Cheney's lies

The thing abut Cheney's lies is that they are of a far different nature that the typical "stretching the truth" that we have come to expect from politicians. That is why it is fundamentally misleading to equate Edwards saying that we are $200 billion in the whole in Iraq (we have spent $120 billion and have already allocated another $80 billion that will be spent in the next year regardless of who is president) with Cheney's whole-cloth reinventions of reality "I've never said Saddam was responsible for 9/11" or "Iraq represented a nuclear threat."

If you consider what Edwards said to be an exaggeration or error of degree (and I don't, since that money is as good as spent right now -- who is going to deny the troops what has already been allocated and is necessary, even if only to extricate them from the quagmire?), then what Cheney says on a regular basis has to be considered something else, since it does not exaggerate or embellish -- it departs from reality absolutely. Arguing that Saddam has nukes, when he does not is not an exaggeration. Arguing that Iraq was behind 9/11 terrorists when they were not is not an exageration -- it is a fabrication, a lie. You cannot 'exaggerate' that black is white. And that is why most news services did the country a disservice when they equated what some might call Edwards' interpretations of reality with Cheney's whole-scale departures from reality. It both minimizes the true differences (and lends credence to the old saw: 'all politicians do it') and by so doing implicitly endorses what Cheney has to say, since it is 'no worse' than what Edwards said.

Or, in brief, Cheney has mastered the technique of the Big Lie and the press is still not on to him...

Or are some perhaps beginning to answer the clue phone?

MSNBC - Rewriting History: "With virtually all of the administration's original case for war in Iraq in tatters, Vice President Dick Cheney provided shifting and sometimes misleading arguments in last night's debate with John Edwards about Saddam Hussein's ties to terrorists and his access to weapons of mass destruction.

Cheney, responding to moderator Gwen Ifill's first question, said that 'concern' about Iraq before the war had 'specifically focused' on the fact that Saddam's regime had been listed for years by the U.S. government as a 'state sponsor of terror,' that Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal operated out of Baghdad, that Saddam paid $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and that he had an 'established relationship' with Al Qaeda.

But except for the allegation about Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda--a claim that is now more in question than ever--the other examples cited by Cheney in Tuesday night's debate never have been previously emphasized by Bush administration officials, and for good reasons...."