Brendan Nyhan

Sorokin wrote that “suggested lesson plans compiled by the NEA recommend that teachers ‘address the issue of blame factually,’ noting: ‘Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist situations because someone is at fault. In this country, we still believe that all people are innocent until solid, reliable evidence from our legal authorities proves otherwise.’” According to the story, the NEA simultaneously “takes a decidedly blame-America approach, urging educators to ‘discuss historical instances of American intolerance,’ so that the American public avoids ‘repeating terrible mistakes.’” Quotes providing context from NEA health information network director Jerald Newberry are largely buried at the end of the piece.

Sorokin does concede that “the suggestions and lesson plans” that are the source of all of her quotes “were developed by Brian Lippincott, affiliated with the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the John F. Kennedy University in California,” rather than the NEA. But she obscures the fact that every supposed NEA quote in her story is derived from a single lesson written by Lippincott that appears on the Kennedy University Web site, not the NEA’s. The NEA did link to Lippincott’s work as a suggested lesson plan. However, recommending someone else’s work on an outside Web site does not mean that each word in the linked article represents the NEA’s official position, and it is clearly unfair to state, as Sorokin did, that the NEA is “suggesting” something based on a few sentences that Lippincott wrote.

There are actually over 100 lesson plans and 60 outside links on the Remember Sept. 11 site, according to the NEA. The lessons are generally intended to help students cope with their feelings about the tragedy and to provide factual information on the attacks and the U.S. response. A wide range of outside resources are provided that cannot be easily stereotyped as “blame-America.” These include links to the CIA, the proposed Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense; the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights and Pledge of Allegiance; and speeches by “great Americans” on “the foundations of our freedom, rights and responsibilities,” including President Bush, Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln.

In addition, Sorokin’s reporting of Lippincott’s statements is intentionally deceptive. When she writes the NEA is “suggesting to teachers” that they not “‘suggest any group is responsible’ for the terrorist hijackings,” she implies that Lippincott is advocating that teachers not blame al-Qaida for the terrorist attacks. This is not at all clear. In fact, he notes that “everyone wants the terrorists punished” and that “justice means punishing the real perpetrators.” The lesson plan is intended to help prevent students or teachers from stereotyping Arab Americans or Muslims. The first item in his list of “Key Messages” is that “we must not act like [the terrorists] by lashing out at innocent people around us, or ‘hating’ them because of their origins.” The second is similar: “Groups of people should not be judged by the actions of a few. It is wrong to condemn an entire group of people by association of religion, race, homeland, or even proximity.” This continues throughout.

The key quotation in Sorokin’s piece comes from the fourth tip for parents and teachers. Lippincott writes, “Address the issue of blame factually. Explore who and what may be to blame for this event. Use non-speculative terms. Do not suggest any group is responsible. Be careful to ensure students (e.g., Arab-American students,) do not assume blame in order to make classmates feel better. Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist situations because someone is at fault. However, explain that all Arab-Americans are not guilty by association or racial membership. Help kids resist the tendency to want to ‘pin the blame’ on someone close by. In this country, we still believe that all people are innocent until solid, reliable evidence from our legal authorities proves otherwise.”

This passage is urging teachers to avoid stereotyping of a “group” like Arab-Americans and Muslims, not to let al-Qaida off the hook. Consider the last four sentences quoted above. In the Times article, Sorokin apparently drops the second and third (inexcusably, she fails even to include an ellipsis to indicate that there is a gap), avoiding the statement that “all Arab-Americans are not guilty by association or racial membership” and creating the implication that the final sentence is a statement about al-Qaida rather than the general legal principle that people are innocent until proven guilty.

It is this kind of unfair, deceptive paraphrasing and omission of context that is frequently used to create a new political myth. Read in context, the lesson plan is actually just a banal recitation of the need for tolerance.

Nevertheless, the echo chamber, voracious for fresh outrages, swung into action immediately after Sorokin’s article was published. Matt Drudge ran a banner headline on the Drudge Report linking to Sorokin’s story: “NEA TELLS TEACHERS NOT TO CAST 9/11 BLAME.” Then the story was picked up on CNN’s “Talkback Live.” Newberry, appearing first, stated that the NEA has “more than 100 lesson plans … center[ed] around patriotism, center[ed] around America’s history and how this event fits into those events.” He added, “The enemy here is Osama bin Laden. The enemy here is al-Qaida. And there are many plans how America is going to work together to take on that enemy.” He also accused Sorokin of writing the story without having seen the site, saying “the site did not even become live until 8 this morning, and those articles were written yesterday.”

Nonetheless, Sandy Rios of Concerned Women of America, who followed Newberry on “Talkback,” said that, according to the NEA, “our kids are not able to blame al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden until they have had a trial.” She then offered this twisted analogy: “We knew on Dec. 7, 1941, that the Japanese were responsible for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We didn’t wait until they went to court and a judge decided. And yet that is what the NEA is suggesting that teachers teach our children.”

That night, on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Bob Kuttner of the liberal American Prospect magazine knocked down the story as focusing on “[o]ne of the many hundreds of links” on the NEA site, calling it “the most dishonest piece of journalism I’ve read in years,” “a completely trumped-up hoax of a charge” and a “malicious allegation.” Rios, appearing as the other guest with substitute host John Gibson, nonetheless falsely claimed “[t]his is what the NEA says” before reading a quotation from Lippincott and pushing her Pearl Harbor analogy.

She wasn’t the only person claiming Lippincott’s piece represented the NEA’s official position that night, however. On CNN’s “Crossfire,” co-host Tucker Carlson said, “The National Education Association has released its lesson plan for Sept. 11 suggestions for what teachers should teach their classes on the first anniversary of the tragedy. Among its directives, don’t, quote, ‘suggest any group is responsible for the attacks.’” And Sean Hannity, co-host of Fox News Channel’s “Hannity and Colmes,” repeated the same spin in a question to Newberry, who tried ineffectually to counter it.

At this point, myth proponents began to circulate even more unfair paraphrases of the original distortion. On “Talkback Live,” Rios alleged that the NEA wants teachers to “talk about all the bad things that Americans have done to contribute to the Sept. 11 attacks.” Then, the next day, Sorokin published a follow-up story in the Washington Times similarly claiming that the NEA “cites American intolerance as a reason for the attacks.” Neither Rios nor Sorokin provided any evidence to support this claim, which is presumably a twisted paraphrase of another one of Lippincott’s tips intended to promote tolerance: a discussion of “historical instances of American intolerance” such as “[i]nternment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and the backlash against Arab Americans during the Gulf War.” Somehow they twist a suggested lesson that is obviously intended to prevent an overreaction to the Sept. 11 attacks into the nonsensical claim that this means the NEA believes America is somehow responsible for the attacks taking place.

In an accompanying editorial that also ran on Aug. 20, the Washington Times refined the myth even further. “NEA staff have apparently busied themselves this summer preparing lesson plans cautioning teachers not to ‘suggest any group is responsible’ for the terrorist airliner hijackings,” it lied. The Times then pummeled the NEA straw man it created, framing direct quotes from Lippincott as NEA creations with false phrases like “the NEA disgustingly lectures” and “the NEA urges teachers.”

On Aug. 20, the Times spin was adopted by the Times of London, which wrote that the NEA “told teachers” and “said” things that Lippincott wrote. On “Crossfire” that night, Carlson called a Lippincott statement “a suggested guideline” from NEA. Co-host James Carville then asked Rios, appearing as a guest, if she had read what Lippincott wrote. She played dumb: “Mr. Brian Lippincott? I know about the curriculum. You mean, what it says in the curriculum?”

Soon, an even more misleading version of the original Washington Times spin began to circulate. This time, pundits and editorial boards harped on Sorokin’s implication that the NEA does not believe al-Qaida is responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative Eagle Forum, condemned “the idea that nobody is to blame for Sept. 11″ to Canada’s National Post. On Aug. 21, Investor’s Business Daily wrote that one of “a new batch of Sept. 11 lesson plans put together” by the NEA “advises: ‘Do not suggest any group is responsible,’ and later seems to propose it’s best not to blame anyone. The NEA’s teaching plans, it seems, are a new variation of the left’s old ‘blame America first’ theme. Sept. 11 was, of course, the work of a group.” And the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle claimed that the NEA “calls for teachers to blame the attacks more on the United States and Western culture than on the actual perpetrators” and “doesn’t even hold the perpetrators responsible.”

On Aug. 22, feeding off its own spin, the Washington Times published a brazen Life section piece by Tom Knott that belittled the NEA along the same lines. According to Knott, the group is “still not sure who perpetrated the horror.” “In the sanitized world of the NEA,” he writes, “Osama Bin Laden probably merits a smiley face next to his mug.” But, he generously concedes, “[a]t least the NEA left the one-armed man out of its Sept. 11 lesson plan.”

Regional newspapers rushed to condemn the outrage du jour. The Cleveland Plain Dealer (8/21), Richmond Times-Dispatch (8/22), Denver Post (8/22), Columbus Dispatch (8/23) and Tallahassee Democrat columnist Bill Cotterell (8/22) all condemned the NEA, attributing Lippincott’s quotations to the group. The Times-Dispatch was one of several to follow Sorokin’s lead in pluralizing the smear from one lesson plan to many, claiming that the NEA “has put together lesson plans for the occasion that caution teachers not to ‘suggest any group is responsible’ for the terrorist attacks.”

On Aug. 25, George Will correctly attributed the essay to Lippincott in his syndicated Washington Post column, but attacked the NEA as a “national menace” and “as frightening, in its way, as any foreign threat.”

Even though there had been ample time to research the story and Kuttner had knocked it down on “O’Reilly” on Aug. 19, most pundits displayed little or no awareness that it was bogus. On CNN’s “Late Edition” on the 25th, panel host Kate Snow repeated Sorokin’s spin, saying that the NEA was “suggesting that teachers … should avoid suggesting that any group is responsible, avoid placing blame for the terrorist assault.” The panel went along with the premise — New Republic editor Peter Beinart even bashed the NEA as embarrassing to liberals like him.

After repeated attempts to contain the controversy, the NEA issued an indirectly worded statement on Aug. 27. Rather than directly refuting the charges, it vaguely asserts that critics “have taken the material out of context” and are “using this national tragedy to attempt to score political points,” giving little indication that the entire controversy has essentially been fabricated. It also at some point apparently removed links to Lippincott’s lesson.

By last week, the controversy began to receive significant attention from the mainstream news media, with dutifully “objective” reports that fail to make clear that the controversy was manufactured appearing in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. (Newberry was ultimately reduced to issuing the nasty accusation that the NEA’s critics are frightened of diversity in the Times.) Finally, Op-Eds by Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman in the Los Angeles Times and Mona Charen in the Baltimore Sun repeated the falsehood yet again.

Outside of the NEA, only a handful of mainstream critics have taken on this spin campaign. For a while, the lonely group consisted solely of Kuttner, Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler (see the Aug. 23, 26, 27 and 28 editions) and the Charleston Gazette. Most commentators and reporters have apparently been too lazy or cowardly to stand in the way of the steamroller of lies and distortions.

Luckily, however, this week Boston Globe contributor Cathy Young and New York Times education columnist Richard Rothstein have joined the ranks of the debunkers (though Rothstein mistakenly attributed Lippincott’s words to the NEA Web site).

Even National Review, a leading conservative magazine, has conceded that Sorokin’s case against the NEA is overstated. In an editorial published last week, N.R. argues that “the critics both overstate and understate their indictment,” with the lesson plans revealing “modern liberal culture’s shallowness” rather than “the NEA’s lack of patriotism.” The editors point out that the lessons come from a variety of outside sources, including the American Red Cross and PBS, that “there is not a lot of blame-America stuff” in them and the site includes “links to America’s founding documents,” though “the mood is mildly adversarial toward Americans, who are assumed to be constantly on the verge of committing ethnic pogroms.”

Sorokin’s article was not the first Washington Times piece to use a misleading, out-of-context quotation to generate a media myth. Joseph Curl did the same thing last November in a story suggesting that President Clinton blamed slavery and U.S. treatment of Native Americans for the Sept. 11 attacks. As my Spinsanity co-editor Bryan Keefer showed, Curl’s story stripped a few fragmentary quotes out of context from a long speech to construct this fiction, when in context Clinton’s statements were unremarkable — so much so that the Associated Press account of the speech did not even mention them. However, Curl’s story ran under the explosive headline “Clinton calls terror a U.S. debt to past,” and from there it spread like wildfire, spawning vague and even more inaccurate second-order paraphrases that in turn generated ever more vitriolic denunciations. The myth continues to reverberate, recently turning up in Hannity’s new book “Let Freedom Ring.”

Unfortunately, there are few brakes on the spread of these myths, which play so effectively on the preconceptions of the public. Partisans have strong incentives to create and refine them in order to generate media attention and damage their political enemies. And the vast ranks of pundits and talk shows desperately need compelling material to fill airtime and column inches. In their rush to churn out content, many uncritically spread reports that later turn out to be distortions and lies. And when sober-minded people point out the truth, the myth mongers are rarely held accountable or forced to issue corrections. As a result, debunked stories are dredged back up and repeated all the time. Until we can correctly remember the past, it seems, we will be plagued with further distortions of it.

This argument is absurd on a number of levels. First, in terms of the specific claims about Provenge, CMS hasn’t denied coverage and experts say it’s unlikely they will do so at the end of the year-long process (see also Media Matters). The entire claim is based on speculation.

More important, even if CMS had already decided to deny coverage, it would not justify Palin’s statement. Here is the relevant passage again:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Palin’s language suggests that a “death panel” would determine whether individual patients receive care based on their “level of productivity in society.” This was — and remains — false. Denying coverage at a system level for specific treatments or drugs is not equivalent to “decid[ing], based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether [Palin's parents and baby with Down Syndrome] are worthy of health care” (see also Cato’s Michael Tanner). Those who try to redefine “death panels” in this way are attempting to move the goalposts in the debate. It’s the equivalent of pointing to buried Iraqi chemical shells from the 1980s as evidence for the Bush administration’s claims about WMD.

Finally, defining “death panels” as rationing of any sort is totally nonsensical. By that standard, there are government and private “death panels” throughout the healthcare system already. It’s true that Obama’s proposal is likely to increase rationing, but so would every other proposal to control the unsustainable trajectory of future healthcare spending. Under Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher plan, for instance, CBO projects that “[b]eneficiaries would… be likely to purchase less comprehensive health plans or plans more heavily managed than traditional Medicare” (my emphasis). Unfortunately, hysteria over “death panels” is preventing a necessary debate over which approach would be most effective and fair.

I think most sophisticated Obama supporters and administration officials would agree with each of these statements, but few besides Matthew Yglesias seem to understand their combined implications. The economy drives American politics, and it’s stuck in a ditch. Absent a macroeconomic miracle, the Fed is Democrats’ best hope for getting the recovery moving, and their only direct leverage is Obama’s appointment power. So why does no one care that Peter Diamond’s Fed nomination was blocked yesterday? As bizarre as it sounds, there is no bigger issue in American politics right now in terms of the potential effects on future electoral outcomes.

This originally appeared at Brendan Nyhan’s blog

As Jamison Foser points out at Media Matters, Barnes published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that repeatedly suggests the key to Obama’s re-election is cutting spending:

If Mr. Obama wants to avert a fiscal crisis and win re-election in 2012, he needs House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be removed from her powerful post. A GOP takeover may be the only way…

Over the past 50 years, it should be no surprise which president has the best record for holding down discretionary spending. It was President Reagan. But who was second best? President Clinton, a Democrat. His record of frugality was better than Presidents Nixon, Ford and both Bushes. Mr. Clinton couldn’t have done it if Republicans hadn’t won the House and Senate in the 1994 election. They insisted on substantial cuts, he went along and then whistled his way to an easy re-election in 1996…

Mr. Obama’s re-election to a second term is heavily dependent on his ability to deal effectively with the fiscal mess.

The suggestion that Clinton had “an easy re-election” due to spending restraint is implausible. Here’s a plot of changes in non-defense discretionary spending (Barnes’s preferred metric) for recent first-term presidents (see methodological notes below for details):

The relationship between spending restraint and vote share is entirely driven by Reagan’s 1984 landslide (an outlier on both dimensions). When it is excluded, there is no relationship between the variables.

By contrast, the relationship between economic growth and presidential vote share is extremely strong and robust to the exclusion of any single president. Here, for example, is the same set of presidents with their vote share plotted against the Douglas Hibbs measure of weighted per-capita growth in disposable personal income (drawn from his Bread and Peace model):

As I’ve previously noted, Clinton’s move toward the center (which included an emphasis on deficit reduction) may have helped somewhat to boost his margin above what we would have otherwise expected, but the driving force in 1996 (as in every election) was the state of the economy.

Similarly, it’s hard to imagine Reagan being re-elected based on his record of spending restraint if the economy was in the tank. The fiscal year 1982 budget cut non-defense discretionary spending substantially, but it wasn’t enough to protect Reagan during the recession of 1981-1982, which pushed Reagan’s approval numbers down to 35% by January 1983. Once the economy bounced back, however, approval rebounded in time for him to crush Mondale in 1984.

Barnes may wish that presidents were re-elected based on spending restraint, but that’s just not the world we live in. Obama’s fortunes will rise or fall depending on the state of the economy.

[Methodological notes: Spending levels are drawn from the historical tables for the FY2010 budget and are in constant dollars (Table 8.2). I compare spending in the fiscal year beginning before the president takes office (e.g. fiscal year 1969 for Nixon) to the fiscal year that ends just before the president is up for re-election (e.g. fiscal year 1972 for Nixon). I start with fiscal year 1974 for Ford (since he took office in August of that year) and end with fiscal year 1976 (excluding the transition quarter in 1976).]

Things have changed, however. In a column for Roll Call, Stuart Rothenberg flags a new NBC/WSJ poll suggesting that the Democratic brand has lost most of its advantage relative to the GOP.

Unfortunately for Democrats, their own brand has fallen like a rock.

In April, almost a year ago, the Hart/McInturff poll found 45 percent of Americans with a positive view of the Democratic Party and 34 percent with a negative view. In the most recent Hart/McInturff survey, the Democratic Party’s positives have sunk to 37 percent and its negatives have risen to 43 percent. Yes, those numbers are slightly better than the GOP’s (31 percent positive/43 percent negative), but not enough to help Democrats in the fall.

Here’s how the net positive numbers (pecent positive minus percent negative) for Democrats and Republicans have changed over the course of Obama’s presidency:

Perceptions of the GOP have only improved a bit, but the negative press and opposition party criticism faced by Democrats have apparently taken their toll. Since my original post in October, the difference in net positive numbers between the parties has closed from 27 points to 6 — a decline that coincides with the most intense stage of the health care reform debate.

As a result of this change, the difference between the major party brands no longer appears to be unusual for this stage in the midterm election cycle (polls in the chart were the closest available):

I interpret this shift as reflecting the underlying fundamentals of the election cycle, which favors the GOP (a Republican takeover of the House is a realistic possibility). The question now is whether the Republicans will continue to gain ground. In 1994, the GOP opened up a major lead in perceptions of the party relative to Democrats between June and October:

I still don’t expect a 1994-style landslide in November, but it seems clear that the Democratic brand advantage that might have helped prevent such an outcome has evaporated.

Will reporters let the president continue this strategy in the second half of his term, especially when it comes to war with Iraq? The evidence isn’t reassuring.

So far, Bush has been protected by his reputation for honesty, the media’s distaste for complex policy issues and — since Sept. 11 — his status as a wartime president. As a result, the administration has gotten a pass when it has used deceptive, even dishonest arguments to sell key pieces of its agenda, most notably the tax cut and Bush’s plan to create private Social Security accounts. And even when serious questions about its arguments have been raised, the White House has dissembled wildly rather than admit mistakes or mendacity.

Take Bush’s false claim to have publicly listed three exceptions during the campaign under which budget deficits would be acceptable. As revenues declined last year and deficits appeared imminent, the president claimed the following to try to protect himself from criticism: “As I said in Chicago during the campaign, when asked about should the government ever deficit spend, I said only under these circumstances should government deficit spend: if there is a national emergency, if there is a recession, or if there’s a war.”

Bush repeated this at least 11 separate times (and told his “trifecta” joke based on it even more often). Yet there is no record of Bush ever saying what he claims during the campaign in Chicago or anywhere else, as Jonathan Chait first reported in the New Republic. After much investigation, it was discovered that Vice President Al Gore listed the exceptions during the campaign, not Bush. A Bush advisor did indicate at the time that he also supported them, but the White House has not produced any evidence to substantiate Bush’s Chicago story despite numerous requests from the press. The administration’s only substantive response was to direct a Washington Post reporter to two GOP primary debates and a post-election appearance by Bush, none of which support the claim.

Then, in July, the Office of Management and Budget issued a press release that severely underestimated the percentage decline in the 10-year federal budget surplus caused by the Bush tax cut (apparently an inadvertent error). Rather than admit its mistake publicly, OMB deleted the error and posted an altered version of the release (Adobe PDF file) on its Web site with no indication that it had been changed. After my initial report on this was picked up by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, OMB was finally forced to add a disclosure to the release.

Now, with matters far more grave at stake in the debate over Iraq, the administration has been no less brazen in its dishonesty. At a Sept. 7 appearance with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush said, “I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied — finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.”

An IAEA report in 1998 (around the time that inspectors were “finally denied access”) did say Iraq was six to 24 months away from developing a weapon before the Gulf War in 1991, but its efforts to produce weapons-grade uranium were largely crippled by the war and subsequent inspection regime. It appears Bush was referring to that estimate to underscore the point that Iraq has already come close to developing nuclear weapons and will try to do so again.

However, he should have been clearer about when that capacity was discovered. By tying the pre-Gulf War estimate to when inspectors were “finally denied access,” Bush appears to imply that IAEA’s conclusion that Iraq was “six months away from developing a weapon” dated from 1998, rather than 1991. The IAEA summary of the report he is referring to in fact stated that as of 1998 it “has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its program goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material.”

Rather than clarifying the point appropriately, Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan claimed the president was referring to an IAEA report published in 1991 (the organization says it did not issue such a report that year) and pointed a Washington Times reporter to two newspaper stories that do not corroborate Bush’s claim.

The White House shifted gears several weeks later, telling a Washington Post reporter that Bush was “imprecise” and that his statement was based on U.S. intelligence. Then, just two days after that story was published, press secretary Ari Fleischer tried a third approach, claiming that “it was in fact the International Institute for Strategic Studies that issued the report concluding that Iraq could develop nuclear weapons in as few as six months.”

But the IISS report Fleischer finally settled on as the president’s source was actually released on Sept. 9, 2002, two days after Bush’s original statement and years after inspectors were “finally denied access.” And if the president was briefed about the report in advance, he would have been told that it does not mention any such six-month estimate. An IISS summary does state that Iraq “could … assemble nuclear weapons within months if fissile material from foreign sources were obtained,” but this conditional assessment of the situation today was certainly not the basis for Bush’s claims in his press conference with Blair.

Nonetheless, Fleischer attacked the Post with righteous indignation. “The source may be different, but the underlying fact remains the same, despite the story’s declaration of the president’s argument, once again, as ‘dubious, if not wrong,’” he wrote. “It is The Post’s reporting that is dubious, if not wrong.”

This dissembling is a betrayal of Bush’s promise to restore honor and dignity to the White House. With so much at stake domestically and abroad, it’s time to hold the president and his administration to a higher standard of truth.