As might have been predicted, the Obama attends radical Muslim school story I wrote about in The Telegraph recently has been followed by still more silly nonstories that are picked up by the mainstream media and presented as real issues when in fact they are just more examples of spin, half-truth and outright lies of the type that has made "swift boating" a new verb in the American political vocabulary.

Which raises a new question: When a story is a lie and outright false, why is the media so reluctant to use the words "false" and "lie"?

Case in point: The much-ballyhooed story that Nancy Pelosi has supposedly requested a luxurious military jet to fly her back and forth to her home district in San Francisco. 

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