As a principle, I try to be truthful. I'm willing to make an exception for unreasonable people. I guess I'd lie to the Nazis about the people I was hiding from them. There have been a couple of occasions when I lied to my mother, because if I'd told her the truth she'd just have caused a fuss and made things worse. But I try to avoid it.
I don't believe in hiding unpleasant truths from children. (They can adjust more quickly than we often think!) There's no use in telling kids that crime doesn't pay when it sometimes does. That's putting didacticism ahead of truth.
Specious half-truths bother me. Like when people insist that the Iraq invasion wasn't Hillary Clinton's fault. It's true that the White House took the lead, and might well have got their way anyhow, but Mrs. Clinton served as a useful enabler. People will say that she was just voting to provide the option, which wasn't supposed to be used until the United Nations agreed. I say, everyone knew that the President would interpret a yes vote as a green light for invasion and any accompanying qualifications were just "face-saving." Mrs. Clinton couldn't have been naive enough to think otherwise, and I think she was voting yes simply to avoid looking "soft." (Typical enabler!)
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