Salon: Bush*s Lies vs. Clinton's Lies

[kskiska]

Lying about war is more serious than lying about sex -- which is why the president's free ride is coming to an end.

Conservative Republicans like to compare George W. Bush to Ronald Reagan, characterizing him as a masculine Everyman, traditionally conservative and regularly underestimated because of his low-key manner. Liberals like to compare him with his father, who seemed Reagan's tightly wound, Ivy League, career-climbing opposite -- and a one-term president to boot.

Now a different former president is the dominant comparison: Bill Clinton. And that bodes very poorly for our commander in chief.

(snip)

There are, of course, differences. Clinton's lie was meant to cover up a personal scandal; Bush's partisans can charitably interpret his lie as merely the result of a chain of people in the White House each adding too much rum to the eggnog. Clinton's lie was completely a personal failure; Bush's was a failure of the complete administration.

But the similarities are greater and more important. For one, both lies have stuck because of their backdrops. If the United States weren't losing a soldier a day and pouring a billion dollars a week into a zone of increasing chaos, no one would remember to question Bush's months-old prevarications. If Clinton hadn't been facing persistent accusations about his womanizing, no one might have known about his trysts with the intern. The Niger fib fit into a pattern of deception about intelligence and Saddam's weapons capacity, just as Clinton's Lewinsky dalliance fit into a pattern of questions about his personal affairs.

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/24/clinton/index.html