Whatever you think of Scott McClellan, one thing is clear: he's tough.

After days of attacks by Busheviks, McClellan went directly into the lion's den to battle Bill O'Reilly on his home court. And even O'Reilly admitted McClellan held his own.

So now that the dust is settling, what's the bottom line? Did McClellan provide any evidence that Bush committed statutory crimes and/or impeachable offenses?

The broadest charge against Bush is that he lied to Congress and the American people to win support for invading Iraq even though Iraq never attacked us or even threatened us.

McClellan comes close to endorsing that charge, but refuses to cross the line.

As I've detailed in this book, the campaign mentality at times led the president and his chief advisers to spin, hide, shade and exaggerate the truth, obscuring nuances and ignoring the caveats that should have accompanied their arguments. Rather than choosing to be forthright and candid, they chose to sell the war, and in so doing they did a disservice to the American people and to our democracy. However, this is not the same as saying they deliberately misled and lied.

Elsewhere McClellan makes the same point:

An even more fundamental problem was the way his advisers decided to pursue a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people. It was all part of the way the White House operated and Washington functioned, and no one seemed to see any problem with using such an approach on an issue as grave as war. A pro-war campaign might have been more acceptable had it been accompanied by a high level of candor and honesty, but it was not.

McClellan is clear that the war was sold to the American people through a political propaganda campaign. But when does propaganda cross the line that separates truth from lies?

For me, that line is crossed when a someone knows the truth but tells a different story to avoid the adverse consequences of telling the truth. So three conditions must be present: (1) knowing the truth, (2) saying something different from the truth, and (3) having an ulterior motive for not telling the truth.

We know the truth: Saddam had no WMD's in 2002. (A few rightwing dead-enders reject that conclusion and insist Saddam shipped them to Syria just before we invaded, but no one in the Bush administration says that.) What we don't know is whether Bush knew the truth.

O'Reilly pressed McClellan hard on this precise point: did Bush believe Iraq had WMD's? For O'Reilly, if Bush believed what he said, he couldn't have been lying according to the first test. And when McClellan said yes, O'Reilly pronounced Bush innocent.

But McClellan refused to accept O'Reilly's exoneration of Bush. According to McClellan, Bush also knew there were facts that contradicted his belief, but he refused to share those facts with the American people. In McClellan's view, Bush failed to act with "candor and honesty." In McClellan's view, Bush crossed a line by withholding key facts while exaggerating unproved allegations, and should be judged accordingly.

But what judgment does McClellan propose? Should we simply consider him "uncandid" and "dishonest," and frown in his presence? Or should he be held accountability somehow?

Obviously McClellan does not consider "political propaganda" to be an impeachable offfense; by his own admission, it was the heart and soul of what he and the White House did every single day. (He wrote his book to try to reduce the role of raw politics in governing.) 

But there has to be a point where "political propaganda" becomes so distant from the truth that it becomes a lie that requires accountability. If not, then Presidents and their aides can tell every manner of lie with full impunity.

In many ways, the contemporary Republican Party was formed out of an adamant rejection of "moral relativism." In foreign policy, they rejected any "moral equivalence" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, even though both were military empires that abused the rights of smaller countries that were deemed essential to their empires. And in domestic policy, they insisted on "personal responsibility" in opposition to loose morals, which they wrongly called "liberal."

And it was "loose morals" that drove them to their irrational hatred of Bill Clinton. Richard Mellon Scaife funded the "Arkansas Project" to find evidence of Clinton's "loose morals" and finally struck paydirt with Paula Jones, who filed a lawsuit accusing Clinton of sexual harassment.

And it was a very short trip from objectionable "loose morals" to actionable lying. Orrin Hatch decided to impeach Bill Clinton after Clinton went on TV and declared, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." According to many observers of southern sexual mores - and to the judge who presided over Clinton's grand jury testimony - Clinton wasn't lying because Clinton didn't give Lewinsky any sexual pleasure, he only took it. But for Hatch, Newt Gingrich, and the entire Republican Party, Clinton's "spin" crossed the line between truth and lies.

On Iraq, George Bush never said Saddam Hussein actually had a nuclear bomb. But he insisted Saddam had the scientists and possibly the materials (uranium from Niger) needed to build a bomb. Thus he deliberately created the impression that Saddam probably had a bomb. And since Saddam hated the U.S., he would probably find a way to use it against the U.S., either directly or through an alliance with Al Qaeda.

Ultimately, Bush's argument for war rested on the probability that Saddam would attack the U.S. with WMD's. If the probability was low, there was little reason for the U.S. to attack him. If the probability was high, then there was good reason to do so.

According to McClellan, Bush knew the probability of Saddam attacking the U.S. with WMD's was acceptably low. (Colin Powell and Condi Rice actually said so months before 9/11.) But Bush told Congress and the American people something different - that the probability was unacceptably high. And according to McClellan, Bush knowingly failed to tell the whole truth and told instead a Big Non-truth for an ulterior reason: because he wanted to "democratize" the Middle East. According to McClellan, if the American people knew Bush's real reason for invading Iraq, they would not have accepted it. So Bush had to launch a propaganda campaign to accomplish his goal.

And therefore by the three-part test I outlined above, Bush lied.

McClellan insists he wants his book to help fix Washington. If he's serious, he should start by drawing a line between acceptable "spin" and unacceptable - and actionable - lies.

I've drawn my line - will McClellan draw his?