RALEIGH — It is my strategery today to coin a new word. Don’t misunderestimate the power of language.

The word is “disingenuity.” It sounds like it should be a real term, related to “disingenuous.” The latter is a delicious adjective that denotes something is “landing in candor” or “misleading.” A common connotation is that the person being disingenuous is doing so by stating a falsehood in such a simple and straightforward way that one tends to suspend disbelief.

Here’s the problem. To be disingenuous is to be calculating. It is to be more than a practiced liar; it is to be an elaborate and tricky one. But the noun form, “disingenuousness,” buries the meaning within a prefix and two suffixes. The core of it is “ingenuity,” thus my suggestion that we call lies of this type and magnitude evidence of “disingenuity.”

Here are my nominees for the 2003 Disingenuity Awards, to be presented later this year at a suitable venue (unfortunately, the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock seems unlike to be ready in time):

* George W. Bush’s critics on the Iraq war and weapons of mass destruction. Now peddling the idea that the president and his aides manufactured or exaggerated evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs in order to justify war, these folks have cleverly deflected attention from the lies and exaggerations of their own manufacture. They confidently predicted a humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq, thousands or tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, an uprising of the “Arab street,” military actions on a distracted America elsewhere, a takeover of Iraq by Iranian Shiites, riots in the streets, dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria. . .

Oh, wait, that last part is a “Ghostbusters” reference. Stil, you get the idea. A disaster of “biblical proportions,” as Bill Murray said in the movie, was supposed to happen in the biblical land of Mesopotamia. It didn’t happen. The tens of thousands of missing Iraqi antiquities ending up being a few dozen, likely purloined by museum employees. No sightings of the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man yet, either.

Look, every political leader of both parties said during the 1990s that Hussein was actively pursuing dangerous weapons of mass destruction. Bush’s critics are simply manufacturing their own weapons of mass distraction, through rhetoric of a brazen disingenuity.

* NC Senate budget writers. They have criticized their colleagues in the House for wanting to use one-time federal money to plug a recurring revenue hole. Their disingenuity here begins with the fact that their criticism is justified. Using one-time money for recurring needs is usually a bad idea (though rainy-day funds are made to be used to plug budget holes and are, by definition, one-time money). The Senate’s proposed solution is to levy yet another bundle of new taxes, about $330 million worth on cigarettes and alcohol. But in the first year of the biennium, these new revenues aren’t needed to balance the budget. Instead, the Senate wants to bank those proceeds and use a portion of them the following year to plug an expected budget hole. That, ladies and gentlemen, constitutes using one-time money for recurring needs.

* Hillary Clinton. She claims in her new book that she didn’t believe the Monica Lewinsky story until her husband confirmed it just before admitting the affair to the country. The brilliance of this lie is that it is so preposterous, few would believe her capable of expecting it to succeed. It’s such a bad lie, in other words, that it is apparently leading quite a few Americans to think that, pathetic though it makes Hillary look, it may actually be true.

The only word for this is disingenuity. Hope it sticks.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.