Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Little white lies

Hmm. Dubya is trying to reinvent history once again. He now claims that he played varsity rugby during his Skull and Bones days. Interestingly enough, the Yale Athletics department finds this very curious--especially given that Yale has never had a varsity rugby program!

If he's willing to tell little white lies about what he did and didn't do in college--and telling a whopper that is so easily verifiable, at that--why should we expect that he'd tell us the truth about anything else?

Update: I had a little more that I want to say about this point. I think what galled me about it is not merely the fact that he lied about it, it's the manner in which he did it. From Karen Hughes's book comes the remark in question:

"President Putin knew you had played rugby, but he didn't have the context. I mean, you just played for one semester in college, right?" Hughes said.

Bush corrected: "I played for a year, and it was the varsity."
Now, Bush could have said, "Yeah, I played for a year," and that would be that, end of story. There's no question that he played rugby: there's the photographic evidence that shows that he played (badly, and practically illegally). Yet, he's so eager to make it look like an accomplishment bigger than it is that he proceeds to tack on the little extra lie. It was an entirely unnecessary addition, and it's a total fabrication. That's what bothers me. He didn't need to lie in the first place, especially given the relative unimportance of the matter. Yet he went ahead and did it anyways.

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