One of the great mysteries about the mainstream press in the last six years is its seeming inability to use one particular word: "liar."

At the end of the Clinton administration, the word was bandied about at regular intervals. After the former president's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" statement, the floodgates opened and full permission was granted to drop the word "liar" in at any opportunity.

But with the Bush administration, despite a six-year record of flat-out statements in total contradiction to the truth, nobody in the press wants to use the word. Anybody can tell a lie, but at what point does enough lies qualify one to be called a "liar" in the mainstream press? Especially when one is in high elective office?

Take, for instance, Vice President Dick Cheney (please). By nearly any account, Cheney has been saying things that are completely and demonstrably at odds with the truth for more than four years now. In September 2003, on NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney talked about "major success, major progress" in Iraq, declared that the country is "stable and quiet," and that Americans are seen as "liberators."

One of the few, and early, media outlets--and by no means a mainstream one--to tarnish the president and vice-president with the L-word was the liberal magazine The American Prospect. In May 2003, authors Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken wrote, "More distressing even than the president's lies, though, is the public's apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it. The post-September 11 effect and the Iraq war distract attention, but there's more to it. Are we finally paying the price for three decades of steadily eroding democracy? Is Bush benefiting from the echo chamber of a right-wing press that repeats the White House line until it starts sounding like the truth? Or does the complicity of the press help to lull the public and reinforce the president's lies?"

Bush administration spokespeople over the years have perfected the bald-faced and in-your-face breathtaking lie. "Breathtaking," because that's what must happen to the average White House correspondent when Ari Fleischer, Scott McClellan, Tony Snow, or Dana Perino utters something that contradicts established reality. Those reporters must just lose their ability to breathe and correct the record.

In one briefing, I recall Fleischer actually denying that George W. Bush ever came out against "nation-building," which would come as a surprise to any of the millions of Americans who watched the debates between Al Gore and Bush in 2000. Fleischer could even turn around and deny words that came out of his own mouth minutes before, as the Washington Post's Al Kamen pointed out in his In the Loop column in March 2003. According to Kamen, reporters asked Fleischer about U.S. aid rolling into Iraq after the initial invasion, and the press spokesman responded, "`We didn't expect the--the Iraqis to cease caring about their own people, to cease feeding their own people, to put up impediments to the humanitarian relief supplies,' such as laying mines." 

Kamen wrote, "Moments later, a reporter asked about `your comment before about how you didn't expect the Iraqis to interfere with humanitarian aid . . . '

"`I didn't say that,' Fleischer said."

The easiest place to lie within the administration must be from behind the podium in the White House press room. After all, the spokesperson has thousands of words to express administration policy while being asked questions about the various topics reporters want to address, and often the spokesperson has to wing the answer. And when on the defensive, as the Bushies have been as of late, the easiest answer is "Well, the Clintons did it, too." 

For example, last week spokeswoman Dana Perino was asked about the new allegations that White House political officials went out to federal agencies and gave expressly political briefings on how each of the supposedly nonpartisan agencies could be used to advance Republican candidates in the 2006 elections. The Hatch Act clearly prohibits the use of federal property for partisan political purposes. 

A reporter asked Perino if the briefings were a White House idea, and she answered, "I think that these briefings--well, I know the Clinton administration had similar briefings. Where did they originate? I don't know. I couldn't give you a date."

This would be a lie. This columnist spent three and a half years working at an agency under the Executive Office of the President--the first three months of which were right before the 1996 elections--and there never were any political briefings made by any White House staffer. And Doug Sosnik, who was director of political affairs for Bill Clinton and later a counselor to the president, told the liberal blog Think Progress, "We never went to agencies and briefed political appointees."

I have to wonder what kind of trust we'll have in anything the president or his people say in another 16 months when their lies are so easily debunked now.

Speaking untruth to power