All the talk about truth by Tim Pawlenty during his extended presidential announcements doesn't seem to add up for the Washington Post's opinion writer Dana Milbank, who implied the new Pawlenty line doesn't jibe with the old Pawlenty from Minnesota.

Despite Pawlenty's claim that he's the one to tell the American people the truth, Milbank says the former governor told "a bit of a fib" on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, an hour after Monday's Iowa announcement. It concerned a 2006 Star Tribune article, when Pawlenty was running for re-election, that quotes him saying: "the era of small government is over” and that “government has to be more proactive, more aggressive.”

Pawlenty told the radio host:

... that he had merely been referencing somebody else’s words — “I didn’t say those words myself” — that his political opponents had “pushed that falsely,” and that the newspaper was motivated by political bias and was forced to issue a correction.

 But Milbank said he checked, and found "Pawlenty had taken some liberties with the facts."

Said Milbank:

For Pawlenty, truth-telling is an attractive theme, particularly now that he hopes to earn the support of conservative intellectuals who had been hoping for a Mitch Daniels candidacy. And, on his first day as truth-teller, he did offer up some straight talk. He took the brave position of telling the crowd in Des Moines that he would like to do away with ethanol subsidies, and he promised to tell Floridians that he wants to raise the Social Security retirement age.

 But in the Republican primary race, the real risk comes from speaking truth to party orthodoxy, as when Newt Gingrich took issue with House Republicans’ plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program. And Pawlenty, who as governor offended ideologues — particularly with his support of a national cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases — now wouldn’t think of it. After all, the same ideologues that he boasted about offending in 2006 now control the nominating process.

Limbaugh jumped on the old Tim Pawlenty positions, Milbank said,

saying the quotes about small government and “aggressive government” sounded like those of “inside-the-Beltway Republicans” who “believe in an active, powerful executive, of an engaging government that’s big enough to handle the requests and demands of the people.”

Pawlenty did indeed have such a message in 2006, when he was asking Minnesotans to give him a second term. But he surrendered immediately when Limbaugh challenged him. “That incorrect quote has haunted me, and I’m glad I had a chance in this big national forum on your great show to clarify,” he explained.

In the race for the Republican presidential nomination, some truths are just too hard to tell.