@17: This is the kind of "I want you to be a hypocrite because maybe that means I'm right" parsing I'm worried misses the point in this debate. The problem actually isn't just that people are lying. It's that people are believing them. #14 sorta begins to explain this, I'll explain further.

I'd prefer if no one chose to lie, but I know that's not realistic. I also don't really think it's a good idea to start censoring people we think are lying. But when someone says something, we need to have a broader life experience and appreciation of the context, and bring this to bear to evaluate their claims. We also have to consider their motivations.

When we don't, we end up in a situation - on both sides - where what people are doing would make some sense if what they've been told was actually true; but isn't because what they've been told simply isn't reality.

Let's consider the Iraq war example in detail, as Republican leaders have conducted both this fight and that one in the exact same way. (Which also makes sense: we often rely on methods we've used in the past with success.) A lot of claims - many of which later turned out to be lies or inaccurate - were used to justify that war. I'll admit I was "duped" by some of them, choosing to trust experts on claims I had no qualified ways to reasonably evaluate.

But I was unsure about going to war because I consider war to be a serious enough action - just like trying to intimidate a member of Congress - that I wanted to make sure I understood the issue before I simply went ahead and supported it.

For instance, a central claim justifying the war was that of nuclear weapons development. We were told Saddam was developing nuclear weapons. But we also should know that Iraq at the time had been subject to economic sanctions for years, and as such, is likely to be a fairly poor country, as it was. Nuclear weapons are incredibly expensive, both to build but also to develop and to train people to develop. Additionally, even if a country did pull it off - some poorer countries have, such as India and Pakistan - it would still be difficult to deliver them to American targets. In this context, it makes less sense that Saddam's nuclear weapons would be developed and that they could be used against us. Furthermore, UN inspections experts seemed to support - or at least not dismiss - this conclusion. I'm not saying I could say for certain that the claim was "wrong," just that I didn't know for sure, now had legitimate reason to suspect deception, and wasn't about to justify a war simply on this basis.

Other claims proved equally shaky with a cursory glance. A large part of the original war rationale was that Saddam somehow played a role in 9/11. This seemed unlikely, given that Saddam's Iraq was relatively secular; a necessity arising because of both its religiously divided population and its long standing difficulties with neighboring Iran. This did not mean that Iraq didn't have ties to al-Qaeda, but that I needed to know more about what those ties were before I was able to trust that they were accurate and support an action as serious as a war.

On top of all this, I knew what the Administration had in mind. I was aware of their ideas related to the conservative think tank PNAC; I knew that the war, even without all the claims they were making, fit into their geopolitical worldview about American power. This told me that they would likely push for war even if they knew nothing about nuclear weapons or ties to 9/11 - and thus gave more reason to hold off on getting behind the war effort.

This same kind of reasoning could be done with the claims around health reform. At the very least, before throwing a rock into a congressional office, or calling in with death threats, one could read the entire bill. Sure, it's a complicated 2000 pages, but when you're about to undertake an action as serious as Congressional intimidation, it seems reasonable to make sure this action is justified in the larger context of reality.

So, in short, it's not the lying itself that's the whole problem (though it certainly doesn't help). It's the fact that too many are easily persuaded by the lies, and lack sufficient contextual information to evaluate them. They're jumping before they look; which, if I didn't look, would make total sense to me too.

I don't look before I jump because I'm so much smarter and more rational than them. I too often have jumped before I looked. We all do. But what's important is that we try hard to learn from those experiences, as we often reflect on them with regret and realized they were very stupid things to do.