Frank Rich: Dick Cheney's "tells"

tell n. in poker, a behavior or habit that gives other players information about the quality of a player's hand.

Frank Rich has identified two ways to spot when Dick Cheney is getting ready to lie to you (and no, one of them isn't "his lips start moving"):

As we saw on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, these days he helpfully signals when he's about to lie. One dead giveaway is the word context, as in "the context in which I made that statement last year." The vice president invoked "context" to try to explain away both his bogus predictions: that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the insurgency (some 15 months ago) was in its "last throes."

The other instant tip-off to a Cheney lie is any variation on the phrase "I haven't read the story." He told Tim Russert he hadn't read The Washington Post's front-page report that the bin Laden trail had gone "stone cold" or the new Senate Intelligence Committee report(PDF) contradicting the White House's prewar hype about nonexistent links between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Nor had he read a Times front-page article about his declining clout. Or the finding by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war that there was "no evidence of resumed nuclear activities" in Iraq. "I haven't looked at it; I'd have to go back and look at it again," he said, however nonsensically.

These verbal tics are so consistent that they amount to truth in packaging - albeit the packaging of evasions and falsehoods.

In the rest of the essay, he rates Cheney's lying form next to that of Condi and the ever-competitive Bush himself.

Rich's article is going onto the Readings list in the sidebar.

(Photo credit to Wikipedia.)