What is it with left-wing zealots and the word "lie". It really gets under my skin. For liberals, it seems, conservatives never make mistakes. Oh no. Conservatives aren't, you know, actually human. And so whenever a conservative makes a statement that turns out to be wrong, it isn't that he was mistaken, it is that he lied.

Al Franken has made this into a mini-career with books like "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". Sure, other zealots on the left like him will eat that stuff up. But is it convincing? To me, it just makes ugly stereotypes of the left ring that much more true. The left certainly has no monopoly on hypocrisy. The right is full of nuts and zealots on its own.  Many charactertures of the right are actually true. I have actually met rich Republicans who pretty much believe that the poor should be liquidated (and I had this conversation in a hot tub in Grand Cayman with people who have never had to struggle or work hard for anything mind you).

But to me, the left's hypocrisy is more disturbing. And I'll tell you why: The left is the one that believes that the government is the solution to all of life's problems. Name a social problem and the left's solution is to have the government solve it. And why not? Because they would love to run the government because they are, after all, more civilized. Where the right generally wants the government to leave them the hell alone, the left wants the government to be all encompassing. A benevolent parental figure. And that's the problem.

The left's view of itself is that liberalism is simply the more civilized way to approach life. Combine that with a healthy dose of righteousness and the power of the government and you have a recipe for authoritarianism.  Anyone who's been a student at a major university in the past decade knows what I'm talking about.  It is on universities that we get a taste of what would happen if the liberals ran the world.  You see, because liberals are more civilized, or more to the point, because conservatives are a bunch of evil, selfish bastards, they feel the need to play referee in the game of life. But they're not an impartial one because they don't recognize that other ideas may deserve equal time with theirs.

The net result is that all conservative actions are viewed by liberals under the most cynical of lenses.  Conservatives who don't support affirmative action on campus are against it not because they believe it is morally wrong to favor people based on their skin pigment but because they're a bunch of racists. Conservatives who favor military action in Iraq are not in favor because they understand what is a stake and concluded this is the right course of action, they favor it because they're war mongers or at best, duped by "The Bush Clan". And when a conservative statement turns out to be wrong, it's a lie.

Let me give you some examples:

When Clinton bombed a civilian Aspirin factory in Sudan during the height of the Monica Lewinski nonsense, his claim that it was a chemical weapons lab wasn't a lie. It was a simple mistake based on faulty intelligence.  Even though the timing of the whole thing was incredibly suspect and the target odious, that was pretty much the end of that.

However...

When Bush follows the same intelligence that Clinton did and assumes Iraq has WMD and calls for military force to remove Saddam for failing to comply with UN resolutions and said WMD are not instantly found (despite Iraq being a huge country) the result is loud cries that Bush "lied" about the WMD.  Clinton was in error about WMD when he attacked Iraq in 1998 but Bush lied. Huh?

It is a symptom of a broader problem. Clinton must have simply made a mistake because he's a liberal and liberals are civilized people.  Bush couldn't have made a mistake because he's a conservative barbarian and is only capable of lying.

Like I said, conservatives can be zealots too full of nasty habits. But there's a big difference -- conservatives aren't the ones hoping that the government gets to be a huge, all encompassing thing with the power to civilize society by force. Conservatives don't view the government as "Mom". Hence, the liberal's tendency for selective tolerance should be a warning to those who believe that in an ideal world, the government would be the one solving life's problems rather than individuals solving them for themselves, their families and their communities.