I don't know who Andrew Sullivan is, but this is about as thorough a
dissection of the situation as I've seen.
Lies That Matter
By Andrew Sullivan
>>> The essence of Clinton's disgrace.
>>> There can be little doubt that if Bill Clinton were a prime minister
>>> in a parliamentary system he would no longer be in office. It is a
>>> convention in British politics, for example, that a minister can
>>> survive even the tawdriest of scandals, or direst of careers, but, if
>>> he clearly lies to the House of Commons, he has no option but to
>>> resign. A lie in this context is not merely a hedging of the truth, a
>>> ducking of a question, or an act of omission-because the Brits have
>>> long understood that these kinds of lies are sadly inextricable from
>>> much of political life. What a lie here means is an untruth spoken
>>> directly and knowingly in a formal capacity to the political nation.
>>> The reason for this convention is a simple one. If a politician is
>>> capable of self-consciously lying to his peers and electorate, then
>>> nothing he says from that point on can be reliably believed. Once that
>>> happens, politics becomes impossible because trust has been destroyed,
>>> both at home and abroad. Domestic politics is as threatened as
>>> national security. It doesn't matter what the lie is about. What
>>> matters is that it is premeditated and clearly proven. What matters is
>>> that the politician knows it is a lie when he says it, and operates
>>> not from a position of political engagement, but from political
>>> dishonesty.
>>> Bill Clinton has done this in two clear, formal contexts. He did it in
>>> the deposition in the Paula Jones case, under oath, an oath as solemn
>>> and as binding as his oath of office. He did it from the White House
>>> on a presidential podium, wagging his finger for emphasis. He did it
>>> to his Cabinet and directly urged others to lie on his behalf. And he
>>> lied again when he said he didn't lie or direct others into bald-faced
>>> deception.
>>> Of course, the United States does not have a parliamentary system, and
>>> so there is greater leeway for an American president. There is the
>>> leeway of apology, the leeway of forgiveness, and the leeway of
>>> impeachment. Having botched the first two, the president must soon
>>> engage the latter. The hearings will surely consume the nation in a
>>> marathon of distasteful distraction from which any honorable person
>>> would wish to rescue us. Bill Clinton is not such an honorable person,
>>> which is why it is unlikely he will quit. But that is not to say he
>>> shouldn't.
>>> The defenses of the president, weak from the beginning, weaker as
>>> every day passes, are on the verge of collapse. We are told that this
>>> is a lie about sex, and everyone lies about sex. Well, to begin with,
>>> not everyone. And not everyone's sex life is conducted in a business
>>> office with an employee scarcely out of college. Most lies about sex,
>>> after all, are lies about equal, consensual, private matters, not
>>> about public acts of exploitation. We have been instructed by
>>> third-wave feminists that, since the Lewinsky affair was obviously
>>> consensual, it was not exploitative. But is there any greater
>>> disproportion of power than that between an intern and the president
>>> of the United States?
>>> And, second, this argument misses what makes Bill Clinton different
>>> from most people. For the majority of us, white lies or discretion
>>> about sex are occasional digressions from general, everyday honesty.
>>> They are exceptions that prove the rule. But, with Clinton, the lies
>>> about sex are not exceptions to the general rule; they are the rule.
>>> They are of a seamless piece with his lies about virtually everything
>>> else.
>>> The Lewinsky saga, in this sense, is a distillation of everything we
>>> already knew about Clinton, the purest proof yet of the moral nihilism
>>> that drives him forward. From the beginning, Clinton has lied with
>>> indiscriminate abandon. He has lied about genocide and he has lied
>>> about his golf scores. Every label he has attached to himself, every
>>> public position he has taken, has smacked of opportunism, not
>>> conviction, self-interested deceit, not public-interested candor. Very
>>> little of it can be taken at face value. He claims to be a feminist
>>> and yet treats the women around him as fools, tokens, or sexual
>>> objects. He claimed to be a New Democrat and yet embarked first and
>>> foremost on instituting semi-socialized medicine. He claimed to be a
>>> social liberal, and yet he signed the Defense of Marriage Act and
>>> boasted about it on Christian talk radio. He claimed to be in favor of
>>> making abortion "safe, legal, and rare," and yet he vetoed a measure
>>> to outlaw the most violent of late-term procedures. He claimed he
>>> wanted to end welfare as we know it and to balance the budget, and yet
>>> he failed to do either until forced to on Republican terms. Like a
>>> Visa card, he is everywhere you want him to be, which is to say he is
>>> nowhere reliable, nowhere dependable, and nowhere in the slightest bit
>>> honest.
>>> And, more important, he has never taken responsibility for any of
>>> this. In Clinton's moral universe, the truth is whatever he can get
>>> away with, and a lie is always somebody else's fault. He therefore
>>> hardly struggles with the truth, because, where there is no
>>> responsibility, there can be no struggle. He can analogize the Bosnian
>>> conflict as another Holocaust, take a poll to see whether he should
>>> intervene, stand by while tens of thousands of civilians are murdered,
>>> and then take credit for world peace when he sends American soldiers
>>> to police the aggressor's gains. He can publicly weep for people with
>>> aids, and empathize with homosexuals, and then sign a bill that would
>>> have thrown every HIV-positive person out of the military and almost
>>> double the rate of gay discharges from the service. He can advocate
>>> women's rights, and then expose himself to a stranger, and molest a
>>> distraught staffer in the Oval Office. (Yes, I believe Paula Jones and
>>> Kathleen Willey.) And then he can go to gay fund-raisers, and NOW
>>> rallies, and Bosnia itself, and pretend he is still a crusader for
>>> morality, civil rights, and peace, all the while corrupting anyone who
>>> comes into contact with him along the way.
>>> The notion that this characterological concern should be separate from
>>> a consideration of whether Bill Clinton can "do the job" of president
>>> betrays a misunderstanding of democratic politics itself. It is not a
>>> business. The president is not, and can never be, a CEO because a
>>> democratic nation is not, and can never be, a company. The United
>>> States is not making a product or selling a commodity. It is an
>>> association of laws and customs, the maintenance of which is an
>>> exacting and delicate and always moral task. The first responsibility
>>> of the person presiding over such an enterprise is not to achieve
>>> growth of 2.5 percent but to ensure the legitimacy of the system
>>> itself. In this fundamental task, Clinton has clearly not only failed;
>>> he has deliberately broken his oath of office. Clinton's attitude
>>> toward the law has not been how he can best uphold it but how he can
>>> best evade it. His attitude toward democratic political discourse has
>>> been not how he can address the issues honestly but how he can best
>>> dissemble, obfuscate, and lie. At some point, such a person does not
>>> merely demean himself; he demeans and threatens the entire system of
>>> government he is elected to defend.
>>> Yes, we knew this before-and he was reelected anyway. But this
>>> reelection was based on a spurious gamble: that "results" matter more
>>> than political character, that a culture of deceit can be outweighed
>>> by an accumulation of prosperity. What we did not count on in 1996 was
>>> what making such a moral compromise would further do to the character
>>> of the man in question. What our moral insouciance did was ratchet up
>>> the scale even further, allowing Clinton to believe he could get away
>>> with virtually anything. Which is why, buoyed by the polls, he
>>> shamelessly hustled shifty businessmen through the White House in
>>> return for campaign dollars, blithely saw Webb Hubbell paid handsomely
>>> while staying silent in the Whitewater investigation, and cavalierly
>>> carried on an affair in his very office with a lovesick intern. These
>>> actions were the actions of a man who had come to believe he was
>>> beyond the moral measure of anyone else and beyond the capacity of
>>> anyone to catch him. So, when he was finally caught, it was little
>>> surprise that his response was not contrition but outrage. How dare we
>>> hold him accountable now, when we have let him off so many times
>>> before?
>>> And, yes, the Republican alternative is truly horrifying. But there
>>> comes a point at which the lesser-of-two-evils argument is a form of
>>> moral corruption itself. Just because bigots and fanatics on the far
>>> right loathe Clinton for the wrong reasons doesn't mean it is wrong to
>>> loathe Clinton for the right reasons. Just because the far right has
>>> brazenly co-opted the language of morality to cloak its own vicious
>>> prejudices doesn't mean that liberals and decent conservatives can't
>>> use a moral discourse to criticize Clinton himself. In fact, the
>>> president's own moral degeneracy, by which I mean not his sexual
>>> weaknesses but his preference for ends over means, and lies over
>>> truth, has fatally co-opted many of the people associated with him. It
>>> has largely destroyed the credibility of many American feminists, and
>>> it has made much of the gay establishment look cynical when it hasn't
>>> looked craven. And this pattern looks only set to continue, until much
>>> that is important in American politics-the defense of a secular civic
>>> culture, of women's equality, of a genuinely liberal racial politics,
>>> of homosexual dignity-will come to be tainted irretrievably with the
>>> shadow of Clinton's insincerity. How many elections will Clinton have
>>> thrown to the far right, I wonder, how many religious fanatics will he
>>> have lent credibility to, how many women will he have abused, and gay
>>> soldiers will he have fired, before liberals summon up the gumption to
>>> say "Enough"?
>>> My own bet is that we still don't know the half of it: The Starr
>>> report might contain information about intimidation of witnesses and
>>> encouragement of deceit that might make our hair curl. Yes, it's petty
>>> business. Sex is often a petty business. So is money-grubbing
>>> commerce, as Whitewater surely showed. But honesty is not a petty
>>> principle. Without at least a shred of honesty in the highest official
>>> in the land, no system of democratic government can withstand the
>>> cynicism and disengagement that will soon overwhelm it. If Clinton is
>>> proven to have lied in the most cynical and shameless fashion, and
>>> then allowed to get away with it, the damage he has already done to
>>> the polity will be close to indelible.
>>> Clinton is a cancer on the culture, a cancer of cynicism, narcissism,
>>> and deceit. At some point, not even the most stellar of economic and
>>> social records is worth the price of such a cancer metastasizing even
>>> further. He should go. And it is a measure of the damage he has
>>> already wrought that this should even be a question.
>>> (Copyright 1998, The New Republic)
Jennifer