Real Time with Bill Maher returned to HBO live last night, and one of the panelists was Christopher Hitchens. Holy cow, has there ever been a more dishonest "pundit?" I don't watch many talking head shows, but if all of the war-backers are like this, their situation is a lot worse than I thought.

When Maher said that only 1% of Brits now believe the war in Iraq was a good idea, Hitchens proudly proclaimed that segment of the population to include him, and that it was smarter than everyone else, including the studio audience, whom he flipped off and cursed at. When Swift-Boating came up, Hitchens instantly said that "MoveOn.org compared George W. Bush to Hitler."

Of course, Hitchens knows that he's lying - either that, or he's so incompetent as an observer that he shouldn't even be watching TV, much less appearing on it. MoveOn ran a contest that let people make their own TV-style ads in 2004, and two of the thousands of user-submitted entries had Hitler references. MoveOn did not make the commercials, MoveOn did not endorse them, and MoveOn both disqualified them and removed them from its servers when their Hitler images were called to the group's attention. To say that MoveOn "compared" Bush to Hitler is like saying that YouTube creates the movies on its site. Hitchens knows this is a lie.

Similarly, he not only insisted that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with Al Qaeda, he called anyone who disagreed with him stupid. Maher said that Saddam was in total control of Iraq and wasn't letting the Al Qaeda people in, so Hitchens retorted that Al Zarqawi had been in northern Iraq before 9/11 and before the invasion, so Saddam must have been cooperating with him and supporting him.

Of course, Hitchens knows this to be a lie as well - Zarqawi was in the northern part of Iraq, in or near the nearly-autonomous Kurdish region that Hussein did not control. Not only do we know this, we also know that the CIA had found Zarqawi three times before the war started, but the Bush administration stopped the plans to take him out every time because it might interfere with the plans to go to war with Iraq. After all, if we could take out the terrorists without invading - and we could have - then people might not want to invade.

Hitchens either knows this or is so massively incompetent that all of his pundit contracts should be cancelled, but he continues to flatly state falsehoods on television because it's the only way to support his discredited war. Maybe he's even made himself believe the lies - it would be one of the easier ways to live with the realization that letting Zarqawi roam free and invading Iraq instead has cost thousands of American lives. It's a lot easier to pretend you have no responsibility in those deaths by encouraging the circumstances that led to them than it is to face the truth.

I still think, though, that Hitchens and other advocates of what the General calls "Our Leader's Eternal War to Resubjugate Brown People" continue to state these lies on television because they know they won't be called on it. Even Maher, as a host, is too polite to his guests to say more than "you're wrong" or "I disagree with that," instead of the correct answer, "You are lying through your teeth and you know it." It's been this way since at least 1994 - they know they can blatantly lie on TV because no one will call them liars to their faces because it's "impolite" or "not constructive" or "out of line."

So they don't hesitate to lie, knowing that without being called on it, most viewers will just see it as a "difference of opinion." After Santorum and Hoekstra's pathetic little spin campaign in July and its full-throated backing by Fox News, the number of Americans who believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when we invaded Iraq has actually increased! Listen to Jack Clark's podcast #55 for the details if you missed them - most legitimate media sources ignored the far-right claim that finding up to 500 scattered, decayed, 18-year-old chemical weapons shells from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war means that "Saddam had WMDs!" These shells are so decayed that they are actually less harmful than common household insecticides. By this standard, Wal-Mart has WMDs.

But since the reality-based community's TV representatives won't call this spin "lying," and it certainly is lying because everyone flogging the story knows these are not the WMDs that the invasion supporters said were there (even Donald Rumsfeld says so), viewers see it only as a difference of opinion: Iraq "had" WMDs, and either they were or weren't as serious as we thought they were. That's a lie - Iraq did not have any of the WMDs that the administration claimed were there, and everyone from the weapons inspectors to the State Department and the non-Cheney part of the CIA both knew so and said so. It's not a difference of opinion.

It will stay this way until those sitting opposite people like Hitchens on TV panels call a lie a lie. Oh, they'll scream like stuck pigs, but not for too long - if they gin up controversy around it, people will investigate and show that hitchens and his ilk were lying, and they don't really want you to know that either.

Just like a bully hits you because he knows you're too scared to hit him back, Hitchens and his dishonest troupe of discredited war backers keep lying because they know their opposition is too scared to call them on it. When that changes - and I don't mean stuff like "Well, he's incorrect" or "that's not the truth," but "you're lying and you know you're lying" - the entire conservative combat commentariat will collapse. They really can't handle being challenged on the facts without lying.

(Troll inoculation: indeed, not all war backers go on TV and lie about it, and some have maintained their support both before and since for non-WMD reasons for the invasion, though few of these people admit that without the WMD argument, Congress would not have approved the invasion. There are plenty who do lie, though, and they need to be stopped. They're not doing either side any favors.)