I don't know what it is, but it isn't "Lying"

Ok, Joe Wilson shouldn't have said "You Lie" during the ceremonial reading from The Teleprompter.
I don't know what he should've said, but there's a time and place for interrupting people, and during joint sessions of Congress isn't it.

There. That's out of the way.

So, how should someone respond when an elected official stands up in front of the nation and says things that just aren't so?
Let's get real here. Is there anyone out there, anyone at all, who believes that our government can take over 1/6th of the economy and have it be "deficit neutral" ? We're ELEVEN TRILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT, fer heaven's sake, and every program they've ever started was supposed to be deficit neutral.
Could our government take over a car wash and have it be deficit neutral, with all the unions, rent-seekers, protectionists, subsidies, and other inevitable burdens of a government-run enterprise?
Does anyone believe that whatever passes for healthcare will cost only $900 billion over ten years?
Does anyone believe that "most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse" ?

Ok, how about "there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don't materialize" ??
If anyone actually enforces a provision that requires Washington to enact spending cuts equaling the healthcare savings that don't materialize, I'll give you 30 minutes to draw a crowd and then kiss your rear end on the courthouse steps. Unless, of course, they just print new money to pay for everything.

You see, we've already been promised that all new legislation will be posted on the internet for 5 days for citizen review prior to votes. We've been promised the most transparent administration ever. We were promised that Joe Biden (Nobody Messes With Joe !!) would ensure that there would be no misappropriated stimulus. (Yes, I'm aware that the phrase "misappropriated stimulus" is redundant.)

But that was then, this is now. Back to the healthcare speech.... Despite all this, the insurance companies and their allies don't like this idea. They argue that these private companies can't fairly compete with the government. And they'd be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won't be. I've insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.

Does anyone out there believe that a government program will be self-sufficient?

(Update from 9-14-09, 7:30 a.m. You can go to The Wall Street Journal for a list of other ummm.... misrepresentations..... in the President's speech.)

Back before the November election, I noticed that Hillary was wildly spouting anything she felt the crowd would like. I thought she was lying when she produced her whoppers about running across runways because of Bosnian sniper fire. She wasn't lying. I don't know what she was doing, but it wasn't lying.

We need a new name for what she did (along with Obama and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Reagan, etc.) when producing inaccurate words for political consumption.

Why do they do it? Well, how many falsehoods would you be willing to lay out on the table for a chance to control half the economy?
Our politicians simply have to lie. They have so many conflicting constituencies, so many opportunities to dip their hands into the till for their supporters, so many ridiculous notions to affirm, that they need to be held to a lower standard than say, car salesmen.

This is why we need smaller government. It's a ridiculous situation when these people's words actually matter.

Here's some Johnny Lang: