Time managing editor Nancy Gibbs published a note to readers yesterday in which she defended the magazine’s White House correspondent, Zeke Miller, over a mistake he made in incorrectly reporting that President Trump had removed a bust of Martin Luther King from the Oval Office. The bust had not been removed; the mistake was quickly pointed out and Miller immediately corrected and apologized for the error. Since then, the White House has been using this mistake in its ongoing war on America’s free press as an example of “deliberately false reporting.”

So let me get this straight: a reporter makes a mistake, corrects it immediately, apologizes multiple times – and he’s representative of some major problem in the American media. Meanwhile, the American president and his lackeys lie repeatedly beginning almost from the very moments after Trump took the oath of office (maybe I’ll do a post later about “American carnage”). The Trump administration never backs down from its lies, never apologizes for them, and continues to insist that their lies are true even when they are thoroughly and repeatedly debunked, and even when they are repudiated by other leaders of their own party. But there’s no problem in the Trump administration. No, President Trump is just trying to do his job for the American people while up against an unfair and biased media.

And I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.

At a press conference Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer asked why there had been no apology from Zeke Miller over the MLK bust issue. Here is what Sean Spicer tweeted two days before that:

In case you haven’t had your morning coffee yet:

1. On Jan. 20, Zeke Miller incorrectly reported that the MLK bust had been removed from the Oval Office. Minutes later, he found out he was wrong and informed his colleagues and corrected his story.
2. At 8:41 p.m. on Jan. 20 – just over an hour after his first story had been published – Zeke Miller tweeted an apology for his error.
3. At 8:46 p.m. – five minutes later – White House press secretary Sean Spicer accepted his apology.
4. Ten minutes after that, Miller replied to Spicer’s tweet accepting his apology to apologize a second time, this time directly to the Trump administration, writing: “.@PressSec This is on me, not my colleagues. I’ve been doing everything I can to fix my error. My apologies.”
5. Two days later, on Jan. 23, Spicer claimed that there had been no apology for the error, despite the fact that he had seen and publicly accepted the apology.

Ok: It’s important that we hold journalists to a high standard of accuracy and integrity. Mistakes are inevitable, but they should work hard to avoid them, and when there are errors, the people involved should immediately correct the errors and apologize for them. All of that happened in this case.

Now: It’s important that we hold the White House to a high standard of accuracy and integrity. Mistakes are inevitable, but they should work hard to avoid them, and when there are errors, the people involved should immediately correct the errors and apologize for them. None of that happened in this case, and it would be completely disingenuous to call any of the administration’s falsehoods thus far “errors.” They have been obvious intentional distortions of facts – otherwise known as lies. They have not worked to avoid lying; if anything they seem to really be putting in the overtime in an effort to come up with more lies to tell us. And obviously they haven’t apologized for any of it.

Sean Spicer has been, from day one, a Very Special Press Secretary. His capacity for insisting upon falsehoods right out of the gate has been impressive. But lying to a reporter about an interaction he had with that same reporter, while the full transcript of that interaction is on Twitter? This takes the act of dissembling to a whole new level. Sean Spicer is the Simone Biles of shameless lying. Except that he always gets caught, so he’s more like Simone Biles if Simone Biles’s otherwise flawless routine always ended with her landing hard on her face.