Mendacious Mehlman

This transcript of Russert interviewing Ken Mehlman may contain the largest number of outright lies that I've ever seen someone tell in a public forum. It's quite astounding.

Mehlman: Here's the question--the fundamental question, the president believes, is when federal funding is involved, he believes it is wrong to destroy some life for the benefit of other life.

This one's not actually a lie, because it reflects the actual policy position of the administration. But I just like marveling at how stupid this principle is when you state it like that. It's wrong to destroy life when federal funding is involved? Whaaaaa??? In a weird way, the whole stem-cell thing was probably the worst tactical mistake the administration made. The idea was to have basically a throwaway issue on which Bush could pretend to think really hard and show that he was a serious man. But the solution he came up with, for reasons that are pretty obvious, made no sense. Now that people have started to ask tough questions about it, they are having to say some pretty stupid things.

MR. RUSSERT: But, Mr. Mehlman, it's gone from $218 billion surplus when George Bush took office to a $427 billion deficit. How can you call that Republican conservative economic policy?

MR. MEHLMAN: Well, what I would say, Tim, is what we've suffered, unfortunately, was an attack on this country. We've suffered a war, and one thing we know: Whenever our nation's faced war, whether it was in the 1980s when we were winning the Cold War or in the 1940s during World War II, the responsible thing to do has been to borrow money to win the war.

It's just unbelievable that they are still getting away with blaming the deficit on September 11th. But this is the first time I've seen a Bush official say that we have "suffered" a war. I personally opposed the Iraq war, protested against it before the invasion, spent a lot of time on it. I'm not happy we're there. But I haven't "suffered" the war. The people who have "suffered" our war of choice are the tens of thousands of people who have died in it , whose homes have been destroyed, their children blown apart by bombs, their mothers raped in our illegal prisons.

OK, now I'm too mad, I can't go on. Maybe more later. But you can read the transcript for yourself.