Wordyard

Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, is scratching his head in incomprehension. “Why Do Dems Call Bush a Liar?,” his column today asks.

Henninger isn’t interested in anything so mundane as an actual review of the basis for many Democrats’ belief that Bush and his team are liars — an examination of the factual record of administration statements about why it was necessary, one year ago, to depose Saddam Hussein right now rather than continue to work with our allies and the U.N. in containing his regime and keeping it from mischief.

Such reviews, in Henninger’s view, are mere caviling — petty quibbles over “how many angels danced on the head of Mr. Bush’s intelligence estimates.”

No, Henninger is alarmed — as we all should be — over the fact that Pakistan’s atomic scientist A.Q. Khan has now been revealed as a peddler of nuclear secrets on the international black market. And he somehow believes, for reasons he completely fails to articulate, that Khan’s acts of counter-non-proliferation are supposed to make us all feel that the Bush administration’s failure to substantiate its claim about Iraqi WMDs simply doesn’t matter any more. (By his logic, we should have forgotten about Saddam and invaded Pakistan instead — but never mind, because there’s very little logic here.)

So what is Henninger’s point? “The Bush decision to invade Iraq was a judgment call,” he says, one that grownups can argue about. But those nasty Democrats are instead playing dirty, making it personal, calling the president names. This, Henninger feels, is not only bad sportsmanship; it actually endangers national security!

But rather than engage at this level, the Democratic candidates and their coterie have chosen to dismantle and demolish Mr. Bush’s personal integrity. The Democrats–and especially John Kerry, if he is serious about succeeding to this office–need to get on-issue and off George Bush personally because the course they are on diverts the electorate from the seriousness of what’s at stake. It also reduces the authority of the country’s leadership at a dangerous moment and diminishes one other national institution: the Democratic Party.

Note that Henninger is not actually asserting here that President Bush is a man of integrity and that the Democrats are wrong. He’s saying the president’s integrity, or lack thereof, is not a fit subject for public debate because, well, you woudn’t want to “reduce the authority of the country’s leadership” at a “dangerous moment.” Here we have a preview of what is likely to be a fall-back strategy for the Republicans this summer, as the jobless economy, the Iraq mess and Bush’s increasingly scandal-ridden record begin, finally, to catch up with him.

Let us consider the jaw-dropping degree of chutzpah required to publish such a view on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal — the same paper that devoted the better part of the 1990s to the systematic character assassination of a sitting president. No charge against the Clintons was too low to trigger the full-on Journal treatment, a relentless combination of irritable rumor-mongering and self-righteous pontification that established a still-unrivalled gold standard in ad hominem editorial assault.

It didn’t seem to matter to the Journal then that such attacks might “reduce the authority of the country’s leadership.” Oh, maybe that wasn’t a “dangerous moment”? Come on, there are always dangers to face down in the Oval Office. (Remember that when Bill Clinton launched missiles against al-Qaeda in 1998, his right-wing foes cried “Wag the dog!”) Sure, Clinton lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky — a dumb, self-inflicted wound. But by Henninger’s logic, Republicans should have refrained from calling him a liar because Presidents Need to Be Strong.

Well, they didn’t — in fact, they impeached him, and nearly drove him from office. So, Mr. Henninger, let me answer your question and explain exactly why “Dems Call Bush a Liar.” “Dems call Bush a liar” because Republicans broke the taboo on calling the president a liar. They said it so many times — long before it was true — that it lost any whiff of lese majeste, and became something you could say if you thought that, you know, the president was lying.

Now, where Bush’s predecessor lied about an ultimately private act of zero consequence to American security or American lives, Bush has lied about starting a war, the most profound decision any president can make. Has that happened before in American history? Of course. But unearthing the truth about the sorry origins of the Spanish American War or the Gulf of Tonkin incident didn’t, as Henninger worries, “diminish our institutions” — it strengthened them.

Beyond this, there’s a wider reason Democrats have lost any shyness about calling Bush a liar. We say it because we are daily astounded by the sheer volume of falsehood the Bush White House pumps into the polis in the course of its daily operations. For the Bush administration, lying (sugarcoat the phrase if you like and call it “distorting the facts” or “misrepresenting the truth,” the point is the same) is a fundamental coping strategy.

This administration didn’t only lie about Iraq’s WMDs: It lies about nearly everything. It lies about the economy. Its deceptive presentation of economic statistics has made it an utter laughing stock among those people who actually understand such statistics. It lies about hard facts (its own budget numbers). It lies about symbols (denying responsibility for the “Mission Accomplished” banner). It has even figured out ways to lie about scientific research, a realm that should be relatively impervious to subjective manipulation.

Everywhere you look, this presidency is draped in curtains of lies. And we’re supposed to protect the nation by not pointing them out? Sorry. The very dangers Henninger invokes to shush complaints instead add urgency to the alarms we must raise. A deceptive government isn’t ever desirable; “at a dangerous moment,” it’s not just bad, it’s hazardous.