It depends on what the definition of “lie” is

The New York Times ran an interesting article over the weekend that has generated a lot of discussion. The premise of the piece acknowledges a number of “exaggerations” from Bush on issues such as tax cuts and Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but questions whether these embellishments constitute actual “lies.”

The Times article concluded, quite surprisingly, that “a review of the president’s public statements found little that could lead to a conclusion that the president actually lied” about the war or tax cuts.

Yet the rest of the article chronicled what certainly appeared to be instances of Bush saying things that were not at all true.

The piece noted, for example, that Bush claimed on multiple occasions that all taxpayers would benefit from his 2003 tax cut. “This tax relief,” Bush declared, “is for everyone who pays income taxes.” Was this true? Absolutely not. 8.1 million taxpayers, all of whom are part of the working poor, owe federal taxes but receive no tax cut from Bush’s policy.

“But there are more than 100 million income tax payers in the country,” the Times article said. “So well over 90 percent will get some tax cut. If he had said ‘almost all,’ it would have been accurate.”

That’s great, but the fact remains that Bush didn’t say “almost all,” he said “everyone who pays income taxes” gets the tax cut. What Bush said was false. Bill Clinton once said he didn’t have “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky. Did the New York Times run an item saying that if Clinton had added “not recently” that the remark would have been accurate?

The Times went on to note that Bush traveled around the country to tout his plan and would frequently share the stage with a family whose taxes Bush said would be cut by more than $1,000. Bush neglected to mention to his audiences that that half of all taxpayers would get a cut of less than $100 a year this year and that by 2005, three-quarters would get less than $100, and that his plan called for that $1,000 tax cut for the family to disappear in a few years.

Obviously, this wasn’t Bush telling the “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” He wanted the American people to believe something, so he intentionally kept certain facts from them.

Or how about WMD in Iraq? The Times article mentioned multiple examples of Bush guaranteeing the vast threat of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. At this point, those remarks appear to almost certainly be an exaggeration.

But let’s not forget what Bush said after the war. In late May, Bush boasted that “we found” the proof of WMD we were looking for. Bush was citing two trailer trucks our forces have found that the administration believes were used as mobile biological weapons labs. Their discovery led Bush to declare that we have “found the weapons of mass destruction” used as a justification for war and that suggestions that we’ve failed to find WMDs are “wrong.”

Of course, on this Bush was being completely dishonest. We hadn’t found WMD and it was reckless and irresponsible of him to say otherwise. Slate’s Tim Noah considered this and other potential lies raised in the New York Times piece carefully and brought up an interesting point: “Can a false statement be a lie if the speaker is unaware it is a lie?”

In order for someone to be lying, they need to realize that what they’re saying isn’t true; otherwise it’s just making an error, not a falsehood. Bush is not, shall we say, a sharp cookie. It’s possible someone handed Bush a prepared text, he believed the text was accurate, so he repeated the words he was told to say. In order for Bush to have been literally lying, he would have had to know he was telling falsehoods. Considering his intellectual prowess, that’s kind of doubtful.

This, naturally, led Noah to another, less comfortable, question: Why doesn’t Bush know that his remarks aren’t true?

The fact that Bush is saying things that are demonstrably false is a double-edged sword. Either Bush knows that his remarks are false, in which case he’s caught telling lies; or Bush is clueless about the veracity of his own words, in which case he’s a fool. Either way, it’s not a great situation. Unfortunately for Bush, one of these two possibilities is the right one.

(It reminds me a bit of Reagan and Iran-contra. Either Reagan knew that his administration was involved in multiple international crimes, in which case he was an accessory to a criminal conspiracy and guilty of “high crimes”; or the president was clueless that his entire defense apparatus was orchestrating these crimes under his nose, which would mean that the president was barely coherent overseeing his own administration. But I digress…)

In any event, Noah appears to be putting himself in the “Bush is ignorant” camp and he makes a compelling case.

“[I]t’s impossible to tell — and, ultimately, of little interest — whether Bush lacks the necessary mental equipment, or whether he’s simply incurious,” Noah wrote. “The end result is the same. Even Bush’s allies concede that Bush is strikingly ignorant. In the July Vanity Fair, Sam Tanenhaus quoted Richard Perle as saying that when he first met Bush, it was ‘clear’ that ‘he didn’t know very much.’ Perle went on to argue (with what he failed to recognize as condescension) that Bush is an eager pupil. But there isn’t much evidence to support even that.”

Just to add to this point, Perle isn’t the only Bush confidant to insult the president’s intelligence. David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, wrote a fawning book about the president, but did manage to mention between complements that Bush “is impatient, quick to anger, sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result, ill informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader should be.” [Translation: not the sharpest knife in the drawer.]

Noah, however, takes this discussion to its natural conclusion.

“It’s often said that Bush has the virtue of self-awareness, that he knows what he doesn’t know,” Noah explained. “That’s probably true. But if it is true, then Bush really oughtn’t to go around making sweeping statements that he hasn’t made any effort to verify. When these statements turn out to be untrue, Bush’s feigned certainty alone justifies calling these statements lies. They may not be the sort of lies a clever person (say, Bill Clinton) would tell. Indeed, many left-of-center commentators (Paul Krugman and Eric Alterman come to mind) refuse to admit that Bush is dumb, presumably because they fear that would make it impossible to hold him accountable for terrible things that he and his administration do. (Many felt the same way about Reagan.) But there’s no reason Bush can’t be thought of as both stupid and a liar.”