Liar, liar, pants on fire

In New Attacks, Bush Pushes Limit on the Facts

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - From the beginning of the year, the White House has charted new ground with the sweep of its negative campaigning, starting with an $80 million wave of attack advertisements directed at Senator John Kerry that began the moment he effectively won his party's nomination last spring.

But the scathing indictment that Mr. Bush offered of Mr. Kerry over the past two days - on the eve of the second presidential debate and with polls showing the race tightening - took these attacks to a blistering new level. In the process, several analysts say, Mr. Bush pushed the limits of subjective interpretation and offered exaggerated or what some Democrats said were distorted accounts of Mr. Kerry's positions on health care, tax cuts, the Iraq war and foreign policy.

...[A]nalysts, including some Republicans, said Mr. Bush was repeatedly taking phrases and sentences out of context, or cherry-picking votes, to provide an unfavorable case against Mr. Kerry.

"So much of what they are indicting is taken out of context," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of a book on negative campaigning. "It's a matter of taking sentences out of context or parts of sentences out of context. And it's hard for journalists to write the context back in because it takes time.''

Scott Reed, who served as manager of Bob Dole's 1996 campaign for president, said, "They are going right up to the line and they are pushing it hard.''

...[A]sked whether he agreed with Mr. Bush's characterization of Mr. Kerry's view on pre-emptive war, Mr. Reed responded, "No.''

...On foreign policy, analysts said, many of Mr. Bush's assertions fall into a gray area between opinion and distortion.

via NYTimes.com