Deception?

Deception?

According to Dick Polman’s front page review of Bill Clinton’s book and appearance on 60 Minutes (“On TV, Clinton Evokes ’90s Pain and Glory”), Clinton reminds us of “the relative innocence of the 1990s” when “a presidential deception was about sex.”

Unless I misread, Polman is not so subtly implying that our current president’s deception is not so innocent. I’m just passing through Philadelphia, so I might have missed it. Perhaps the Inquirer itself, or Dick Polman in an earlier interpretive news story, might have provided some evidence to support the accusation that President Bush has lied to the American people. But there was certainly no such evidence in Polman’s article today, and indeed I am not aware of any elsewhere.

I am of course aware that some Democrats have accused the president of lying about Iraq, but I’m sure that unsubstantiated partisan accusations never find their way into your news articles. So, where is the evidence?

UPDATE

Dick Polman has responded by email, pointing out that he never said Bush lied; that he, like many other well-informed journalists, has reported that “the administration has engaged in deceptive claims about Iraq”; that the facts are too numerous for him to mention; and that I wouldn’t believe them anyway.

I have just sent the following to him in reply:

I am of course aware that some administration claims (echoing claims of the Clinton administration and others) about Iraq have proven not to have been accurate. I am not aware of convincing evidence that such claims were “deceptive.” I do admit, however, that the distinction you attempt to draw between deception and lying does elude me, especially since almost everyone now recognizes that Clinton lied and you clearly imply that the only difference between Clintonian and Bushian deception/lying/misrepresentation/fibbing/whatever is that the former concerned relatively trivial matters of a personal nature.