And no one's been lying, 'cause we don't lie any more

Holy crap.

Ok. As you longtime readers may remember, a particular hobby horse of mine in the past has been the failure, as I see it, of both the press and the Democrats to say when the Bush administration (and I'm sorry to say, much of the right) is lying. That's "lying," pls note, defined as:

noun 1. the telling of lies; untruthfulness.
–adjective 2. telling or containing lies; deliberately untruthful

It is not: Making a statement of opinion with which I disagree. If you say that American Idol is a great show, that would be an opinion with which I disagree. If I say that American Idol is an unpopular show, that would be a lie. We clear on the difference? Fine.

BTW, I don't just mean, failing to report when someone from the administration or other right-wing figure makes a statement that is provably untruthful, deliberately or not. That's a separate problem.

I mean what I perceived as reluctance actually to use the words lie, liar or the like. That's why the title of Franken's 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them' was so nice. He was one of the only people willing to say it.

During the last weeks before and the first just after the '04 election, I remember saying something probably more than once. I said I thought that if John Kerry had found the guts to just point at George W. Bush during a debate and say that this man is a liar...

...he'd have been elected president. But John Kerry didn't have those guts, so Bush got another four years to completely alienate us from the rest of the world.

Plus, many of the same people who swore on a bible that the Clinton impeachment was not partisan, or even really about a sexual affair, but simply about a lie? They're now willing to permit and even support lies on a grand scale. I find it hard to bottle up my indignation about that.

But, in all this, I always thought it was just a casual, rank cowardice on the part of our politicians and pundits. Never even fantasized that it was anything like an actual policy in oh, say, a paper of record.

From the book Feet To The Fire, page 178, in an interview with columnist Paul Krugman:

Howell Raines, the executive editor, said to me, "you can't use that word."

Why?

It sounded too partisan. It's a funny thing-and again, this is part of the story, to say, the candidate or the president is lying," is considered a partisan statement even if you can prove that he's lying...if he's lying about a public matter, a matter of policy or a rationale for war, it's unacceptably partisan to say that.