The Difference Between A Lie And Deciet, Plus A Look At An "Open-minded" Liberal

I love when a conservative finally says what needs to be said. I have tried to create an analogy for Bush's decision to go into Iraq, but the best I could come up with was this;
You walk into a store, and look at an item. It doesn't have a price tag on it, so you ask what the price is. A clerk finds one with a price tag and it says $5. However, when you go to check out, the cashier rings it up, the corperate headquarters has increased teh price without telling anyone, and the price is now $10.
Did the clerk lie to you if he genuinely did not know the price had changed?"

I again roamed over to Lies.com, looking to see what was going on over there. That's when I read the BEST logic for the difference between Clinton lying about his relations with Monica Lewinsky, and what liberals call "lies" by George Bush. Read it.

A lie is the telling of an untruth that you know at the time was an untruth, with malicious intent. That is my definition, I haven’t looked the word up, but I know if I followed that simple definition growing up, I didn’t get beat. As your definition says, deception does not always imply aim or intention. In simplest terms a lie is pretty much black and white, although the results of that lie can have a wide range of ramifications, usually, but not always negative. Deception has every shade of gray and can also have a wide range of ramifications. We add the malicious intent clause to differentiate lies that cause harm from “white lies”.

When Clinton lied in court, the lie itself wasn’t that bad, two consenting adults having sex. This was a lie because Clinton new at the time he said he didn’t have sex with that woman, he indeed had had sex with that woman. No one knew if he was or wasn’t lying until the DNA was checked on the blue dress. Then he said he hadn’t lied, another lie and then he admitted to having an inappropriate sexual relationship, that was deception to cover the obvious lie. So now we have a lie, that lie is not serious, the ramifications to Clinton’s career may have been serious but the ramifications to the public or to justice were not. Remember a lie is a lie, the level harm depends on the specific case. What raised the bar in this case was that it was material in a sexual harassment case. It always amazed me you guys glossed right over that since you are for women’s rights and all.

...Back to Bush. If he said Hussein had WMD based on the best intelligence available at the time, and the intelligence was wrong, there was no lie. If there was contradictory intelligence and he chose to ignore it, finding the pro WMD intel to more reliable, he didn’t lie. Deciding to go to war with or without WMD proof , as the Downing Street Memo said doesn’t mean he lied, it just means he felt there were enough other reasons to invade with or without WMD. You can disagree with the decision, but that doesn’t mean there was a lie.

Now on to deception. You can deceive without lying, showing a picture of a car you are selling only on the side that was not wrecked for instance. You didn’t say it wasn’t wrecked, but you didn’t say it was either. This would be a harmful and probably illegal deception. If you have information that would help your opponent in a debate, but you purposely don’t give it to him to be used against you, that is a form of deception, albeit on the periphery of the term, but this deception isn’t bad. It is bad for your opponent, but it is not bad for you, and after your (our) interests, everyone else’s comes first.

At this point I haven’t seen any credible evidence this administration lied, and very little that it even deceived. They may not have told every single thing, presidents seldom can. There are national security issues to consider, remember Arabs get CNN too. You also don’t want your enemy to know what you know about them, and the press today, unlike the press in past wars doesn’t hold back information that would be detrimental to this country so you simply can’t give them the information in the first place. He also has political enemies in this country like you guys and all but a couple token Democrats in congress that don’t have the best interests of this country in mind, only their own political ambitions.

Very well said. And now to see the response by an "Open Minded" Liberal

Hi shcb - appreciate your politeness, I realize that does not come easy for self described right wing rednecks, but it has allowed us thinking liberals to understand the (misinformed) reasoning behind the silly (but dangerous and fearsome) things you right wingers and neo cons say. I really feel sorry that you types have to exist in such a treacherous world view of reality; I just wish you would stop trying to impose that “them A-rabs are out to get us”, or whatever other garbage mentality (”you’re either with us or yer gainst us,” says gwb) on everyone else. On that note, please just support peace.

And the liberal continues to spit insults at conservatives, despite the fact that all other commentors were very civil.