Bill Clinton's Pathetic Lies

...This willingness to wing it-or to say what is expedient-is one reason Clinton made it to the White House...

...The bullet penetrated his torso after traveling up his sleeve...

...He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual," Thomas Jefferson once wrote...

...More recently, Clinton hasn't even been taking Whitewater questions, emphasizing instead that he's cooperating more fully with investigators "than any president in history...

...Helens caused more pollution than all the cars in the world caused in the preceding 10 years...

...It brings to mind Truman's succinct complaint when asked by a friend what he thought of Roosevelt: "He lies...

...In mid-September, he went even further: "For two years, I said the Medicare trust fund was in trouble and Mr...

...It's all there in David McCullough's Truman, a book the president claims to have read...

...But it also contained a number of misleading assertions and insinuations...

...And Harry Truman, whom the current president professes to revere, worked his father's 600-acre Missouri farm in 1906, rising at 5 a.m...

...Who was helped on July 19, 1993, when he visited Fort McNair to discuss his "don't ask, don't tell" compromise on gays in the military and used a handy bit of revisionism...

...Guess what...

...Bill Clinton's critics might find this an apt description of the current president...

...As an ethicist, I hate all lies . . . and I'm not thrilled about conflicts of interest back in Arkansas, either," he told me...

...Yes, in January 1993, during the transition, the Congressional Budget Office abruptly raised its estimate of the annual deficit from the mid-$250 billion range to more than $300 billion for years to come...

...Clinton has a taste for categorical statements: He has claimed that no other president had the regard for the First Amendment that he does, that no occupant of the White House has gotten press as bad as his, and even, during a September trip to California, that he has eaten more raisins "than any president who ever held this office...

...On top of all that, in the early spring of 1993, the Congressional Budget Office revised the numbers again-this time downward-attributing the move to lower interest rates and to the recovery that began when George Bush was president...

...The president appears to have been referring here to his health care package in 1994, and the GOP denial of a health care "crisis...

...This president salts his remarks with so many inventions, half-truths, and self-serving exaggerations that reporters who cover him often have to choose between truth-squadding every speech or ignoring his fibs...

...My own favorite was his claim that Mount St...

...As a candidate, Clinton promised to cut middle-class taxes, submit a plan to balance the budget in five years, add 100,000 cops to the streets, and ensure that all Americans who wanted to repay college loans with public service could do so...

...And it was all the more brazen because numerous presidents grew up on farms, or in farm communities, or farmed themselves as adults...

...Carter resigned his commission in the Navy to save his family's farm and peanut warehouse business...

...Press secretary Mike McCurry retracted that before the day was up...

...He'd answered all the questions, he said...

...The real reason the Japanese suddenly dropped their barriers to foreign rice was a disastrous crop failure in Japan that led the government to take rare emergency measures (as they'd done when importing American rice in the 1950s...

...But regarding Whitewater, it has become clear that the dissembling went beyond just kissing off reporters' questions with a fib or two...

...It seems on its face to be of more significance to the nation that Reagan said he wasn't trading arms for hostages-when he was-than for Clinton to fudge the facts of a long-ago land deal in Arkansas...

...There are many ways politicians butcher the truth...

...Josephson said he is more troubled by implausible statements made by both President Reagan and President Bush over the Iran-contra scandal...

...Then there was Jimmy Carter, whom Clinton knows personally...

...I'm not making that up...

...Yet he never revised any of his promises...

...Trade Representative Mickey Kantor was still negotiating into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade a provision guaranteeing that 4 percent of the Japanese rice market would come from abroad...

...Less than a month later, at the annual White House correspondents' dinner, Clinton also needled Bob Dole, who was then bottling up Clinton's "stimulus" package, by asserting that Dole had written a letter asking for $23 million in federal funds to convert a Kansas senior center to a boathouse...

...The White House had argued it should be modified, but not abolished...

...They fib about personal indiscretions, dissemble about broken campaign promises, and grossly exaggerate their accomplishments...

...Questions about his draft record had been raised in every gubernatorial campaign Clinton ran in Arkansas, especially the first one in 1978, when Billy G. Geren, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, held a press conference to denounce Clinton as a draft dodger...

...Prefacing his remarks with that exact phrase, Clinton challenged Republicans during the 1993 budget battles to get specific...

...His speech contained some evocative language and salient points...

...This base-closing commission made far more changes . . . than any of the three previous base-closing plans...

...It was an odd assertion from a man who has never really held a private sector job, let alone worked with his hands...

...These were not the facts...

...In truth, the commission had closed its doors on schedule, even returning $1.6 million to the Treasury...

...Barney Frank, and this issue had been raised...

...armed forces ended when a black steward at Pearl Harbor grabbed a machine gun and blazed away at attacking Japanese planes...

...If I had to do it over again, I might answer the questions a little better," Clinton replied...

...Let's look at the facts here," the president fumed...

...Washington was the first breeder of mules in America...

...He was referring to an FCC regulation that gave tax breaks to media corporations that sold outlets to minorities, a program killed by Republicans over the objections of Clinton and his aides...

...The Clinton economic team not only didn't cut middle-class taxes at that moment, but said interest rates had declined because the markets and the banks were encouraged by the administration's economic plan...

...This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time, depraves all its good dispositions...

...They pumped $68,900 into the deal and lost it all...

...This is very nearly the opposite of the truth: Gingrich, trying to taunt the administration into presenting its own plan for controlling Medicare spending, has been reminding people that Clinton's own Medicare commission warned of impending disaster...

...In 1990, while running for governor of Arkansas, his pollsters told him there was one issue that could hurt him: voters' fears that he wanted to run for president...

...Ever heard of George Washington?' The Department of Agriculture was his idea...

...Such hyperbole is a familiar Clinton construct...

...This was news to Rep...

...Bill Clinton is hardly the first president to tell a tale...

...During that 1992 campaign, as questions about Clinton's past arose that ranged from Whitewater to his draft record, Clinton's modus operandi was to furnish incomplete or inaccurate responses in the apparent hope that the truth would never quite catch up...

...He took credit for curbing Federal affirmative-action programs: "I've already abolished one I thought was excessive," he told one audience...

...Ronald Reagan cheerfully fed the public all kinds of false information he'd committed to memory...

...As head of the U.S...

...Geren outlined all of the essential allegations that would surface in 1992...

...The day before, Clinton told students at Abraham Lincoln Middle School in Selma, CA: "Right after I became president, I was told by Republican leaders in the Congress that they would not vote for my budget, none of them would vote for it, no matter what I did to it-that they wanted a partisan issue, and that if I tried to bring the deficit down, if it didn't work, they would blame me, and it if did, they would say, well, I raised taxes in '93 to bring down the deficit...

...The patrician FDR once visited farmers in upstate New York and told them, "I'm one of you...

...You know, I'd been in public life a long time, and no one had ever questioned my role...

...We're selling all kinds of things we never sold before, not just automobiles, we're selling rice to Japan for the first time, something I am very proud of," he said...

...Just whose interest was Clinton serving, for instance, when he blurted out at a press conference-with no apparent basis-that the Justice Department feared for children inside the Branch Davidian compound in Waco because those as young as 3 had been taught how "to kill themselves...

...The plan had not yet become law...

...Beyond that, everything else he said is inaccurate...

...Kasich had submitted to the White House a line-by-line Republican counterproposal identifying $430 billion in spending cuts-and received a signed letter from Clinton thanking him for his input...

...But as a practical matter it depends what they're lying about...

...The question had never been presented to me and I never had the opportunity to discuss it with anyone," he said...

...I mean, 'Hello...

...On the same trip and on a more serious note, the president also made untrue assertions about weighty domestic policy issues...

...Speaking in California in 1993, Clinton said, "We celebrated the Bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987, right...

...After all, whom did Bill Clinton hurt with his little farm fable...

...That day, he charged they'd actually told him so...

...GATT had not been approved then, and the nonemergency exports weren't to begin for another year...

...UPI's Helen Thomas, noting that Clinton's credibility had been damaged because of his ever-changing explanations of his draft record, asked him: "If you had to do it over again, would you put on the nation's uniform...

...Also, the president claimed that up to 4 million American wives are the victims of domestic violence each year, a number that statistician David Murray told Ann Devroy of the Washington Post is probably "five times too high...

...Carl M. Cannon is the White House correspondent of the Baltimore Sun...

...In fact, they haven't yet begun...

...Attentive Arkansans recognized this for the lie it was...

...Aides let it be known that Clinton had read a staff-written speech verbatim, but sometimes it is Clinton who sandbags his aides...

...When asked why, he and his advisers always cited the same factor: the larger-than-expected deficits bequeathed to him by Bush and Congress...

...As president, he didn't submit budgets that would accomplish all of this...

...Herbert Hoover, orphaned at age 9, grew up on his two uncles' farms, where he picked potato bugs-a penny for every 100-and later weeded onions at 50 cents a day...

...This was about half-true...

...His "reinventing government" is the most massive overhaul of the government in history, his economic plan cut the deficit by anywhere from $500 billion to $1 trillion, the largest ever, and so forth...

...Actually, the amount of dollars Dole requested for the project was zero...

...nor did Hillary Clinton do business with regulators appointed by her husband...

...At the same time, U.S...

...Thomas Jefferson's writings on grape growing are still consulted by Virginia vintners...

...White House aides used the same explanation for a speech last March in which Clinton related some dubious statistics on violence against women...

...In fact, the previous August, Clinton complained publicly that he thought Bush's budget office was downplaying the deficit and that it would actually be in the range of $400 billion...

...Gingrich and others mocked me and denied that it was in trouble...

...But this was a crock...

...This commission added only nine bases to the hit list recommended by the Pentagon...

...it's old stuff, and the only ones pushing it are political enemies...

...Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, says that not only could California's 30 million people easily absorb the job losses at McClellan, but so could the city of Sacramento alone...

...There's still a Constitutional Commission [that] you're paying for...

...The theory is that a president may believe the good of the country is at stake in foreign policy, but that self-serving lies about inconsequential matters are more a sign of faulty character...

...The difference between us and the other side," he said, "is that we asked them for their spending cuts and we're still waiting...

...Yet historians generally give presidents something approaching a dispensation to lie about national security matters (a subject Clinton doesn't lie about, as far as I know...

...Seeking the support of the gays, Clinton expressed opposition to the gay ban, and received supportive, frontpage coverage in the gay press...

...The president also said the job losses at McClellan Air Force Base would devastate the California economy...

...After all, the lack of faith Americans have for their leaders goes way beyond Reagan or Clinton-or even Richard Nixon...

...The previous commission had added 18...

...On the contrary, just weeks before the Harvard speech, he'd met with gay activists, including Rep...

...Food Administration, Hoover probably knew more about agricultural prices, production, and distribution than anyone on either side of the Atlantic...

...Thus, Vice President Al Gore got it right last November when he tried to drum up support in Congress for GATT by saying: "With GATT, American farmers will sell rice for the first time to Japan and Korea on a regular basis...

...There was no overlap with Clinton's official capacities...

...He actually raised taxes on middle-income Americans in the form of a gasoline tax increase...

...But there is something instructive in the example Josephson chose to illustrate his point that not all lies are of equal weight: Iran-contra...

...He raises an important point, and I will return to it...

...It was so very bizarre," mused Sonja Hillgren, editor of Farm, Journal magazine...

...I have never seen a deer, a duck, or a wild turkey wearing Kevlar," he said...

...Pete Domenici of New Mexico, were eager to make a deal with Clinton...

...Then-communications director George Stephano-poulos, acknowledging that mistake, said the president had been "ill-staffed...

...These claims are untrue as well...

...Before the attack on Dole, the president asked Stephanopoulos to check the senior-center story out for him, but when the communications director reported back that he couldn't verify it, the president made the remarks anyway...

...My own fear is that the problem is deeper, and that Jefferson was really warning us not only about the danger of a flaw in one man, but in the presidency as well...

...Perhaps I've belabored this point...

...A number of them, notably Sen...

...He said a violent crime is committed against a woman in this country every 12 seconds...

...In the end, White House posturing on the budget- and so many of these other exaggerations-seems to go far beyond the "quick lies" that Michael Josephson talks about...

...But like most of those who cover the White House full-time, I've grown troubled by Clinton's casual approach to the truth...

...In July, the president launched into a finger-pointing, fist-pounding Rose Garden tirade against the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission for its supposedly capricious judgment in closing bases in electoral vote-rich California...

...But Clinton's performance in Iowa is part of a disquieting pattern...

...Before the speech, Clinton had often said he guessed the Republicans were using this strategy...

...Nobody here disputes California is taking a hit in this round," base-closing commission spokesman Wade Nelson told me...

...There are deceptions in staff-written speeches, simple slips of the tongue, falsities based on historical ignorance, Reaganesque flights of fancy, and, finally, they willful shadings of the truth for partisan advantage...

...Reporters don't want to become accomplices in presidential prevarication, but typically his fibs contain just enough truth that it's easier not to fool with them...

...I am the only president," he said, "who knew something about agriculture when I got there...

...John Kasich of the budget committee...

...None of these assertions was accurate, but by the time the truth came to light, Clinton was in office, and his explanation had evolved...

...If I could shoot like that," he said referring to Iowa State star Fred Hoilberg, "I would still be in the NBA...

...In October 1994, for instance, Clinton began spicing his stump speech with the claim he had opened up Japanese markets to American-grown rice...

...Iran-contra is a foreign policy issue...

...For example: A local police officer mentioned by Clinton was indeed killed with a handgun while wearing a Kevlar vest, but not because he was struck with an armor-piercing bullet-they haven't yet been marketed...

...One Reagan fish tale was the claim that segregation in the U.S...

...When confronted with the March 8, 1992, New York Times exclusive on Whitewater, Clinton and his wife offered an initial defense that consisted of three main themes: • They were "passive" investors totally oblivious of the workings of Whitewater Development Corp...

...Clinton explained that he had stumbled onto this issue only when asked about it by a Harvard student in a speech he gave there on October 30, 1991...

...The crowning example came during the third presidential debate...

...Bill Clinton has tried them all, while sometimes asserting piously that "it's time to tell the truth...

...He tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him...

...to plow, milk cows, hoe corn and potatoes, cut wood, and feed hogs...

...But Clinton's claim a month before in a speech at a Michigan Ford plant was, at best, misleading...

...So he pledged: "If I am elected governor, I will not seek the presidency of the United States...

...If the farm crack were an isolated example, it would just be funny, like the time Clinton claimed to have grown up in a national park or, perhaps thinking he was Bill Bradley, appeared to be claiming a career in professional basketball...

...Michael Josephson, founder of an institute in California devoted to the study of ethics, terms falsehoods like this "quick lies," and says they are an unfortunate part of everyday life in modern America...

...But this was entirely expected...

...Obviously, no Republican ever spoke such words to the president...

...Last June, Clinton went to Chicago's 15th police precinct for a campaign-style speech calling for outlawing bullets that pierce protective vests...

...We need to keep perspective on what's important...

...Bill Clinton wasn't even the first to fudge his agricultural experience...