Lies about lies

Notables from Joseph Goebbels to Marcus Garvey are on record extolling the power of the lie repeated. It's a sad phenomenon: repeat a lie often enough and it becomes embedded in the public consciousness, and gradually accepted as fact.

The Democrats are studiously promulgating a little Big Lie of their own, and that lie is, "Bush lied us into war." This falsehood is generally accepted as gospel by the left, and yet the fact that it is a lie is so obvious that it serves as a textbook example of how repetition enables the acceptance of the outlandish.

For starters, not every false statement is a lie. If a student incorrectly answers a question on a test, his answer is false, but not a lie. If I break my leg and end up in a hospital, my earlier statement to a friend "I'll meet you for dinner tonight at 6" is false, but not a lie. If a project goes over budget, the budget is false, not a lie.

All lies are falsehoods, but not all falsehoods are lies. A lie is a knowing falsehood told with intent to deceive. Honest mistakes are not lies. Good-faith errors based on information believed reliable are not lies.

For Bush's claims of Iraqi WMDs to be a lie, Bush would have to be aware they were false. If he did, he would possibly have been the only person in a position of authority (with the possible exception of Saddam Hussein) to know this. See John Hawkins's page of WMD quotes for an illustration. Prominent Democrats from Barbara Boxer to Tom Daschle to John Kerry to Robert Byrd to John Edwards to Ted Kennedy to Jacques Chirac are all on record making strong statements of belief in Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. Either all these notables are liars too, or some of them believed what they said.

(The typical rejoinder is that these poor people were all taken in by Bush's lies. Sadly, many of these quotes predate the Bush administration.)

So we have two possibilities: Bush believed in good faith the same intelligence that convinced all these other people that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and chose to act on that intelligence. Or Bush, alone among prominent leaders, knew that the WMDs did not exist and chose to act anyway. He sold America on a war with claims of WMDs he knew didn't exist. What then? If he knew that WMDs didn't exist, he knew that American troops would find no WMDs. Did he think the American people would just forget? Of course, to the left Bush is an idiot chimp, but they have dark respect for the sinister abilities and political genius of his handlers. Would Karl Rove ever allow his puppet to make such a staggeringly bad political move as launching a war under pretenses that were certain to be proven false?

To believe that Bush lied us into war, one must accept incredibly unlikely postulates. When those who should know better insist that Bush lied us into war, they themselves are lying.