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rebarbative

risible

all of the above

Sometimes in life, it is okay to tell a little ______, but you should always avoid ______. Which pair best fills in the blanks? white lie to the American people; getting caught

story that tugs at the heartstrings; being mawkish

joke to lighten the mood; running with scissors

kid that you’re going to fund his education; following through

Correct the punctuation in the following sentence: “George W. Bush is the President who, in God’s name, will protect our children.”The sentence is correct.

George W. Bush is the President who in God’s name will protect our children.

George W. Bush is the President. Who, in God’s name, will protect our children?

George W. Bush is the President. Who, in God’s name, will protect our children?!

43

What Is a Lie?

Throughout this book I’ve used the terms “lie,” “liars,” “lying,” and “O’Lie-lly” rather, you might say, liberally. Calling someone a liar is a serious charge. It’s not quite as bad as calling someone a “traitor,” as Ann Coulter does in her new book, The Treason Diet, but it’s serious.

Telling the truth is something I take seriously, and I try to hold myself to an impossibly high standard. For example, Coulter’s book isn’t really titled The Treason Diet. It’s titled Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.

Yes. Lying is a serious matter. And calling the President of the United States a liar is not something I say with any relish or self-satisfaction. I wish with all my heart that our president wasn’t a liar, or if he were, that he was more like President Clinton.

Bush lies about important things. Like the economy, his tax cuts, education, our reasons for going to war, and drunk driving. But I think he lies only when he feels he has to. He knows that, most of the time, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Rush Limbaugh are only too glad to do it for him.

And all the lies, small and large, add up. They create a worldview in which the mainstream media is a liberal propaganda machine. In which Democrats are ruthless, manipulative power grabbers. And also sissies. Where if you’re poor, you should blame yourself, and for everything else, blame Clinton. Where Democrats feed a culture of victimhood, but where the real victims are decent, hardworking white males. The right-wing media’s lies create a world in which no one needs to feel any obligation to anybody else. It’s a worldview designed to comfort the comfortable and further afflict the afflicted.

In a surprising moment of candor, the Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash told an interviewer:

The conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We’ve created this cottage industry in which it pays to be unobjective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it, too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket. I’m glad we found it, actually.

It is a great racket. And not just for their media, but for Bush and everyone around him. Bush is good at make-believe. He says what he has to say. But he gives tax cuts to his supporters, throws business to his cronies, quietly guts environmental protections, and leaves millions of children behind. He calls himself a compassionate conservative. That’s the biggest lie of all.

The right-wing media racket lets Bush get away with it. When the mainstream media dares to tell the truth about Bush, they’re called biased. This book, no doubt, will be accused by some of having a liberal bias. See how shameless they are? They’ll stop at nothing.

Yes, I’m a liberal, and I’m proud of it. It’s a term we need to reclaim. Because I believe most Americans are liberals just like me. Most Americans believe in helping people. And most Americans believe that the government has a role to play—to create opportunity, to protect the environment, to provide for the common good.

We are the country, but they control it. Only 7 percent of Americans say they want to weaken