Eric Alterman wrote, before the State of the Union, considerably before the invasion of Iraq and certainly before any scrutiny of the uranium statements: Bush Lies, Media Swallows:

“Ben Bradlee explains,

‘Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face. No editor would dare print this version of Nixon’s first comments on Watergate for instance. ‘The Watergate break-in involved matters of national security, President Nixon told a national TV audience last night, and for that reason he would be unable to comment on the bizarre burglary. That is a lie.”

Part of the reason is deference to the office and the belief that the American public will not accept a mere reporter calling the President a liar. Part of the reason is the culture of Washington– where it is somehow worse to call a person a liar in public than to be one. A final reason is political. Some reporters are just political activists with columns who prefer useful lies to the truth. For instance, Robert Novak once told me that he “admired” Elliott Abrams for lying to him in a television interview about illegal U.S. acts of war against Nicaragua because he agreed with the cause.” AlterNet

The flap over the radioactive lie and the general pattern of dissembling about the rationale for invading Iraq has to be placed in the more general context of this President’s lying contempt for the American people, whom he considers an unfortunate impediment to his ability to do whatever he wants. Fortunately, they are a credulous and gullible lot who can easily be deceived with even the sloppiest of fictions and falsehoods, or so he is advised by his handlers. If the man were smarter, he would be embarrassed at the public spectacle of his clumsy, blundering pattern of blatant prevarication on every issue of importance. My thesaurus is open continuously to the right page, but I’m running out of synonyms for “lie” and “liar”. And while the media descend in a feeding frenzy on the fabrications and inconsistencies of the uranium issue, the administration has succeeded in keeping it appearing to be an isolated, unfortunate incident of bad intel rather than part of a general pattern. As per Ben Bradlee’s 1997 comment, it is up to the press to do differently.