Over on the Volokh Conspiracy, law prof Oren Kerr responds to ACLU accusations that the Justice Department has lied about the Patriot Act. Has anyone else noticed that factual mistakes are now called “lies” by the Left, and by many Democrats. It cannot be that they have forgotten the commonplace distinction between making a mistake and lying. More likely, this is their reaction to the widespread lies–not mistakes–of the Clinton administration. But yet another currency in our moral language is being

debased in pursuit of left-wing partisan retribution.

BTW, no one ever accused Bill Clinton of lying about the existence of

intelligence showing an Iraqi aspirin factory to be a chemical weapons

plant. Everyone assumed he was acting on real intelligence that turned

out to be mistaken. The accusation was he bombed what he THOUGHT was a

chemical weapons plant to distract attention from the Grand Jury.