THE DEFINING LIE
MEDVED, MICHAEL
THE DEFINING LIE by Michael Medved ALL DISCUSSIONS ABOUT the president's predicament, whether at dinner parties or on talk radio, in neighborhood bars or on cable TV, seem to unfold with an almost...
...they declare, avoiding the fact that he is the only president forced to respond to credible charges of sexual immorality during his term of office...
...No it's not, retort the clinton critics...
...Regardless of how indignant or eloquent a presidential pursuer might prove to be, he's already lost the debate...
...And everybody lies about sex, whether it's sighing, "You're the best I've ever had," or swearing, "I could never feel attracted to anyone who looked as trashy as she does...
...Sexgate" has tested his mettle just as surely as Watergate defined the real Richard Nixon...
...Film critic Michael Medved hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show and is co-author of the newly published Saving Childhood: Protecting Our Children from the National Assault on Innocence...
...Harding, FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson may have engaged in extramarital adventures as president, but they never looked the American public in the eye and lied about their shortcomings...
...He's not the first chief executive to fool around in the White House...
...the context could hardly have been more public...
...it's about lying...
...THE DEFINING LIE by Michael Medved ALL DISCUSSIONS ABOUT the president's predicament, whether at dinner parties or on talk radio, in neighborhood bars or on cable TV, seem to unfold with an almost ritualized predictability...
...A sex lie in this context might have involved a plaintive plea to the effect that "Hillary, honey, I swear that big-haired intern isn't my type and there's never, ever been anything between us...
...He was lying about the survival of his presidency...
...At one point or another, Bill clinton's exasperated defenders invariably declare that the chief executive's social life is his own business...
...if he accepts the notion that clinton has merely lied about sex...
...And most Americans remain convinced that he answered this singular challenge with an outright lie...
...There was nothing private about this response...
...Veteran pundits predicted he would be forced to resign within a matter of weeks, and even his friend and former aide George Stephanopoulos publicly used the "I-word" (impeachment) in discussing Clinton's future...
...The reaction of the leader of the free world to the one decisive crisis of his political career speaks volumes about his fitness to hold the office...
...But it's still only lying about sex, insist the clintonistas...
...The deeper issues involve perjury, obstruction of justice, stonewalling, a consistent pattern of deception, contempt for our legal system...
...But when the president issued his categorical public denial in the Lewinsky matter, he wasn't speaking to his wife—he was speaking to the American people...
...When he confronted the charges against him, his reply was hardly personal—it was profoundly political, and unprecedented...
...If the president indeed failed to tell the truth last January when he stared into TV cameras, wagged his finger at the nation, and declaimed that he had not had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, he wasn't lying about sex...
...Yet this notion involves perhaps the most crucial misunderstanding of the entire controversy...
...No one is so upright or honorable that he hasn't at some time fibbed a bit, or at least shaded the truth, when it comes to life's most intimate arena...
...sex ought to remain a private issue, they say, and this whole scandal is only about sex...
...For the first time, this popular, skillful chief executive encountered a make-or-break juncture in his presidency...
...And if he lied then, he wasn't lying to Hillary—he was lying to us...
...The notion that charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and, worst of all, breaking faith with the American people amount to nothing more than "lies about sex" is absurd...
...The only moment at which he faced a potentially history-making disaster was when his very claim to the office he had craved his whole life appeared suddenly shaky—with the first explosion of Lewinsky-related news last January...
...With all the problems confronting our country, they snarl, who cares whether some middle-aged guy got involved in an affair with an adoring intern...
...As the president's defenders rightly insist, such a statement, however misleading or dishonorable, ought to remain a private matter—of concern only to the chief executive and his wife...
...At this point, the anti-clinton contingent usually sputters off into "higher-ground" defensiveness, suggesting that the president isn't supposed to behave like everybody else, that he ought to set a moral example for the country, that his lies do more damage to the fabric of society than those of ordinary citizens, and so forth and so on into the evening...
...Through either slick leadership or sheer dumb luck (or some combination of the two), Clinton has managed to avoid earth-shaking crises in his terms in office—no Great Depression, no Hiroshima or Korea, no Cuban missile crisis, no Gulf War...
...Indeed, that lie might properly be viewed as the defining moment of his presidency...
...it's not about sex, they bark...
...That is why another line regularly employed by Clinton's apologists remains at best irrelevant and, at worst, thoroughly misleading...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 47
