Nicholas F. Benton's White House Report:

The Bush campaign will not be stepping into the limelight of the Republican National Convention on a high note. Yesterday was a virtual disaster for the administration, and should I point out that it was all about getting caught in more egregious, public lying, not once, but three times.

First, there is the lie associated with the sudden resignation of long-time Bush adviser and confidant Benjamin L. Ginsberg. Ginsburg was forced to confess, following media revelations, that as Bush's chief outside counsel, he was intimately involved in working with the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that have been slandering Sen. Kerry with national TV ads. But his resignation wasn't about that involvement. It was about the Bush administration's vehement denials of involvement leading up to it. In other words, it was about more conscious lying to the American people from the mouth of the president.

Second, there is the lie uncovered by the Army's own official investigation into the abuses by U.S. personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The investigation's report issued yesterday revealed much greater involvement by higher-ups in the systematic abuse than either President Bush or Secretary or Defense Donald Rumsfeld have been willing to admit. The adamant insistence by Rumsfeld, even while under oath to Congress, that the abuse was limited to a small group of out-of-control personnel at the lower echelons of the prison's chain of command has been determined to be just another lying cover-up. This time it is his own Army investigators who've established that, even if they were reluctant to carry their inquiries as high up as might be appropriate.

The rush to bring a handful of low-level personnel to justice in the matter turns out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors aimed at hiding a much uglier truth. Again, the issue is not the prison abuse so much as it is the Bush administration's lying to the American public.

Third, there is the lie uncovered yesterday perpetrated by long-time partisan Kerry hater John O'Neill, the head of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans group. O'Neill has repeatedly challenged Kerry's statements about his crossing the Cambodian border in a swift boat on Christmas Eve in 1968, carrying CIA or special ops personnel. (It has been officially denied that the U.S. had any personnel in Cambodia at that time). In fact, O'Neill has blustered that Kerry would have been court-martialed for anything like that. Further, he claimed that he did the same patrol two months after Kerry and it ran "only 50 miles from Cambodia. There isn't any watery border."

But yesterday, the Kerry campaign alerted major news organizations to the existence of a taped conversation between O'Neill and then President Richard Nixon (the tapes continue to haunt that president). The snippet that discredits everything O'Neill has said about Kerry on this matter consists of this brief exchange:

O'Neill: I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water.

Nixon: In a swift boat?

O'Neill: Yes, sir.

Enough said. O'Neill has been lying all along.

It must be said that Bush and his cronies set themselves up for the ultimate humiliation on this whole matter when their specious slander campaign drew out not only Chicago Tribune editor William B. Wood, breaking a 35-year silence to come to Kerry's defense as a Vietnam veteran who served with the former senator, but especially the stunning image of Sen. Max Cleland on national TV yesterday at the gates of the president's vacation compound.

Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was featured on all the major national news reports last night rolling his wheelchair to the entrance to Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch asking to present a letter signed by nine U.S. Senators urging the president to denounce the Swift Boat group's TV campaign against Kerry.

How shameless is this president and his staff that they would force this heroic man to so publicly denounce a systematic pattern of slander against former war veterans in public service? He cited the Bush campaign's slanders against Sen. John McCain's war record in the 2000 primaries and against him in his Georgia senatorial re-election campaign in 2002. Now, he said, the same thing is being done to Kerry. All this coming from a man whose military record during Vietnam involved never being called to active duty, never leaving U.S. soil, and being questionable at best. Has he no honor at all?

The trouble with lying is that you can get found out. Bush and his minions got busted three times yesterday, no less. How long until even his own faithful begin to figure out that there is a real problem here?