Liar. 'Liar?'

The Nation

Liar. 'Liar?'

by Eric Alterman

Once upon a time, only people with bad manners took note of the fact that George W. Bush was an inveterate liar. One such person, pundit Michael Kinsley, observed back in April 2002, "Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother." Back then it was undeniable but all but unsayable in the mainstream media. Even when addressing himself to the very topic of Bush's myriad lies six months later, Washington Post scribe Dana Milbank combed his thesaurus and came up with "embroidering," "taken some flights of fancy," "taken some liberties," "omitted qualifiers," etc. But even this artful linguistic circumlocution so infuriated Karl Rove & Co. that the White House pressured the Post to reassign the reporter. When asked to comment on an incontrovertible, unarguable, prime-time presidential lie--Bush publicly claimed that Iraq would not allow inspections, when in fact the UN inspectors had to be kicked out for his war to begin--on CNN's Reliable Sources program, Milbank said, "I think what people basically decided was this is just the President being the President." What, after all, is the big deal about lying about why you started a war?

Bush had been lying right from the start, of course, but just for fun, one assumes, he recently decided to double-down on his bet. On the day after the election, Bush explained to the media that the discrepancy between his insistence just a few days earlier to reporters that Donald Rumsfeld would stay in his job come hell or high water while, in fact, he had already started the process to replace Rumsfeld with Robert Gates could be explained by... well, heck, Bush just felt like lying about it. His exact words: "I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question, and to get you on to another question, was to give you that answer."

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