Lying Liars and the Lies they tell

Allen Brill, host of The Right Christians, has a blog on which I enjoy interacting with folks who disagree with me on things political and theological. Most of the discourse is serious and charitable, as I've said elsewhere.

Every now and then, though, a commenter will make an overly-zealous statement. For instance, in the comments of this post, one fellow wrote, that Bush "cannot be trusted because he's lied on every policy initiative to come from his office." Every policy initiative? Wow. Quite the pathological liar we've got in the Oval Office.

In a different vein, Melanie of Just another Bump in the Beltway tracks the news of the day, and her dislike for Bush is pretty apparent. For instance, she recently blogged on Bush's statement on a settlement on Mars, commenting,

Bush might as well propose peace on earth, a chicken in every pot and universal spiritual enlightenment. Along with the immigration proposal earlier this week, this is nothing more than hot air. The level of cynicism that this betrays on the part of Team Rove is pretty spectacular. Just because Bush can form the words "base on the moon" in his mouth doesn't make him JFK.

Actually, it's Melanie who strikes me as cynical, considering that she immediately chalks this proposal up to hot air, and that she rarely has a single good thing to say about Bush. (In fact, I've never seen a positive statement about Bush from her, but it's possible that I missed it.)

The parallels between liberals' contempt for Bush and conservatives' contempt for Clinton are striking... it seems that the combination of their respective policy initiatives together with their own personalities really grate on the political opposition. Of course, I think Clinton was deserving of much of the scorn he received, and Bush isn't, but that's another story :-) It's still interesting how they seem to inspire similar reactions.