You Lie!

Wow. It really is the sane party vs. the party of lunatics and eight-year-olds, isn't it?

I sat down to write a little something about this, but happened by Kleiman's digs, and found that Jonathan Zasloff had already written almost exactly what I wanted to say. So here it is.

The main point: yes, it would have been better for the U.S. and for the world if someone had stood up and said "Mr. President, that is a lie" when Bush said "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."* So I'm not, in general, against calling the president out when he lies.

But, first of all, Wilson is full of sh!t. It's the president's plan, he's introducing it, Wilson has no idea what's in it, and he's just childishly insisting that any plan offered by Obama must contain coverage of illegal immigrants.

Also, if you're going to call the president a liar, you need to stand up and say it like a man, not sit there sputtering "you lie" or "liar, liar" or any such nonsense like an insolent child.

What a penis.

At any rate, part of what makes Wilson a penis is that he himself was lying (or, perhaps, just irresponsibly mistaken), but Obama wasn't. If you're going to pull something like that, you have to be right about it.

So what about Obama's plan? Well, I know enough to stay out of debates I don't understand. But to my ignorant ear, it sounded great at first blush, FWIW, which isn't much. He continues to try to be resolutely centrist, despite the crazy pouring across the aisle, and that counts for a lot in my book.



* As I've written before, Bush's State of the Union address lie about African uranium was a rather complicated lie. In fact, its very complexity is additional evidence that it was very carefully phrased in order to try to avoid a bald-faced lie in favor of a more subtle lie. British intelligence thought Saddam had tried to buy the uranium in question, but we had better evidence indicating that they were wrong. So to tell the truth, given the information we had, would have been to say that it was unlikely that Saddam had tried to procure the uranium. To say that it was likely that he had tried to do so would be to lie, given the evidence available to us. So, similarly, it was a lie to say that the British government had "learned" that he had done so--'learned' is a success term. It would have been true, but radically dishonest and tantamount to a lie, to say that the British government believed that he had done so. But to say that they had learned it when we knew they had not learned (but merely came falsely to believe) is, though a complicated lie, a lie.