Call it what it is: Lying

There have been some comments made around the blogosphere (and in some parts of the media) regarding the administration’s approach to peddling their social security nonsense and how similar it is to their approach with Iraq: create an “imminent” problem, close ranks and stay on message, enlist media proxies, draft the involved agencies themselves to sell the message (despite their status as civilian non-appointees), use push polling, invoke faith, and skirt the borders of the truth without out-right stepping over the line.

Josh Marshall mentions this last aspect in a recent post:

So, just as he and his associates did during the build up to the Iraq war, he uses paraphrases, work-arounds and slippery repetitons to communicate the intended falsehood while still providing himself with sufficient wiggle room to evade being tagged as a liar.

I beg to differ… he isn’t just waltzing around the truth; he is outright lying this time. And why not? It’s not like the media called him on his presdigitations with the Iraq War. Kevin Drum thinks there are reasonable problems the media is encountering on this score:

So what's the right thing for the press to do? Obviously they have no control over what the president says. And like it or not, they really do have to report what he says. He's an important guy, after all. And if he says stuff like this over and over, the press is pretty much obliged to report it over and over.

And despite the sterling example of the liberal blogosphere, it's equally obvious that reporters can't preface every quote from the president with, "In yet another attempt to deceive the public, George Bush said today...."

In this particular case, the LA Times took the usual tack of quoting a couple of Democrats who "responded" to Bush's statement — in the 12th paragraph of the story. That's page A14 in the print edition, for readers keeping score at home. In other words, practically no one saw even that much of a response to Bush's plain misstatement.

So what's the answer?

I think it is actually quite clear. Unlike the build-up to the Iraq War, the facts are all available in black and white.

With Iraq, there were a lot of people who I talked to who were more than willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt despite all the three-card-monty show he made when making his case to the people. “He must have access to some classified intelligence that we don’t know about, blah blah blah.”

But all the data you really need to know is available… there are really no secrets here. So the media doesn’t have to play their “Republicans say this, but Democrats say that” game; they can simply cite the data itself. For instance :

"Young workers who elect personal accounts can expect to receive a far higher rate of return on their money than the current system could ever afford to pay them."

-Vice President Dick CheneyCatholic University of America
January 13th, 2005

"Calculations of the median voter’s return from “investing” in Social Security suggest that for a majority of voters the U.S. Social Security system provides higher ex-post, or actual, returns than alternative assets."

-Vincenzo GalassoSocial Security Bulletin(The quarterly research journalof
the Social Security Administration)
Vol. 64 • No. 2 • 2001/2002

No Democrats involved. Just the politicians spewing lies, and the nonpartisan civilian experts shooting it down. This is but one example… whenever Bush says to some kid that social security will be “flat broke” when he retires, all the media has to do is point to the (overly conservative) numbers from the CBO and SSA, get some balls, and say:

He’s lying. Again.