Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Brad DeLong: The Bush Administration lies --- compulsively?

Brad DeLong: The Bush Administration lies --- compulsively?
At long last, the anti-Bush forces seem to have finally settled on a single theme: He lies. His advisors lie. A lot. About everything.

And this is true. In some sense, the remarkable thing about the Bush administration is not what they do — after all, other administrations have cut taxes, busted unions, and gone to war — but the fact that they tell so many baldfaced lies about what they do. Thanks to yeoman work from the likes of Al Franken, Joe Conason, Paul Krugman, David Corn, and others, this storyline is starting to become conventional wisdom, and I think the Democratic candidates should start picking up on it and hammering it home. If they repeat it often enough, the Bushies are going to end up on the ropes. Americans don't like liars.

Oh, and one more thing: aside from plain old, ordinary, garden variety lies — of which they have plenty — I've noticed that the Bushies have a real specialty in one particular kind of lie. More on that some other time.

Sometimes I think they lie even when the truth would serve them better than a lie. I'm not as optimistic as DeLong about the American passion for honesty -- I think American's can live quite well with a comforting myth. The problem for the BA is that their stories aren't very comforting now ...

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