Back in the day, Washington wags used to parse Bill Clinton’s public utterances looking for various misstatements, lies, fibs, fudges, what have you.
Sometimes what they found was just nitpicking, or misstatements, 
in other cases they found trimming or fibs. I’ll let you be the judge of how much they did or didn’t find.
Now we have President George W. Bush.
And with each passing day it seems his public statements show not so much a pattern of lies as evidence that when he’s not doing press availabilities he’s living on some other planet. Misstatements are becoming so par for the course that his public pronouncements now seem more and more like a verbal equivalent of what the immortal David St. Hubbins once called a “a free-form jazz exploration” in which the individual words aren’t supposed to distract us from the larger truth the president is trying to convey.
Look at the president’s final remarks from his press opportunity with Kofi Annan yesterday …
The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region.
I mean, where do you start with this?
As the well-worn line goes, I think it’s too soon to say we know Saddam didn’t have a WMD program. I thought he did. There was lots of evidence to suggest he had at least some chemical and biological weapons programs. And we’re still actively looking. (Here’s an interesting piece in the new New Republic about how and why he might not have.) But I think our inability thus far to find any clear evidence of a on-going chemical, biological or nuclear weapons program would seem to leave us at least a bit short of being “absolutely” certain that he had one. Am I nitpicking here?
Like the philandering husband, he seems to be asking us, “Who ya gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?”
And remember when Saddam wouldn’t let the inspectors in? I totally missed that one.
Look, you can certainly say that Saddam wasn’t cooperating fully with the inspectors, that his people hadn’t fully accounted for various chemical and biological munitions which the UN thought he had back in 1990s. Hans Blix said as much. It’s true. But, c’mon, he let them in.
You hear this stuff and you say to yourself: “Well, you can kinda know what he meant, I guess.”
I find myself thinking that. But even that doesn’t cut it.
The disquieting fact is that these whoppers aren’t even getting reported any more because it’s become a given among reporters and editors that most of what the president is saying on this subject has little connection to anything that’s actually going on. And the two keep diverging more and more. It’s almost as if the shakier the evidence gets the more certain he becomes about what the evidence was supposed to prove.
