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California Insider fact checks Bill Clinton campaigning for Gray Davis. Infinitely charitable, Weintraub gives every benefit of the doubt to Clinton, saying merely that Clinton's "history was a little on the weak side", that Clinton left some things out, and that one of his arguments "doesn't apply". But what we know about Clinton and his associates is that this stuff is not accidental, it's premeditated. And so by being "charitable" Weintraub actually falsifies the story -- i.e. gets the story wrong. The straight "just that facts" reporting in the case of Clinton campaigning for Davis is another instance of "there he goes again" -- there he goes with plain as day duplicity, a mucking up of the public discourse with "big lie" fabrications of the facts of California constitutional law, and a laughably false picture of the governor making hard decisions in the pre-recall world. Of course, this is a well burried lie because it insinuates that Gray Davis did make such hard decisions prior to the recall, when in fact the very reason he's being recalled it that he refused to make the hard decisions the state so desperately required.

Reporters spend so much time around politicians that they come to accept deception and duplicity as something folks in polite company don't call attention to -- putting light on such a thing is a social mistake sort of like a young child pointing out that grandma's makeup isn't put on right, or some parts of her underclothes are exposed. You've supposed to just ignore it and pretend its not there, or use some sort of euphemism like "spin" to pretend that it's something other than what it really is -- the big lie, the poluting of the public discourse. The greatness of H.L. Mencken -- and the great joy his political writing gives -- comes in part from liberty Mencken allows himself to be the growup intelligently revealing the truth all around him that any child can see, but that the cowering "get along to go along" adults pretend doesn't exist. And the truth Mencken most often exposes is that the moral high road of the politician was almost always a means for the politician to serve up the big lie in a way most appealing to the gullible and the wishful thinking -- which 9 times out of 10 included the deep-down hopelessly idealistic and agenda driven reporter, who was cynical only on the surface.

Well, my rant has taken me a bit away from where I began, and I'm at a point where it has little to do with California Insider, who I'm convinced is just a nice guy who doesn't want to go beyond were the facts very strickly allow him to go. All I'm suggesting is that these things prevent him from really telling the truth when he tells the story of Clinton, Davis and the Clinton campaign against the recall.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan provides a good example of Clinton doing what he constantly does -- intentionally using the Big Lie for political gain:

CLINTON LIES - SHOCK HORROR: Will Saletan has another example of something Maureen Dowd has also mentioned in the past - that the Bush administration tried to increase the levels of arsenic in the drinking water. Who repeated that hoary old canard? None other than former president Bill Clinton at the Iowa State Fair, saying that the Republicans "tried to put more arsenic in the water." He knows that it was his administration that delayed new, tighter arsenic standards for eight years, and that all the incoming Bush administration did was to review the last-minute directives from the Clinton White House, before enforcing a standard that was stricter than was the case for all of the Clinton administration. But, hey, who's listening any more to that incorrigible old rogue? The blogosphere, that's who.