Dishonesty: Frequently the Best Policy

Why This Bush Lie? Timothy Noah
I believe that the point Timothy Noah makes in this article for Slate, that the press wouldn't have jumped all over Bush because of his citation of the forged Niger Papers in his State of the Union Address if the administration simply denied any wrongdoing, is quite correct. For anyone who has watched how stories develop in the Media, it seems clear that if Bush had simply maintained that he had been right the whole time he would not have caught as much flack has he did. The issue would have been dismissed as partisan bickering, the papers would dutifully report that A said this, while B said that and leave the yellowcake matter alone. While the charges that the administration politicized intelligence gathering in order to gain support for the Iraq War (a related, but much more serious allegation) have gotten comparatively little attention from the Media, a case where the President has stuck to his story, Bush set off a journalistic feeding frenzy yellowcake has , becuase he didn't.