Why Finally Is the Press Attacking This Lie?

Timothy Noah -- We can count at least six other lies told by or on behalf of President Bush in this calendar year alone. That doesn't include two addled lies Bush uttered while trying to extricate himself from Yellowcakegate—that the CIA didn't doubt the uranium story until after he gave the speech, and that the United States went to war because Saddam wouldn't let inspectors into Iraq. Why was the yellowcake lie treated like a major news event, when the earlier lies were not?

Is it wrong to lie? Reporters tend to shy away even from that moral judgment. But at least in Washington, reporters take a very dim view of incompetent lying. The rules of engagement dictate that you may not have an opinion about a president and his policies—too divisive!—but that you may opine all you like on that president's effectiveness at getting things done. That's what happened in Yellowcakegate.

Unlike disagreement between one person and another (or even disagreement between one person and the rest of humanity), a single person's saying one thing and then saying another is usually taken (sometimes unfairly) as prime facie evidence that a lie has been told.

Even Jim Hoagland, who writes an opinion column for the Washington Post's op-ed page, hews to this standard in lambasting the Bush White House for "the sudden tone-deafness of a Bush team that had been pretty good at not giving its enemies ammunition to use against it." That "tone-deafness" was demonstrated when the White House conceded that Bush had no reliable factual basis for his yellowcake claim. The more professional thing to do, Hoagland suggests, would have been to wait it out and hope that evidence would eventually prove Bush's unfounded assertion to be correct. Hoagland's headline says it all: "A Classic Case of Incompetence." Never mind that, in pretending to know that Saddam tried to buy yellowcake from Niger, Bush told a lie. His real sin was not being a pro.

In Why This Lie Part 1 - It wasn't his first. Timothy Noah recaps some of the other lies.