Do not miss Jon Chait’s latest takedown of Ari Fleischer, “the world’s most dishonest flack.” It opens beautifully:

Ari Fleischer has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal. That’s right: It’s the perfect storm of dishonesty–the world’s most dishonest flack meets the world’s most dishonest forum.

How long will I have to read through the op-ed to find a lie? I’m guessing two sentences. Let’s see … . Nope, I was wrong. I didn’t have to go any further than the headline (“The Taxpaying Minority”). Wow, Fleischer is arguing that only a minority of workers pay taxes? That’s a pretty startling claim.

Well, no, it turns out, he’s not. Here’s how the op-ed begins:

If the tax forms you’re filing this year show Uncle Sam entitled to any income tax, you increasingly stand alone. The income tax system is so bad, and increasingly reliant on a shrinking number of Americans to pay the nation’s bills, that 40% of the country’s households — more than 44 million adults — pay no income taxes at all. Not a penny.

Think of it this way. After dropping off your tax forms at the Post Office, you find 100 people standing on the sidewalk. Forty of them will be excused from paying income taxes thanks to Congress.

A couple things stand out here. First, Fleischer seems to think that the concept of 40 percent is so difficult that his readers won’t understand it without a real-life illustration. Gee, Ari, you’re throwing around all these fancy numbers, but what does 40 percent really mean? Oh, 40 out of 100. Now I get it.

The next thing I notice is that this claim is very different from the headline of his column. If 40 percent are paying no taxes, then 60 percent are paying taxes, and thus would not, technically, be considered a “minority.” Rather than tax Fleischer’s brain with fancy mathematical formulas (60 > 40), I’ll break it down for him in simple, homey terms. Think of it this way, Ari: After cashing in on a famous career lying for the Bush administration, you haul several large bags of cash to the bank, where you’re standing in a line of 100 people. Forty of those people are former Bush staffers cashing their ill-gotten rewards from K Street. Therefore 60 of them are not. Sixty is a larger number than 40…

Of course, the central conceit of Fleischer’s op-ed–that 40 percent of Americans pay no taxes–isn’t true, either…

And if you missed Chait’s now-classic Fleischer profile from 2002, now’s your chance.