Yeah, what happened to all those conservative experts on lying? Are they hanging out at the bar with Novak or gambling with Bennett? Where are those paragons of virtue and why aren't they foaming at the mouth for impeachment?


Josh Marshall/ The Hill
A rose is a rose is a rose.

But a lie is, well … that’s really more an exaggeration. Unless, of course, it’s a misstatement. Except in cases involving weapons of mass destruction, when often it’s simply a matter of “over-hype.”

Actually, it’s all fairly hard for me to keep up with. All I know is that under George W. Bush the pundits who had no trouble calling Bill Clinton a liar have suddenly decided lying is a very subtle, hard-to-define, complex matter.

But let’s zoom in on one case of possible deception which is starting to look more and more clear-cut.

Last January, in his State of the Union Address, President Bush told the American people that Iraq had recently tried to purchase uranium from Niger. Later, of course, we discovered that the documents in question were forgeries — a low-budget hoax that the head of International Atomic Energy Agency’s Iraq inspections unit, Jacques Baute, was able to debunk with a few quick Google searches.

So when did the White House discover they were fakes?

On June 8th, Condi Rice conceded that the documents were fraudulent but told Tim Russert that the White House hadn’t known before the speech. “Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the Agency [i.e., the CIA], but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery.”

But Rice wouldn’t have had to look too far down into the “bowels of the Agency” since just about everyone in the intelligence community — and at least some people on her own National Security Council staff — had known the documents were phonies for almost a year. . . .





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