| I do not consider all slips of the tongue or mistakes of recollection worth worrying about. I do not even think that all lies are equally serious. I personally would not vote against a candidate because he had smoked some dope in his youth, or even because he had had an affair. I consider much of this stuff human foibles, and baring intimate knowledge of the particulars, not much worth bandying about. But I also do not think that double standards have been a big problem here. Clinton is not someone who has had an affair, he is a reckless womanizer who exploited a girl in the workplace. If you call it consensual, consider that he was willing to destroy her reputation if it came out, and that he admitted under oath that he knew that she was such a chatterbox there was a good chance it would come out. Leiberman is not someone who over time changed his mind on certain morally serious issues, he is a person who overnight, for the sake of the nomination, jettisoned his conscientious objection to partial birth abortion. Gore is not someone who occasionally exaggerates his resume, he has a compulsive tendency to embellish and mislead. I admit that I would not consider his assertion that he had been on the scene during Texas disasters as a lie, since he could have been confused. But I do not think he was confused when he said that his investigative reporting had put a bunch of people in jail, or when he said that he had walked point in Nam. I do not think that there is a double standard, I think that the instances are significantly dissimilar...... |
