While I do believe that many in the Bush administration have outright lied to the American public (and the world), I don't know that Bush himself actually lies.
In a recent essay, "Bush Lying?", Noam Chomskey writes:
Lying requires a certain competence: at least, it requires an understanding of the difference between truth and falsehood. When a 3-year old tells you an obvious falsehood, it isn't really fair to call it a lie. The same was true of the huge whoppers that Reagan came out with when he got out of the control of his handlers. The poor soul probably had no idea. With Bush, I suspect it is more or less the same. There is a literature of "exposures" (Woodward, etc.), which is taken seriously, but I don't frankly understand why. Among the people he is interviewing, some have the competence to lie, and it only makes sense to suppose that they are doing so; why should they tell him the truth? As for the others, it doesn't really matter what they tell him. The same is true of people who are deeply immersed in some religious cult, like the Washington neocon intellectuals. It is hard to know whether they have the competence to lie, just as it's hard to know for someone who has a direct line to some divinity.
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