Poppy Bush is going to take his ball and go home.

He has seen news accounts comparing some of his statements with subsequent disclosures intimating he was not exactly telling the truth. Some have been so gauche as to suggest that President Bush’s passion for secrecy has spawned a penchant for fibbing.

The president was not amused.

"I think we’ve had too many press conferences," he told reporters Feb. 15, aboard Air Force One. "It’s not good. It’s overexposure to the thing…. We’ve got a whole new relationship. It will be pleasant. It will be fun. It will be fun. But it will be different."

Henceforth, the president announced, there would be "a new thing, a new approach" when he is pestered with questions about affairs of state: "I’m not going to discuss it," he said. "I’m not gonna be burned for holding out or doing something deceptive."

By the end of his little display of pique, the president, grinning at his own cleverness, was no-commenting even on whether he had a good night’s sleep, "because some will think it is too much sleep and some will think it’s too little sleep."

This presidential fencing with the White House pressies, some of whom have feasted at state dinners and cavorted at Camp David, has a clubby, intramural flavor that tends to obscure how casually George Bush and his aides are wont to mislead the American people.

The pattern of deception goes back at least a decade. It includes politically expedient false denials both of plans the president has for the future and things he has said and done in the past.

We are not talking, here about deceptions motivated by imperatives like protecting the security of a military operation or the life of a hostage.

A Kick Out of Surprises

Rather we are talking about dissembling-outright lying sometimes-for such high reasons of state as keeping planned announcements secret so as to spring them at the appointed time with a big splash. The Leader of the Free World gets a kick out of surprises.

Asked at a Feb. 12 press conference whether he thought it was time for a four-power conference on the future of Germany, President Bush said: "No, not at this juncture." As he spoke, his negotiators were at work on plans for just such a conference, announced the next day.

A similar episode began with the president’s strong suggestion on and after Dec. 4, echoed by aides including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, that he would make no new troop-cut proposals in Europe. At the time his administration was preparing to do just that. But the legerdemain allowed the president to announce his new troop-cut proposal with a flourish in his otherwise uneventful State of the Union addressee Jan. 31.

Not all Bush administration deceptions have been so frivolously motivated. Some have been concocted to cover up secret actions that would expose presidential duplicity or spoil those lovely popularity ratings if uncovered.

A prime example was the lying about the secret mission to China last July of National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagle-burger. Two weeks after, President Bush had supposedly banned "all high-level exchanges of government officials" with China in response to the Tiananmen Square massacre, they were in China meeting with the top leaders.

On Dec. 9, Scowcroft and Eagleburger popped up in China again, this time publicly toasting those who had crushed the students in Beijing. The next day, Secretary of State James Baker said on national television that this had been "the ‘first time we’ve had high-level United States officials go to the People’s Republic of China" since the massacre.

That baldfaced lie was exposed a week later when Cable News Network reported the secret July trip.

The president’s subsequent comments were revealing. He had never publicly barred high-level meetings with China, he rationalized: "I said ‘no high-level exchanges.’ So please look at it very carefully." Oh.

Asked at a Jan. 5 press conference about Baker’s deception, the president quickly changed the subject from lying to secrecy. "Some things will be conducted in secrecy, and I know you don’t like it," he said, adding, "I don’t think Jim Baker would ever deliberately mislead somebody, and so I will stand with him."

By this time Baker had admitted misleading just about everybody. "I only misled them for seven days," he offered lamely. From all indications this deception would have continued for seven years, had CNN not exposed it.

The Big, Bold Lie

President Bush has also shown an occasional penchant for that variant of the big lie involving the bold denial of palpable public facts.

In January, promoting his proposed capital-gains tax cut, he said: "I am sick and tired of these demagogues who call this a tax cut for the rich. It means jobs. It means savings. And it is good for all Americans."

The president may have enough blind faith in trickle-down economics to believe the "good for all" part. But his suggestion that this is not a tax cut for the rich is the very definition of demagoguery: the use of false claims and promises in order to gain power.

More than 83 percent of the proposed capital-gains cut would go to families with incomes of $100,000 or more, and 66 percent would go to the 681,000 families with incomes of $200,000 or more. The 54 million taxpayers who earn less than $20,000 would reap 0.4 percent of the tax cut. Those are, the best available projections, made by the staff of the non-partisan Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

A subtler but clearly calculated deception came in the president’s budget message a year ago. He said, "We can afford to increase spending-by a modest amount but enough to invest in key priorities-and still cut the deficit by almost 40 percent in one year."

What he didn’t say was that the few spending increases he proposed were dwarfed by the painful cuts needed to make his numbers add up.

The 1988 campaign was, of course, such a farrago of half-truths, untruths, demagoguery, and implausible denials that it all seems a blur now.

Among the more implausible denials were those by candidate Bush that he had ever been "aware of" reports of Gen. Manuel Noriega’s involvement with drugs before Noriega’s indictment in early 1988. Faced with a mountain of evidence to the contrary, then Bush Chief of Staff Craig Fuller later explained that "what he’s really saying is that certain knowledge didn’t come until after the indictment of Noriega."

Campaign Corrections

Then there was the then vice president’s denial in February 1982 that he had ever uttered his famous description of Ronald Reagan’s economic program as "voodoo economics."

"I never said it," Mr. Bush said. "I challenge anyone to find it." NBC News found it, on film.

In early 1980, Ms. Bush said that Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, "was right" and that he supported federal funding for poor women to have abortions in cases of rape and incest.

Then he became Ronald Reagan’s running mate. What’s a fella to do? George Bush dutifully called for a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions. By 1984, he had "no recollection" of ever supporting rape-incest abortion funding.

Ah, well, a few minor discrepancies. Nothing to undermine one’s "absolutely total confidence as to his integrity," to borrow from then Republican National Committee Chairman George Bush’s 1973 paean to Richard Nixon.