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Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (1127)	8/14/1998 1:04:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 13994

>>I think the Z thread has more liberals that need converting. Liberals think it is their special mission in life to go around stomping out any existing embers of truth and justice - all things that stand as an affront to their "faith". Virtually all the debasement of modern life can be traced to liberalism and its faithful agents of societal deconstruction. Clinton? Confess? . . . By Michael Kelly Some months back, when we and the Lewinsky scandal were young and gay, and it was still considered unusual for the word "semen" to appear in the same sentence as the word "president," I argued in a column that Clinton could find forgiveness from the public and safety from Ken Starr through public confession. When I suggested this to an adviser to the president, the adviser hooted and said the issue had been bruited and was already mooted. Clinton, he said, would forever lie on the bed he had made when he swore that he had never, no, never Lewinskyed. The political pro knew his business. Amid reports that: (a) Lewinsky will testify that she did indeed have sex with Clinton, and that (b) Clinton will also testify "completely and truthfully," and that (c) the FBI has The Dress, the confessional strategy is suddenly the vogue. The new consensus among armchair consultants is that Clinton should go before the nation prior to his Aug. 17 grand jury date and perform a mea culpa. Forget it. As Clinton's predecessor would have said, not gonna do it. Gonna stick with the story that brung me. In fact, gotta. Why gotta? Assume that, as regards Lewinsky, Clinton lied. What would happen if he recanted now? The chatter is that the harm would not be so bad: The lie was only a bit of fibbing about sex (about which, who does not lie?) concerning an irrelevant matter in a dismissed civil suit. An admission would be survivable, as the current landscape of the polls suggests. No. If Clinton culpas, the landscape will change, radically, and for Clinton, fatally. The White House still gets decent mileage out of the line that this whole wretched affair is the result of a political conspiracy headed by a zealot. The trashing of the presidency, the damage done to constitutional rights, the imperiling of future presidents, the wreck and ruin of lives, the subjection of innocent bystanders to a frightening and costly grand jury inquisition, the criminalization of politics -- all of this is Ken Starr's fault. If Clinton recants, this line becomes indefensible. Telling the truth now raises the inescapable point that, by refusing to tell the truth earlier, Clinton forced upon the nation the ordeal of Starr's pursuit of the truth. It becomes undeniable that it was not Starr but Clinton who was fundamentally to blame for a process that put so many people through such suffering and that so harmed the presidency. Then there is the problem with timing. A confession delivered when there is still some chance of getting away with the lie is an act of courage. One delivered only after all chance has vanished is quite the opposite. In confessing now -- only after Lewinsky had agreed to testify against him and the FBI had begun dress-testing -- Clinton would find himself in the position of the husband who decides to forthrightly admit his infidelity after his wife has discovered the credit card receipts from the highway motel. This does not generally work very well. And then there is the problem with resonance. Clinton has been often accused of being, as Sen. Bob Kerrey once said, "an unusually good liar." A chronic, recidivist, extravagant liar. To admit that he lied so aggressively and so shamelessly in the Lewinsky matter would give immense weight to this assessment; Clinton's every utterance on every subject, past and future, would be suspect. Any moral authority he possesses would be utterly lost. Mea culpa-ers argue that the polls suggest the public would be forgiving. Don't believe it. The public likes to think it is rather more saintly than it is. Answers to conditional and theoretical questions about the possibility of presidential lying say nothing about what the public sentiment would be once the people were confronted with the reality that the president had lied to them. And not only had lied, but had lied with such fervor, had enlisted the people's support in a high-minded "war" against prosecutorial misconduct, had countenanced a campaign that portrayed those who (it turns out) were telling the truth as moral lepers. People would realize they had been played for chumps. People do not like being played for chumps. As long as Clinton sticks to his story, no matter how far-fetched it becomes, a percentage of the people will choose to believe him -- as a percentage chose to believe Alger Hiss, and Richard Nixon, and Marion Barry, and O. J. Simpson. That percentage is vital to Clinton's future. It is the difference between the hope of revisionism and the certainty of rejection. If Clinton admits he lied, he will be left naked before the winds of scorn and the judgment of history. I do not think he will do that to himself. Michael Kelly is the editor of National Journal. washingtonpost.com