Eric Alterman on Bush admitting he lies to get the press off his back (which shouldn’t be all that difficult, considering their usual position is on their knees):

But because Bush couldn’t be bothered to pretend this time, he created a conundrum for much of the media. The press claims all kinds of special privileges for itself–legal, financial and ethical–based almost exclusively on its constitutionally protected role as the watchdog of the rulers for the ruled. Democratic theory requires that citizens choose their leaders on the basis of true information about their preferences and performances, and the very raison d’être of the political press is to provide it. But if those leaders are free to lie–and the press plays along with those lies–then democracy itself is undermined. How many members of Bush’s base, one wonders, roused themselves to run to the polls on November 7 because, well, “say what you will about Bush, at least he promised to stick by that Rumsfeld fellow.” A day later their democratic decisions would seem a cruel joke.

What’s more, now that Bush has come out and all but said, “I lie because I feel like it,” nothing he says can be taken on faith. Some will no doubt resist this. Having been deprived of the “It’s not a lie if the liar believes his own lie” argument that had previously proven so popular, This Week’s George Will excused Bush on the grounds of his apparent imbecility. “The English language is not always the President’s friend,” Will explained, as if Bush had been reared speaking Sanskrit. But this dog is not likely to remain in the media’s hunting party for long. Bush’s revealed contempt–both for the truth and for the reporters whose job it is to find it–has created a kind of existential crisis for reporters and their bosses: “If the President is willing to call himself a liar, how can we go on pretending it isn’t so?” And yet, if they remain unfree to call the President a liar, well… you get the point.

So far, nobody in the MSM really has a handle on the issue. The Washington Post, to its credit, ran five separate news stories that touched on the lie–two online and three in the paper. (This was originally misreported in the liberal blogosphere, which charged the paper with changing the wording of its stories to protect the President from his lie. In fact, the Post merely printed multiple stories with differing descriptions of the lie, with no subsequent changes in any of them.) All were reasonably straightforward, deploying phrases like “appeared to mislead,” which is as close as the paper’s editors can bring themselves to calling a lie a lie. Unfortunately, the only story devoted exclusively to the lie itself was by Howard Kurtz, who could think only to ask if Bush’s lie about Rumsfeld was “on par with President Bill Clinton’s hair-splitting defense in the Monica S. Lewinsky investigation that ‘it all depends on what the definition of is is.’” The New York Times barely touched on the question–treating the decision to replace Rumsfeld as a typical Washington soap opera. Save for the occasional op-ed, the issue soon disappeared under an avalanche of stories about Nasty Nancy Pelosi (the new Wicked Witch of the West in Morton Kondracke’s phrasing) and “maverick” John McCain, the MSM’s President-in-Waiting. We were back to business as usual in George Bush’s America.