Take a long, hard look at this video:

Barack Obama said that when he gave a speech in Detroit telling automakers that they had to build more energy efficient cars, nobody clapped.

The reaction of most people who look at the above would be to conclude that he's simply lying. Obviously (unless the video is doctored and the applause was pasted in), his recollection of what happened does not square with the facts.

But does this necessarily mean he was consciously lying? In linking the above, Glenn Reynolds compared it to the Hillary Bosnia sniper flap. During that controversy, many people (myself included), thought it was yet another example of Hillary Clinton's longstanding "congenital liar syndrome."

However, while almost no one swallowed Hillary's lame "sleep deprivation" excuse, some analysts noted that there might be another possibility beyond mere pathological lying:

There are two possibilities: Hillary may be a pathological liar. Or, more persuasive to me, Hillary believed what she was saying and her description of her Bosnia trip was a true representation of her psychic reality and not external reality. In her internal world, Hillary may feel as though she's always being shot at by sniper fire and that she's heroically managed to stay alive.

This theory makes sense of Hillary's recklessness. It didn't feel reckless to Hillary to repeat this lie over and over again, and she paid no heed to those who contradicted her, because in her mind, she was telling the truth. Only when confronted with undeniable evidence of external reality -- actual footage from her Bosnia trip - did she admit (possibly to herself as well as the public) that her version of events was not true.

In the course of Hillary's campaign, a number of features have repeatedly emerged that are also elements of her Bosnia tale. 1) Hillary is both hero and victim; 2) facts are of no consequence; 3) And there are no witnesses or observers to the facts. This last point is always startling. For example, Hillary's explanation of her vote on the war made Nora Ephron wonder if Hillary thought we "weren't alive at the time."

On the tarmac in Bosnia, Hillary is the victim for being shot at and the hero for braving a war zone. And she's apparently having a negative hallucination that nobody else was there. The irony, of course, is that when the Bosnia story was discovered, it reinforced Hillary's psychic reality: Once again she felt she was being sniped at (this time by journalists). And that she had to heroically fight on and escape this near-death experience. Which it now seems she has.

But according to the experts, it doesn't much matter what I'd prefer to think about Hillary at this stage of the game, does it?

So, unsettling as it is to contemplate the possibility that Barack Obama might not be lying in his own mind, the simple fact is that either he was consciously lying, or else he was engaged in the same type of hero-or-victim self-delusion explored in the above theory about Hillary.

If this was not a conscious lie, the fact that he said "nobody clapped" when the crowd did in fact clap evinces a simultaneous desire to be both a hero and a victim. More worrisome to me is the possibility that he knew they clapped, but didn't think they clapped long enough or loud enough, because that might -- and I stress might -- indicate paranoid megalomania. Leaders whose egos demand prolonged and sustained applause (of the "better clap or else" variety) tend to have less than stellar historical track records, and I'd rather avoid giving examples.

So I just hope it was an ordinary lie.

MORE: While her analysis relates to the "now you see it now you don't" flag pin controversy, I find Ann Althouse's reaction reassuring:

Come on! He's lying! Don't lie! I mean, I know you've been having an unimaginably powerful experience with millions of people buying the things you say, but don't get cocky. We do still have our lie detectors, and we can reactivate them if we get in the mood to. Don't push us. Keep the magic alive.