Liar, liar, pants on ... hey, does someone smell smoke?

Most of us learn, at an early age, what a lie is. We get called out and punished for telling lies. It's not a difficult philosophical concept.

• "I didn't take my sister's dessert" (when I did) is a lie.
• "It will be sunny tomorrow" (when it is unexpectedly cloudy) is not.

We have even invented words and phrases to provide shadings around this stark word: "fib" (a small untruth, said knowingly but without intent to harm); "white lie" (a variant of "fib," perhaps said precisely to prevent hurt, as a response to the sexist and proverbial, "Does this dress make me look fat?").

But, on the big things -- Truth and Lies. It's a binary thing. We have nice, one-syllable words for them.

So, when the President-elect (soon to be the Chief we Hail) says something that:
   (a) he knows is not the truth
   (b) with intent to change reality
   (c) and blame someone else
... what should we call that?

I am amazed that there is actually a debate about this.

The editor of The Wall Street Journal, an incredibly credible newspaper, says he prefers not to cast Trump's lies as, well, that word:

 “I’d be careful about using the word ‘lie.’ ‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead.”

Well, yeah. That kind of the point.

The editor, Gerard Baker, goes on to help us parse the fine journalistic and philosophical distinctions he and is staff struggle with here:

"To accuse someone of lying is to impute a willful, deliberate attempt to deceive. It says he knowingly used a misrepresentation of the facts to mislead for his own purposes."

Then:

 "Now, I may believe that many of the things Mr. Trump has said in the past year are whoppers of the first order."

And, because he is a powerful man running for (arguably) the most powerful post in the entire world, we need to be dainty about whether to call these first-order whoppers -- which any intelligent person could disprove -- what they are: lies?

As in, when the President-elect is captured on camera saying something, then declaring he never said it.

As in, here.

Or, to be bipartisan, when President Clinton said, "I never had sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky," when ... you know, stained blue dress and all. That was a lie. A horrible lie.

I am amazed at the lengths to which some will go to give Trump "a pass," "one more chance," "the benefit of the doubt."

He is soon to be our president. He was elected, according to our current system of selecting our top leader. If he feels like telling "whoppers of the first order," he has a large staff to fact-check before he opens his mouth or launches his Twitter account.

But if he "misspeaks" without checking the veracity of his facts -- or, better yet, is saying he did not do or say things that are on the record -- I think we know what to call that.

Trump is a liar, and he is getting away with it.