President Bush has adopted a weird new rhetorical lying tactic in his speeches — claiming to have been having conversations with Kerry. He’s said this a few times now in different speeches. Consider yesterday, in Holland, Michigan:
Taxes are an issue in this campaign. I’m running against a fellow who’s promised at least $2 trillion in new money so far. And we haven’t even gotten in the stretch run yet. So I said to him the other day, well, how are you going to pay for them? And he said, that’s easy, just tax the rich.
Kerry and Bush haven’t had any such conversation, of course. I don’t know which possibility is worse: that Bush feels that he can lie so brazenly, or that he might actually believe that he’s having conversations with Kerry.