Post-Speech Memo: You Can't Sugarcoat a Lie

After finally arriving home, I decided to take a break from micro-parsing Bush's speeches tonight, and instead went to go see Batman Begins (a terrific movie). On the way over, though, I did catch some excerpts of the speech and it seems to me that beyond all the different lies in the text, Bush faces one very big problem: he gives us every reason why staying the course is good (freedom, democracy, stability, etc.) but no reason why staying the course actually fulfills the original mission, which was to disarm Saddam Hussein. That is the reason this president simply will never be able to control the message about the Iraq War or maintain public support - because the American public has now fully realized we were blatantly lied to about why we were going to war. And no matter how much sugarcoating Bush packages the war in, he can never escape that fundamental truth.

Why is this important now that we are so deeply involved in the war? Isn't that just an afterthought at this point? No. People don't like to be lied to. Sure, they like strong leaders, but they also like strong reasons for sacrifice and action. The fact that it is now clear we were deliberately misled, and thus there were no strong reasons for war, leaves the entire Iraq War without a real rationale in the mind of the public. Until Bush fesses up to that reality, his happy, subject-changing rhetoric will continue to do exactly the opposite of what he wants: it will make people more angry that he still refuses to admit he lied.