This is preposterous. Of course politicians lie. That's what we pay them for.

Only a gang of out-and-out mountebanks could be so drunk on their own duplicity as to outlaw any mention of the very practice in which most of them are habitually, instinctively, almost continually engaged.

Perhaps the delusion is catching. Or how else to explain the unabated storm of outrage at the Prime Minister's refusal to admit to having lied about the GST? It isn't as if the matter were in any doubt. Everyone knows he lied.

Why is it necessary to hear him say so? Why, except in the service of another, bigger lie: that any of us should ever have believed him.

This is the signal achievement of the Liberals in office: not to have lied, time and time again, and got away with it, but to have corrupted our very notion of what is true, that falsehood might be measured against.

Until lately, until last week in fact, the Prime Minister had maintained that he had never said the Liberals would abolish the GST: that the most he had ever said was in line with the promise contained in the famous Red Book, namely that a Liberal government would "replace" the tax. This is a lie within a lie. By now it is established fact that as a candidate Jean Chretien said, not once but repeatedly, that he would abolish the tax if elected. But he would be no closer to the truth had he stuck to what was in the Red Book, since it is as much a lie to suggest that the Red Book promise has been fulfilled. The tax has not been replaced. It has not even been harmonized, except in three provinces, in such a way as to make it more complex and confusing than before.

Now, after the sensation over his appearance before a CBC "Town Hall" -- itself a hearty exercise in misrepresentation -- Chretien has retreated roughly to the position adopted by Paul Martin last spring, which is to acknowledge that the government has not replaced the tax, but that it was only an "honest mistake" to have promised it would. This is a third lie. No serious person believes that the Liberals ever intended doing anything but what they have done. A broken promise is one thing. A promise that could not but have been broken is another.

The party, while in opposition, was not ignorant of the many years of study and debate that went into reform of the old federal sales tax, which applied only to manufacturers. It knew that every alternative to the GST had already been canvassed, and found inferior. So when the Commons Finance committee, two years after the Liberals were elected, came to precisely the same conclusion, it could not have been a surprise to anyone, least of all the government. There was no "honest †mistake." The promise to replace the tax was a deliberate lie.

And, what is more, everyone knew it was a lie at the time. This is what happens when the press gets too caught up in reporting on politics as a game: the pith of the matter tends to get mislaid. It was just too much work to go into the obvious impossibility of the Liberal promise. Everyone was having much too much fun dwelling on the blunders of the Conservative campaign, as compared to the famously well-oiled Liberal machine.

That remained the storyline through most of the first three years of Liberal government. The volley of bile at the Prime Minister's relatively innocuous bit of historical revisionism may reflect the press's growing unease at its complicity in the Grits' electoral fraud; more likely, it is born of growing despair that the next election was shaping up to be a walk, and as such, devoid of dramatic possibilities.

This isn't only to indict the press. Perhaps there were some Canadians who genuinely believed that the Liberals could or would simply abolish the GST, and forgo the $18-billion in revenue it brings in every year. Perhaps there were some more who thought the party had any intention of "replacing" the tax with something other than itself.

But much the majority, I suggest, were those who, somewhere inside themselves, knew it was a lie. They wanted to be seduced, wanted to be told there were no hard choices or unpleasant realities, knowing that, in the harsh light of the morning after, they could always indulge in the bitter pleasures of recrimination.