Lies. For the Bush neocons, they are second nature, as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning. Bush and crew lied about the events of September 11, 2001, about “al-Qaeda” in Afghanistan, about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Pat Tillman, the football star who walked away from an NFL career to fight a manufactured enemy in Afghanistan, where he was shot dead by his own troops, was shamelessly exploited by the Pentagon, and became part of yet another lie.

“His family was initially misled by the Pentagon and did not learn the truth for more than a month. Tillman was awarded a Silver Star based on fabricated accounts—who fabricated them still isn’t clear after several investigations,” reports the Ledger Independent. “We don’t know what the secretary of defense knew, we don’t know what the White House knew,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “What we do know is these were not a series of accidents, these stories. They were calculatedly put out for a public relations purpose…. Even now there seems to be a cover-up.”

Of course there was a cover-up—that’s what government officials do. Pathological lies come easy and right as rain for the likes of the pathocrats who lord over us.

“I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary,” former Pvt. Jessica Lynch told the committee. “The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don’t need to be told elaborate tales.”

However, with all due respect to Ms. Lynch, the American people do need to be told “elaborate tales,” in fact elaborate and engineered lies designed to hornswoggle the commoners, who in the past were motivated to tar and feather government officials for lesser crimes, for instance levying excise taxes.

Now?

We are more outraged over celebrity actors with anger management problems yelling at their daughters. We can’t be bothered with illegal wars predicated on malfeasance and mendacity—not when Shyamalia the Hooters girl is showing cleavage one channel over. If indeed we are the least bit interested in politics, we can tune in to Sheryl Crow and producer Laurie David confronting Karl Rove over the issue of global warming, never mind there “is absolutely no convincing scientific evidence that human-produced greenhouse gases are driving global climate change,” as climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball, would have it.

The fact our rulers would lie and lie mightily should not come as a surprise, as they are mostly psychopaths, and psychopathy is defined as a condition characterized by lack of conscience and manipulative behavior. “The psychopaths, those human-looking predators without conscience, have no love for the rest of humanity,” notes Henry See, citing the work of Andrew Lobaczewski. “It is a life and death struggle between them and us because they know that if the true nature of their existence as humanity’s natural predator ever come to light, they would lose everything.”

Indeed, they would lose everything, but as it now stands humanity, at least the slice here in America, can’t be bothered with these “intraspecies predators,” not when rumors regnant offer details on Paris Hilton’s promenade with Kevin Federline in Las Vegas.

Pity the masses for their inability or unwillingness to call out the predators, for their ignorance carries an ultimately burdensome, if not fatal, result.

“President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won’t. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice,” writes Eric Alterman, with obvious frustration. “In the one significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush’s consistent pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank could not bring himself (or was not allowed) to utter the crucial words. Instead, readers were treated to such complicated linguistic circumlocutions as: Bush’s statements represented ‘embroidering key assertions’ and were clearly ‘dubious, if not wrong.’ The President’s ‘rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy,’ he has ‘taken some liberties,’ ‘omitted qualifiers’ and ’simply outpace[d] the facts.’ But ‘Bush lied’? Never.”

But of course, Eric, and for obvious reason—the corporate media is owned and operated by the same psychopaths, the Washington Post and the New York Times constitute their purview.

As Lobaczewski writes, “all ponerogenic associations have in common … their statistically high concentration of individuals with various psychological anomalies,” malformations shared by “gangs, criminal mobs, mafias, cliques, and coteries.”

Naturally, media owned by a psychopathic death merchant outfit such as General Electric, a megacorporation with a $43 billion media empire, will naturally engage “various psychological anomalies” in order to stay atop the dung heap—or, more accurately, a massive and stinking mountain of dead bodies, numbering in the millions—and it is quite naive, if not downright half-witted, for Mr. Alterman to think otherwise.

Dana Milbank, regardless of what Eric Alterman writes, is a Yalie, a member of Skull and Bones, and works for the CIA’s favorite newspaper. No doubt he is quite enthusiastic about his job as a corporate scrivener and doubtless as well he is well-compensated for the effort. But then the Nation magazine, where Mr. Alterman writes, is owned by Katrina vanden Heuvel, daughter of William J. vanden Heuvel, the onetime executive assistant to the founder of the CIA, William Joseph Donovan. Vanden Heuvel later became a board member of the Farfield Foundation, billed as a “philanthropic foundation,” in fact a CIA front organization.

If you can say anything about the media psychopaths and their pathocratic buddies in government, it is they are accomplished at manipulation, a hallmark of psychopathy. Frank “Wisner’s gang of weirdos,” as the closet queen J. Edgar Hoover described the CIA, was and is certainly accomplished at manipulation, as Operation Mockingbird, that is to say the wholesale compromise of corporate media, is a well-oiled machine going on some sixty odd years now. Thus it should come as no surprise criminal—indeed, genocidal—lies keep a tight ship.

Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, may call for the Oversight and Government Reform Committee to haul former Secretary of Forever War, Donald Rumsfeld, and Gen. John Abizaid, then-chief of the U.S. Central Command, before his committee to explain the lies surrounding the death of former NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman, but this is an exercise in futility, at best a roadside spectacle, soon obviated by larger, more portentous news stories, for instance Courtney Love’s decision to keep her “butt in shape” through diet and exercise.

“How high up did it go?” Henry Waxman demands to know.

Well, Hank, if the truth be told—and even if it is, no doubt it will be preempted by the Sports Babes’ draft analysis—we can bet our bottom dollar it runs all the way to the top.

Finally, and sadly, considering the fact Mr. Waxman needs to ask is indication enough he will never get there.