On Monday night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart got bogged down in a semantic debate with Scott McClellan about whether the Bush administration "lied" and the extent to which its deceptions were willfull:
But as we wrote in All the President's Spin (which Stewart generously praised back in 2004), this debate is unproductive -- Bush rarely says things that are completely false and we can't ever know people's intentions:
George W. Bush's dishonesty is different. Rather than simply lying, he has subtly and systematically attempted to deceive the nation about most of his major policy proposals. On issues ranging from tax cuts to stem cells to the debate over the war in Iraq, he has consistently twisted the truth beyond recognition in order to promote his policies.
Remarkably, he has done so while generally avoiding obviously false statements. Instead, Bush consistently uses well-designed phrases and strategically crafted arguments to distract, deceive, and mislead. The result is that all but the most careful listeners end up believing something completely untrue, while proving the President has lied is usually impossible.
Unlike famous White House dissemblers of the past, Bush almost never explicitly claims that black is white or day is night. Instead, he deceives the public with partial truths and misleading assertions... Because Bush's statements are so often constructed in this way, he has walked away from one deceptive claim after another scot-free.
...A better approach is to judge public officials' words against the known facts. We should focus on what the President and his top aides knew or should have known to be false or misleading at the time they made a public statement. By that standard, George W. Bush has been extraordinarily deceptive about public policy issues.
I think this is a standard for public debate that Stewart and McClellan could agree upon. It's too bad they wasted so much time on semantics.
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