Bush's Lie

And what was supposedly so artful about Bush saying "he has not talked to me about resignation"? The spokesman acknowledged that Bush and Snow had some discussions, and that over some period of time Snow "had made it clear that he wanted to move on."

So is the White House claiming that Bush was on solid ground because, in the direct Bush-Snow discussions, the word "resignation" literally didn't come up? That they talked about Snow's desire to leave and his succession, but not his "resignation"?

In the best-case scenario -- and if you ignore the "No" at the beginning of Bush's statement -- Tony Snow's description of what the president said as "artful" rests on hair-splitting wordplay at least as preposterous as any Clintonian parsing. Worst-case scenario, the spokesman was just spinning like a top -- and the press corps, by and large, bought it.

A History of (Not) Lying

How hard is it for reporters to call what Bush says a lie? Consider Dana Milbank 's near-legendary front-page Washington Post story from October 2002, headlined: "For Bush, Facts Are Malleable."

Milbank wrote that some of Bush's statements "were dubious, if not wrong"; that Bush's "rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy"; that he was guilty of "distortions and exaggerations"; that he had "taken some liberties," "omitted qualifiers," and made assertions that "simply outpace the facts."

But you won't find the word lie in there anywhere. It just won't get by the editors.

Mitigating Factors

One potentially mitigating factor to Bush's lie is that pretty much everyone in the room knew he was lying.

That very morning, Edmund L. Andrews had reported in the New York Times: "John W. Snow has signaled his readiness to step down as Treasury secretary, possibly by the end of June, or as soon as the White House has a candidate to succeed him, say Republicans with ties to the administration."

So here's how Peter Baker and Paul Blustein chose to report on the Bush statement in The Washington Post: "Bush, when asked about the Treasury secretary at his news conference last night, indicated only that he had not spoken directly with Snow and quickly changed the subject to positive economic indicators."

Justified?

One could also argue that it was just an innocent lie, intended simply to temporarily cloak an ongoing personnel matter -- or a justified lie, intended to avoid market disruption.

But the fact remains that Bush and his aides inevitably anticipated a question about Snow would come up. So his response was not an accident.

In other words, here is proof that when Bush feels it is justified, for one reason or another, he is more than capable of lying in response to a direct question, rather than just ducking it.