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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dwight E. Karlsen who wrote (38294)	3/14/1999 5:05:00 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Chris Matthews, commenting on Clinton's lying: George Stephanopoulos says he's still burning from the first time Bill Clinton got him to lie. It was back in 1992 when the then-Arkansas governor was being grilled about his Vietnam draft record. "For months, we had been defending against the charge of draft dodging," the former Clinton spokesman writes in the latest edition of Newsweek magazine. "I was right there on the ramparts...insisting that Clinton had never been drafted and never pulled strings...that this obsessive focus on Clinton's past was part of a right-wing plot." Then it hit. A reporter for the Associated Press confronted Mr. Stephanopoulos with a copy of Mr. Clinton's draft notice, the document the presidential candidate had been denying for months. "How can this be?" he remembers grilling himself on what he calls the "worst morning" of the '92 campaign. "How come the governor didn't tell us?" "I forgot about it," Mr. Clinton told him, urging his young, ambitious warrior back to the front. Though far too young for the Vietnam generation, Mr. Stephanopoulos has enough moxie to know that no guy forgets getting drafted. His candidate "forgot" getting drafted in April 1969 because he didn't want to explain how he had manipulated a local ROTC commander to get out of it. What bothered Mr. Stephanopoulos was that Mr. Clinton could so calmly lie, so coldbloodedly get his loyal people to lie for him. He sees the same pattern in the president's seven-month stonewall on the Monica Lewinsky case. "It's bad enough that Clinton defiled his presidency by having sex with an intern off the Oval Office; bad enough that he humiliated his wife and daughter. But President Clinton turned his personal flaws into a public matter when he made the whole country complicit in his cover story. "This was no impulsive act of passion; it was a coldly calculated political decision. He spoke publicly from the Roosevelt Room. He assembled his Cabinet and staff, and assured them that he was telling the truth. Then he sat back, silently, and watched his official spokespeople, employees of the U.S. government, mislead the country again and again and again." What strikes me is the irony buried here: that Vietnam and the home-front, youthful resistance to that war should once again explode into American politics like a left-behind landmine. A national horror that terminated the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and terminally embittered that of Richard Nixon is being recalled to undermine Bill Clinton. Still, Mr. Stephanopoulos has a point. I remember my own experience of 30 Augusts ago. Lyndon Johnson had ended all deferments for graduate students. That included me. For the first time, I found myself looking at a 1-A draft classification and the cold fact that nothing stood between me and the jungles of Indo-China. Most important, I remember the relief of getting that letter accepting me into the Peace Corps, promising ready assistance with any problems I might be having with the draft. I remember the equal relief two years later on winning a lottery number in the low 300s. Millions of men my age can download the same lists of dates and reclassifications, deferments won and lost, draft numbers high and low. Young George is right. None of us has forgotten any of it -- least of all a day your number came up.