Lying about Who’s Lying at the NY Times -- Obama "Misspoke"

The New York Times recently published an editorial about all the now-obvious lying Obama engaged in to secure passage of the health law enacted solely by Democrats.  The NY Times says Obama “misspoke”.  The word “misspoke” means, at least to those not engaged in writing and publishing for a living, a mistake, a mistaken notion of what should have been said.  Obama, however, “misspoke” often, as often as he could to anyone who would listen, with the exact same unequivocal statements about Obamacare such as “If you like your existing health care plan, you can keep it.  Period.” – words we now know the Democrats knew were lies all along.   

Responding to criticism of the editorial’s using the term “misspoke”, the NY Times’ editorial page editor, one Andrew Rosenthal, defended the word by asserting “We have a high threshold for [saying] whether someone lied.”

This statement turns out to be a big, bald-faced lie, as Seth Mandel documents (link) in a post at Commentary online.  Not many years ago the NY Times repeatedly and explicitly called President George Bush a liar when disagreeing with him over policy.  Thus, when a Republican was president the NY Times was free and loose with the “liar” accusation, but now with a Democrat in office the NY Times can’t even use the word when evidence clearly shows that Obama and his aides discussed the ongoing need to lie as Obama was lying.  Ironic it is, the NY Times lying about its standard for calling someone a liar.   

I bother now to write this post not to document evidence of the extreme liberal bias at the NY Times, an unnecessary effort since examples are legion.  Rather, I write to express a certain sadness from the reminder that once-great institutions often corrode from the inside when no adults are left who know right from wrong, or good from bad.  We know now that the New York Times was long this way (its cover up of Stalin’s massacres by its reporter Walter Duranty [link] quickly comes to mind), and before the explosion of alternative sources to more readily grasp what is true and what is not, we just didn’t know different, or better.

Update 11/15/2013:  The NY Times by many accounts has abandoned the ridiculous "misspoke" terminology, and has adopted now the term "incorrect promise".  I am not making this up.  Honestly.