FDR was a man beloved by the people of this nation because he led them out of the great depression and gave them hope when it was in short supply. He lied to the press more than once during his four terms as President. He also lied to more than one of the senators and congressmen from his own party who gave him his majority in both houses of our legislative branch. He was careful enough about those lies that there are still people around who believe that those lies were based on his honest belief. They say that after all they worked out to be for the good of the nation. Harry Truman didn't believe in lying for any reason. The famous sign that resided in Harry's office during his Presidency said "the buck stops here". It was a poignant comment about the buck passing that goes on in Washington. It was also a statement about the personal responsibility that a President has; his responsibility to discern the lies from the truth and to prevent lies from becoming the basis for national policies. The reason that we pick one man to sit at the top of our administrative branch of government is because only one man can really decide some of the important matters about how we use our great power as a nation. The Congress can override a Presidents decision in regard to pretty much any policy but for all practical purposes that seldom happens. So if a President were, for instance, to believe a lie and say, start a war because of that lie, we would probably be stuck with that war.

I think that that may have happened more than a few times in our nation's history; we entered a war based on a lie. Whose lie is important but not as important as you might think. The issue of the personal responsibility of the President for making those choices dominates the debate in almost every case. Lyndon Johnson left office as President after being elected to a single term because he was perceived as having accepted a lie about Vietnam that drew us deeply into that war. The lie probably came out of the military and Lyndon could have claimed that it wasn't his lie but he didn't, he just left office without running for his second term.

Iraq is a war that we entered based on at least two lies that we can say with relative certainty were told to or by the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State among others. Those lies are regarding two important issues that strike to the heart of any valid justification for this war. One, of course, is the lie about the imminent threat posed by the supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction, WMD for short. Now WMD's are in short supply in Iraq today and they were not used during the war. Therefore they can be presumed to have been a convenient fiction created somewhere in the arcane process of interpreting information about Iraq prior to the war. The other lie is that there was a link between Iraq and the terrorists who committed the atrocity on 9/11 2001. Neither lie stands up to a significant degree of scrutiny now, nor does it appear that they could have stood up to significant scrutiny by the President or his advisors before the war.

Who lied to whom is an issue but the key issue here remains who was responsible for telling the lies that started this war. Who told them to the people of our nation? After all it is the people who must bear the cost in lives and money for this unwise war. Who created the lie is important but it pales in importance when held up in the light of who used the lie to justify their intent to start this war and sell this war to the people. That intent, to go to war in Iraq, clearly preceded the creation of these lies. The users of these lies clearly are the key advisors to the President and probably the President himself. If anyone is fired over this the President should take a lesson from that other President from Texas, Lyndon Johnson and also fire himself. Impeachment would be appropriate but unwise because we are in the middle of a war. Simply leaving the oval office door open for a more honest member of his own party or the other party will have to do. God bless and keep you all safe in these times of fear and lies based mostly on that fear.