corrente

And high time, too. Andrew Greely of the Chicago Sun-Times writes:

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief (director of communications, in the current parlance), once said that if you are going to lie, you should tell a big lie. That may be good advice, but the question remains: What happens when people begin to doubt the big lie? Herr Goebbels never lived to find out. Some members of the Bush administration may be in the process of discovering that, given time, the big lie turns on itself.

The president has insisted that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, a continuation of the administration's effort to link Iraq to the attack on the World Trade Center. While almost three-quarters of the public believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attack, the polls after the president's recent speech show that less than half believe that Iraq is the ''central front'' of the war on terrorism. Moreover, the majority believe that the war has increased the risk of terrorism. A shift is occurring in the middle, which is neither clearly pro-Bush nor clearly anti-Bush. The big lie is coming apart.

There is not and never has been any evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attack. None. The implication of such involvement was an attempt to deceive, a successful attempt at the big lie.

Now comes the "balanced" part.

I'm not sure that the president knows it is a lie, however.

The hidden assumption here being that aWol actually knows what a lie is. It could be, that for him, it is sufficient for him to believe something for it to be true ("faith-based intelligence").

Of course, that would make him at best deeply narcissistic, and at worst a sociopath... But then, news is suppposed to be new, isn't it....