Books! Actual books!
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"Pulls you in like a good sports story"
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"
-- New York Newsday
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Snappy and informative"
-- Associated Press
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."
-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life
"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."
-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game
"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"
-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All
"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."
-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history
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“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
— Boston Globe
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
— New York Observer
"Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”
— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."
— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review
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Main  Antiwar.com
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Bush Lies To Congress, 2005: a sample of obvious lies |
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Thursday, 03 February 2005 |
Leaving aside some of Bush's truly nutball twists of mind (like the idea that Egypt
is about to show the way to democracy in the Middle East; never mind
that they're currently under "emergency rule," criminalizing dissent
and allowing indefinite detention, and have been for the last twenty-four years)...
Let's
look at just a few of the hard-and-fast, indisputable lies from last
night's bullfest. (All Bush quotes from the official transcript,
republished here.)
Josh Marshall caught this one first:
Our
society has changed in ways the founders of Social Security could not
have foreseen. In today's world, people are living longer and
therefore drawing benefits longer - and those benefits are scheduled to
rise dramatically over the next few decades.
Unquestionably false.
In
1934... the actuaries predicted that the proportion of Americans over
65 -- then only 5.4 percent -- would rise to 12.65 percent in 1990... They were just a tad high; the
actual figure would be 12.49 percent. [Emphasis added.]
Bush glossed a lot of details, but he did give at least one plain, specific fact on the numbers... I quote:
By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt.
Horseshit. According to the Congressional Budget Office's authoritative numbers (.pdf document), updated just last Monday: if absolutely nothing changes, benefits aren't even projected to begin declining until 2053, at which point (prepare to quake in mortal terror):
CBO finds that the benefits paid will be 22 percent lower than the scheduled benefits.
Bankrupt?
Bankrupt? Bullshit. Even something as mainstream as CNN's Money
section is now running a "Reality Check" article, politely saying Bush
"may have overstated Social Security's problems," given that (in the
exact words of the head numbers guy at the GAO) "the program will never
go bust."
On crime, Bush told another whopper, distorting his own record wildly
with a new proposal completely at odds with his administration's actual
policy (a tactic he used repeatedly; I'm just using this one as an
example):
Tonight I propose a three-year initiative to help organizations keep young people out of gangs.
Fascinating, given that (as noted by ThinkProgress.org's liveblog of the speech) Bush has actually proposed a 40% cut in federal juvenile crime prevention funds, and has overseen an overall 44% reduction in anti-gang funds since 2002.
Foreign policy? More lies:
We are cooperating with 60 governments
in the Proliferation Security Initiative, to detect and stop the
transit of dangerous materials.
Another big fat one. ThinkProgress.org:
The administration has undermined the legitimacy of the Proliferation Security Initiative
by refusing to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the
Sea. This treaty has been ratified by 145 nations, including the other
members of the Proliferation Security Initiative (who insist that it
provides the only legitimate international framework for the
initiative). Even Republican Senator Richard Lugar – chairman of the
Armed Services Committee and a Bush supporter – has repeatedly
criticized the administration for failing to ratify the treaty.
We are working with European allies to
make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium
enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing...
Wow. Very, very false. In truth, the U.S. is not
working with the EU, so much so that last Friday, Mohamed ElBaradei,
head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (which Bush pointedly
ignored while wildly exaggerating WMDs in the months prior to the Iraq
war) publicly pleaded with the Bush administration to start:
“I would hope that the US eventually
would be actively engaged with the Europeans in the dialogue with
Iran,” ElBaradei told Reuters...
The folks at ThinkProgress.org also caught this nicely, but there's some detail I'll add: two weeks ago, the Bush administration was rebuffed by every single country it approached
-- 15 for 15, including Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Australia, and
even Poland (don't forget Poland!) -- in an effort to dump ElBaradei.
Why? According to our own allies (see below), because ElBaradei called
bullshit on Bush prior to Iraq, and he's not likely to drink Bush's
Kool-Aid on Iran.
Bush, of course, would rather have a stooge in place to go along with
whatever his next bullshit is. And so how did Team Chimpy try to dump
ElBaradei? By lying, of course:
... most allies have viewed the
campaign as retaliation against someone who questioned U.S.
intelligence on Iraq and is now moving cautiously on Iran.
The U.S. effort, led by John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for
arms control and international security, included sifting through
intercepts of ElBaradei's phone calls in hopes of finding material to
use against him.
There have also been orchestrated leaks by unnamed U.S. or Western
officials who have told reporters that Iran was secretly improving upon
a weapons program and that ElBaradei was trying to hide that
information from the IAEA board.
Yesterday, diplomats in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, said one of
the more recent accusations -- that Iran had bought large quantities of
the metal beryllium for a nuclear charge -- had proved to be unfounded.
After the beryllium claim first surfaced in news reports from Vienna,
U.S. officials said ElBaradei had concealed the information from the
public. But diplomats said yesterday that an exhaustive investigation
found that Iran's attempts to buy the material, which has dozens of
civilian applications, were unsuccessful.
So regarding Iran, Bush is not only not
working with our European allies, his administration
is actually trying to undermine the guy in charge of the
anti-proliferation effort precisely because he is working with our allies instead of just giving Bush whatever the hell he wants.
Conceding that it's possible to jack up rationalizations and
interpretations that spin these last obvious lies into inadvertent
misstatements or something a little less criminal, go back to the top
and look again at the inarguable distortion of the basic math of Social
Security, which ain't much more complex than grade-school arithmetic.
Bush absolutely, positively lied. Repeatedly.
Lying to Congress is an impeachable offense.
It is also, very sadly, now a standard part of how this country is run.
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