plain english

Paul Krugman, the standard-bearer for truth at the New York Times, reportedly has been waging an ongoing battle with his editors to run his column without sugar coating. Word has it that the big sticking point is the word "lie". Apparently it's not seemly for a columnist at that grand old bastion of newsprint to write that the President of the United States lies.

Krugman snuck it in today's column, with a tweak to his editors:

Many pundits and editorial boards still give Mr. Bush credit for trying to "reform" Social Security. In fact, Mr. Bush came to bury Social Security, not to save it. Over time, the Bush plan would have transformed Social Security from a social insurance program into a mutual fund, with nothing except a name in common with the system F.D.R. created.

In addition to misrepresenting his goals, Mr. Bush repeatedly lied about the current system. Oh, I'm sorry - was that a rude thing to say? Still, the fact is that Mr. Bush repeatedly said things that were demonstrably false and that his staff must have known were false. The falsehoods ranged from his claim that Social Security is unfair to African-Americans to his claim that "waiting just one year adds $600 billion to the cost of fixing Social Security."

I thought Mr Krugman might like some help for his next column, so I looked up "lie" in Webster's New World Roget's A-Z Thesaurus. The word lie has four general categories: to utter an untruth, to be situated, to be prostrate, to assume a prostrate position. Although President Moron probably spends far too much time in a prostrate position, I'd rather not think about that. For "to utter an untruth", Roget's lists these synonyms:

falsify, prevaricate, fib, tell a lie, equivocate, fabricate, [here come some goodies] deceive, mislead, misinform, misrepresent, exaggerate, distort, misstate, misspeak, concoct, tell a falsehood, be untruthful, forswear, be a liar, dupe, pervert [oo, use this one!], slant, twist, overstate, embellish, embroider, overdraw, bear false witness [I understand god gets you for that one], say one thing and mean another, dissimulate, dissemble, perjure oneself, delude, malign, invent, manufacture, make up, trump up [alternate meaning: to have a bad hair day], palter [a new word for me - cool!], beguile [Mr Krugman, please don't use this one], tell a white lie [not to be confused with white men telling lies], stretch the truth, spin a long yarn, bull, make out of whole cloth [can they make WMDs out of cloth?].

While you're thinking of others, read Krugman's excellent column here.