"What if the president lied to us?" (Salon)

[BlueCheese]

34. The article takes as given that Obama has said false things and gives two choices.

Either Obama is lying, or he is dangerously uninformed and incompetent.

My guess is if you were to ask Obama or various administration officials themselves, they would claim they haven't said anything false, mostly because they've defined terms in ways that are different than how most people see them. Is that lying? You could certainly argue it is, but they might genuinely think that it's not.

When Obama says the NSA isn't "abusing", he probably means intentionally looking at data they shouldn't look at, according to their rules, thus excluding the 2700+ times they unintentionally did so. (Of course, I think abuse starts when they store our data in the first place, well before any looking takes place.)

When he says we don't have a "domestic spying program", he probably means something like monitoring the calls and Internet activity of many or even most Americans. Things like keeping the communications of Americans that were "incidentally" caught up in targeting foreigners don't count in this regard.

I'm not sure what he meant by saying the FISA court is "transparent". This, while clearly erroneous, is in a category of falsehood that is so obvious that it's almost less dangerous, since the audience can tell on their own that it's false. The first two items are much more dangerous, because the audience can't tell on its own that they are being deceived.