EUPHAMISM OF THE DAY, courtesy Dana Milbank

PRESIDENT ENHANCES HIS FACTS

As Buzzflash puts it, come on, he flat-out lies! Anyway, the central focus of this piece is right on, that Bush says things that "outpace the facts" as Milbank again euphamizes. But Dana's whoreish tendencies kick in, really strongly in a number of places:

Presidential embroidery is, of course, a hoary tradition. Ronald Reagan was known for his apocryphal story about liberating a concentration camp. Bill Clinton fibbed famously and under oath about his personal indiscretions to keep a step ahead of Whitewater prosecutors...

In a now time-honored WaPo tradition of relating other people's fuckups to Clinton whenever possible (after all, the Post spent a ridiculous amount of resources on investigating Whitewater, money better spent on, say, Harken?), and Milbank is quite capable at this. Nevermind that Clinton lied about "personal indiscretions", certainly not illegal indiscretions, in an investigation about a land deal that exonerated him. Meanwhile, Bush is lying all over the place about the economy, Iraq, his administration's pre-9/11 knowledge, Harken, etc.

And ironically enough, Milbank does a bit of fact-enhancing himself!

Statements on subjects ranging from the economy to Iraq suggest that a president who won election underscoring Al Gore's knack for distortions and exaggerations has been guilty of a few himself.

No, he didn't win election by underscoring Gore's supposed "knack for distortions and exaggerations". Rather, he LOST the election but had the will of the people tossed out by the Scalia 5. And don't get me started on the Post's and almost all of the media's running bullshit narrative on Al Gore.