Presidential Pants on Fire?: They say that Bush is 'lying.' They're wrong

National Review, June 16, 2003 by Byron York

On the economy, Milbank took Bush to task for urging Congress to pass a terrorism insurance bill. "There's over $15 billion of construction projects which are on hold," Bush said in a speech last October, "which aren't going forward -- which means there's over 300,000 jobs that would be in place, or soon to be in place, that aren't in place." Milbank complained that the $15 billion figure was not a government estimate but had instead been produced by the Real Estate Roundtable, which favored terrorism insurance and had come up with that number through an "unscientific survey" of its members. The figure of 300,000 jobs, Milbank wrote, was also suspect, but he offered no evidence that either figure was actually incorrect. The White House stood its ground; an official told ABCNews.com's "The Note" that the jobs figure was "vetted and approved by the president's economic team."

So in one example, Milbank apparently misinterpreted the president's remarks about UAVs. In another, he hit Bush for a misstatement on Iraqi arms, while failing to tell readers that the IAEA report in question was nowhere near as definitive as he suggested. And in the third example, he criticized Bush for citing statistics -- surely a time- honored political practice -- that Milbank found wanting, although without any proof that they were wrong. Milbank filled out his article with a couple of other examples, one a Bush statement about a union dispute in which the meaning of the president's words was debatable, and another Bush statement about an Iraqi defector and an al-Qaeda leader in which Bush "omitted qualifiers that make the accusations seem less convincing." And that was it. One might reasonably ask whether any of those cases represented examples of presidential lying in the tradition of Nixon and Clinton.

In mid May, Post columnist E. J. Dionne picked up Milbank's theme: "Bush and his White House say whatever is necessary, even if they have to admit later that what they said the first time wasn't exactly true." Exhibit A in Dionne's account was the president's May 1 flight to the USS Abraham Lincoln for a speech announcing the official end of hostilities in Iraq. The White House, Dionne noted, had originally said Bush would fly to the carrier in an S3B Viking jet because the ship was hundreds of miles off shore, too far to travel by helicopter. But when the president actually left, the carrier was about 30 miles from shore, close enough for a routine chopper flight. Nevertheless, the president took the jet for a dramatic landing on the Lincoln. "Now that's very interesting," Dionne concluded. "You can be absolutely sure that if an Al Gore White House had comparably misled citizens about the reason for a presidential made-for-television visit to an aircraft carrier, Gore would have been pilloried for engaging in yet another 'little lie.'"

It was an argument heard over and over around Washington, especially from Democratic lawmakers. But a close look at events suggests there was, in fact, no lie -- big or little -- in the Lincoln affair.