John J. Mearsheimer Quotes
The public, by and large, trusts its leaders not only to tell the truth, but to get the job done. When they don’t get the job done, they get punished, and when they don’t get the job done and it comes out that they lied, they’re in really serious trouble. This is what happened to [Lyndon] Johnson and it’s what happened to [George W,] Bush. If you’re going to tell a lie, make sure the policy works out.
John J. Mearsheimer, Political Scientist & International Relations Theorist, Interview, Boston Globe, January 2, 2011
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He was paraphrasing the findings of Political Scientist, John J. Mearsheimer. See {641228} and {641230} .
At the time Walker made this statement George W. Bush was in the 6th year of his troubled presidency. He was not a strong leader and was generally believed by all but his most loyal supporters to have not told the truth to the American people and many people thought that he and his administration had deliberately lied about many things – especially the Iraq war causes belli. Bush claimed that he had been misled by bad intelligence and that his failure to tell the truth was inadvertent.
It is a moral crime about which voters do not seem to care much.
One major theory is that most Government lies are perpetrated by Appointees who will only be working for the government for a few years. By the time the truth comes out, they are no longer in office and cannot be affected much by the revelation of the truth. The law actually protects most Federal Officials from criminal or civil penalties for most lies told while in office.
George W. Bush had become very unpopular and many politicians were trying to distance themselves from him, his policies, and the poor implementation of those policies. Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat, had just lost his own primary election and was attacked because he advocated support of the American president in war and foreign policy.
George W. Bush had told the country that the reason for the Iraq War was that Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction. After the invasion it was determined that there were no such weapons that had justified the war. Debate since has concentrated in whether the Bush administration had pressured the intelligence experts to provide the information they wanted to justify the war or whether the administration was misled by their intelligence agencies.
Podharetz was citing the Vietnam war. The two American occasions where the plausibility seemed to fade were the Vietnam War and The Irag war. Both Presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush as Bismarck predicted, had much political trouble over the wars.
- Born: December 14, 1947
- Nationality:
- Profession:
John Joseph Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
