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Credibility Gap
The Bush administration has perfected the art of being dishonest without lying. Unfortunately, a compliant press (and public) have allowed them to get away with it.

Writing in the March 29 issue of Newsweek, Jonathan Alter described Democrats as "over the top" in their constant references to the president's dishonesty. "Because Bush & Co. were as shocked as anyone at the absence of WMD" in Iraq, he says, "that's more in the category of grotesque hype than outright lie." For a real "example of dishonesty and, yes, corruption at high levels" we need to look to Medicare, where Chief Actuary Rick Foster calculated that the bill would cost over $150 billion more than the administration was claiming and was kept silent only through the threat that he'd be fired if he released his work to the Congress.
In a sense, Alter's right. The administration learned the true cost of the bill, realized that the truth was politically inconvenient, and decided to cover it up and continue to feed the public and the Congress information it knew to be false. That is a lie.

On Iraq, the administration took a different tack. On the subject of links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, for example, the White House operated largely by omission. True, but incomplete, statements were made, calculated to instill a belief in the public that the Iraqi government was a sponsor of the Ansar al-Islam terrorist organization when there was not, in fact, any evidence that this was true. This was a clever strategy, in its way. By why is leadership by deception any less worthy of condemnation for the fact that the deception was cleverly performed? ...