It’s worth reading Josh Marshall’s assessment of “Washington’s newfound appreciation of the ‘subtleties’ of truth-telling” with regard to Iraq’s apparent non-arsenal of non-weapons of non-mass destruction.

Along the way, he quotes Bill Keller who says “What the Bush administration did was gild the lily”. The phrase is corrupted from from Shakespeare (can’t remember what play), where the original line is “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily…” This makes more sense as an image. But as I think Mark Kleiman was arguing a while ago, this may be another one of those cases where colloquial misquotation improves on the original.