Today, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen writes:

So common is the statement “Bush lied” that it seems sometimes that I am the only blue-state person who does not think it is true. Then, last week, the indomitable Helen Thomas changed all that with a single question. She asked George Bush why he wanted “to go to war” from the moment he “stepped into the White House,” and the president said, “You know, I didn’t want war.” With that, the last blue-state skeptic folded.

Liberal bloggers are already up in arms about Cohen’s delayed conversion. Brad DeLong claims that “The Washington Post will never recover its reputation as long as it continues to employ people in the unreality-based community like Richard Cohen,” while Tapped’s Ezra Klein writes that “Richard Cohen’s admission that he didn’t realize that Bush had lied until sometime last week is a bit absurd. If you don’t think Bush is a liar, you simply haven’t been paying attention. And if you haven’t been paying attention, maybe you shouldn’t be a Washington Post political columnist.”

But as we wrote in All the President’s Spin, what’s surprising is that Bush rarely tells outright lies. He makes deceptive statements all the time (the book documents countless examples from the 2001-2004 period), but they are almost always half-truths or sins of omission rather than self-evidently false.

To be sure, Cohen has seemed almost comically naive and out of touch in recent years. The Post should replace him as soon as possible. But the “Bush lied” cartoon character is silly.

As ATPS explains, the reason Bush has gotten away with so much is precisely because he rarely gets caught in outright lies. Instead, he uses technically true language to leave a false impression with his audience, a practice that takes advantage of the practices of “objective” journalism. I’m disappointed that our analysis didn’t make more of an impression on DeLong and Klein, two bloggers whom I respect.