Politicians accused of lying are much in the news these days.

On opening day of the B.C. legislature’s fall session, NDP leader Carole James intentionally breached the rules of parliamentary decorum by using the ‘L’ word to describe Premier Gordon Campbell’s studied ignorance of the province’s declining financial situation during the spring election campaign. In a clearly rehearsed set piece, she withdrew the comment almost before Speaker Bill Barisoff had time to demand it, thus fixing it in the Hansard record.

Did Campbell lie about the deficit? No. He did what U.S. President Ronald Reagan did regarding a secret scheme to fund Nicaraguan rebels via Iran: he maintained a “plausible deniability” of the facts.

This nasty business took a new turn in the U.S. last week. President Barack Obama was making a rare speech to both Houses on health care, when South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson shouted “you lie.” Obama was moved to respond on the spot, saying “that’s not true.”

What did Wilson say Obama lied about? Chances are, if you heard about this dustup at all, your media source didn’t bother to mention that. Obama claimed his public health-care plan would not extend to those in the country illegally.

This is a huge, unsolved problem for the U.S. There’s a long history of illegal aliens getting state drivers’ licences that they then use to gain other official documents. Terrorists do this.

Those 45 million U.S. residents everyone talks about who don’t have health insurance, how many of those are illegally in the country? No one really knows, but it’s likely a majority. That would be getting close to the entire (official) population of Canada. Obama must know all this. Ergo, he may well have lied.

Al Franken made the transition from Saturday Night Live to the U.S. Senate with a book called Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. “Fair and balanced” is of course a mocking reference to the slogan of Fox News, where you can see the bulging necks of anti-Obama shock troops Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

To the ongoing horror of the “mainstream media” in the U.S., Fox routinely crushes CNN and the rest in the news ratings. MSNBC, the struggling web-television hybrid network, has resorted to a full-on Democrat megaphone to fight back, with about the same success that Franken’s Air America radio show enjoyed against talk radio king Rush Limbaugh.

A couple of readers have suggested Black Press chose me as provincial affairs columnist five years ago because they wanted to emulate the success of Fox News. One wag dubbed me “Mark Steyn’s mini-me.” Now I don’t actually rant about immigration, or fawn over Stephen Harper, but I do occasionally refer to the fact that the NDP hasn’t had a new idea in 30 years. (If you don’t think that’s a fact, please advise me what their new idea was.)

I also believe, after first-hand research, that independent power development is generally a good thing. To some this makes me a “pirate power publicist” who is somehow paid to lie to you.

B.C.’s mainstream media are currently having one of their own eerily unanimous moments of horror, after Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid responded to cuts in school sports funding as follows: “Maybe people will be doing more walking or dancing or playing in parks.”

MacDiarmid is a doctor. Her statement is perfectly sensible.

This incident proves the modern political axiom that a “gaffe” occurs when a politician inadvertently blurts out the truth.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press and BCLocalnews.com.

tfletcher@blackpress.ca