Richard Cohen on "Bush lied"

Today, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen writes:

So common is the statement "Bush lied" that it seems sometimes that I am the only blue-state person who does not think it is true. Then, last week, the indomitable Helen Thomas changed all that with a single question. She asked George Bush why he wanted "to go to war" from the moment he "stepped into the White House," and the president said, "You know, I didn't want war." With that, the last blue-state skeptic folded.

Liberal bloggers are already up in arms about Cohen's delayed conversion. Brad DeLong claims that "The Washington Post will never recover its reputation as long as it continues to employ people in the unreality-based community like Richard Cohen," while Tapped's Ezra Klein writes that "Richard Cohen's admission that he didn't realize that Bush had lied until sometime last week is a bit absurd. If you don't think Bush is a liar, you simply haven't been paying attention. And if you haven't been paying attention, maybe you shouldn't be a Washington Post political columnist."

But as we wrote in All the President's Spin, what's surprising is that Bush rarely tells outright lies. He makes deceptive statements all the time (the book documents countless examples from the 2001-2004 period), but they are almost always half-truths or sins of omission rather than self-evidently false.

To be sure, Cohen has seemed almost comically naive and out of touch in recent years. The Post should replace him as soon as possible. But the "Bush lied" cartoon character is silly.

As ATPS explains, the reason Bush has gotten away with so much is precisely because he rarely gets caught in outright lies. Instead, he uses technically true language to leave a false impression with his audience, a practice that takes advantage of the practices of "objective" journalism. I'm disappointed that our analysis didn't make more of an impression on DeLong and Klein, two bloggers whom I respect.

Comments

[Con Roche]

You are quite right that Bush rarely tells a straightforward lie. That seems to be Cheney's specialty. Bush let the cat out of the bag at his press conference last week however, when he said, "I was VERY CAREFUL NOT TO SAY" that Saddam had been directly involved in 911. That's correct. His cultivatedly clumsy delivery disguises tha the fact that his words are selected extremely carefully. His statements are crafted, not only to deceive, but to leave him with what Nixon called "plausible deniability."
With his constant use of the "non-lie," Bush has made Clinton and his parsing of "is," look like a paragon of candor. That's not a slam dunk.

[ash]

Clinton called it "plausible deniability" as well. In fact, he used the term to explain to Lewinsky why there couldn't be full-fledged sex. Of course, his version never killed anyone.

[Jonny]

B/c Bush is so stupid, it is about as possible as one out of 100 monkeys can type all of Shakespeare's works that Bush intentionally gives half-truths every single the time.

I think was is going on is that everyone speaks half-truths; it's just that more people hear the President than Joe Schmo in Indiana. Even an honest person will slip up unintentionally.

Furthermore, b/c noone is omnipotent we can only comment on what we perceive (or what others perceive for us) and perception is not error-proof.

Also, there are spin doctors on boths sides that can find an inconsistency in any statement. That's not all that hard. It's what lawyers do all day.

If we take the word of Iraqi generals alone, it is very reasonable that many people/heads of state believed Saddam had WMDs.

As far as everything else Bush has said, I have to take Nyhan's spin of it.