There are just some lines that politicians should leave to others like Senator Vitter (R., La.) denouncing others as “prostitutes” or former Senator Craig (R., Idaho) denouncing the critics for “pandering” to voters (as hypothetical examples). Bill Clinton reached that point Monday when he asked without a shadow of discomfort or awkwardness when voters really wanted a president who would lie to them with a straight face.
Clinton demanded to know “who wants a president who will knowingly, repeatedly tell you something he knows is not true?” He was not done yet as the irony level began to rise above his waist: “When I was a kid, if I got my hand caught in the cookie jar, where it wasn’t supposed to be, I turned red in my face, and I took my hand out of the cookie jar. You’ve got to give it to Governor Romney. When he gets his hand caught in the cookie jar, he just digs down for more cookies.”
Well, I have to give it to Clinton. Politicians often “transcend” their past votes and scandals. However, to set out to lecture folks on the need for presidents to be fully honest and truthful with the American people is not exactly a strength for our 42nd President. I understand his point. But, as one of the people who testified in the Clinton impeachment hearings, I wonder whether he is the guy who should deliver it.
Source:
Erich,
You seem to have gotten the purist’s diarrhea, or as some would say, ýou just discovered that your ideal world is not reality.
Who denied you anything. I just said, clearly I thought, that you are fighting reality, not facing it. “heeyyy, what’s this skit outside my door?”
I learned once that politicians lie. It is necessary to gain office and behold it. What is said are all contingency promises. Not contracts—-and I did not say that, but note it again the validity of that.
I think Clinton tells far more serious lies than the one that he thought that gentlemen of honor among thieves would accept in the name of the corp. Who I screw is no business of the Speaker of the House, a man with a long list of adulteries.
So, unfortuantely, we are left in reality with judging the difference between psychopathic liars, like Romney: “Come on pooch, in your box, you’ll enjoy the ride.”
And those not psychopathic, who say “I plan to….” and who get stopped by an invetarate “we like whites” Congress.
Lastly, what Malisha said.
I think the whole thing here is a matter of context and precise use of language. I think Clinton should have said, “You don’t want a president who will lie to you about matters that affect your freedom, your financial viability, and your government’s actions affecting you.”
And, by the way, your president is not responsible to tell you the truth about sex. Ask either your mommy, your daddy, or your therapist about that.
I just found out something.. Apparently Clinton lied about the Surplus because Socks, the cat, might have pissed on the White House carpet.
Clinton was so worried about Socks losing fur, so it was absolutely necessary to lie about the “surplus”.
(Erich he answered on tv because he was asked on tv.) Your hatred for Mr. Clinton makes anything I might say irrelevant to your position. You don;t want my reply, No point to my responding to rhetoric and rhetorical.
The Oval Office- Now open 24 hours… It’s now a massage parlor.
Oval office head.. Do they still have private “models” in the oval office, or did that end with Clinton?
Let’s ask his daughter. Or, let’s ask his wife.
I just saw something that Lee wrote. “Would I want my daughter learning that about me?”
Are you f—ing kidding me?!!!
First of all-I would never cheat on my wife. Second of all, do you really think his daughter didn’t know about it? HE’S THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES-NOTHING HE DOES IS PRIVATE.
Lee, to say that Clinton lied on TV to protect his daughter is crazy. Do you really believe that?
So let me that straight.. Forget the entire country.. He did it for Chelsea..
Do you honestly believe that? Seriously.. After everything you know about Bill Clinton, a womanizing liar who made a mockery of the White House, you actually fall for the excuse some groupie made up saying it was all for his daughter????
Did I read that correctly? Lee, please tell me you left something out. Please tell me that you don’t really buy that.
LOL.. “Clinton went on national TV and denied an affair because of his daughter”..
How about his wife????
Why would he go on TV? Why not just pull Chelsea aside and lie to her face?
Bringing up a shooting at a Jewish temple as a terrorist activity and putting that on the President is absolutely the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.
But, if you want to go there, let’s.. The Jewish shooter was caught. The snipers were caught. Muhammed Reza was caught and he didn’t even kill anyone!!!
Even though I don’t credit Bush for the police catching these psychos shooting guns, it sounds to me like you might want to give Bush credit for that. If you think that those were terrorists acts, and they were apprehended, then perhaps you owe Bush that much.
I personally think none of that has anything to do with terrorism, except for Reza-but again-he killed nobody.
But to go from al Qaeda attacks on US interests, where hundreds of people and even thousands of people were killed in those attacks, to a shooting at a Jewish temple in Seattle is one hell of a jump.
I could not disagree more with that, Lee.
The fact of the matter is, Bush put a stop to bin Laden’s attacks during his administration and there is nothing you can do to take that away from him.
Nice try, though..
Erich I explained why I put out the entire list via that click. You don;t want to read past what you want to read and have an argument I have not entered into with you.
There is more then enough info out there that Bush had a warning about 9/11 in time to do something. If you don;t want to count the casualties from 9/11 no way I can make you.
Lee, so you’re mad at Brownie for the response. Am I correct?
And what do you have to say about the fact that FEMA went to officials in LA BEFOREHAND and they were turned away.
What more do you expect from FEMA? If they’re preemptive in their approach, yet turned away at the gate, what do you expect them to do?
Let’s call it like it is: Brownie is the one you’re mad at.
So what’s the issue with Bush, again? Brownie is Bush’s man? So what…
Idealist, and while we’re at it: Obama does not have the nation’s full support.
The Presdient who had the most support from the consituents, was President GW Bush. His approval rating immediately after 9/11 was, what? 92%?
Obama had 52% of the popular vote. I’d say that he does not have the full support of the country.
I didn’t vote for Obama, but he’s my President and I support him. There’s not enough of that in this country.
I hope Obama can deliver. I don’t see it happening, but Obama has my support 100% because he’s the leader of my country. I hope I’m wrong. I hope that Obama can turn things around in this country, but let’s face the facts: we’re fighting a war, we’ve got other issues such as the economy, the trade deficit, and manufacturing in this country is becoming non-existent.
However, I’m smart enough to know that the Presdient of the country does not have a whole lot to do with the economy when it comes down to it. I know that the President does not directly control trade imbalance in a country with free trade. What it boils down to is, people don’t understand that these problems are the direct and indirect result of our own actions.
If you own a pair of shoes, you support China. We don’t make shoes in this country anymore. So we really don’t have a choice. But, when we buy things as consumers which are imported instead of buying domestic products, we don’t realize the implications of that action.
So after it becomes a major problem, we like to deflect the responsibility and point the finger at someone else.
Sorry, but I don’t do that. I’m more conservative than liberal, but I do not fall for either agenda. I prefer to make my own decisions and I don’t like it when people make ignorant accusations of the President just because it’s the norm.
Let’s face the facts: Bush did not create this mess that we’re in. He added to it, but we weren’t in good shape prior to his terms. But the press got out of control and everyone without a clue blamed some of the most idiotic things on Bush.
I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now. I don’t like people blaming Obama for things that he has no control over either.
Idealist, you wonder how I cannot sleep “together” with myself, when all I did was make a comment about a former President, a known liar, who made a stupid comment?
Do you see the problem with that?
But since you asked, I’ll tell you how I sleep “together with myself”. I sleep at night knowing that I don’t have to bring up Bush like these other people are doing when this whole discussion is about Clinton and Romney.
I sleep at night knowing that I am not going to be a complete moron and fall for the hypocritical comments of one of the biggest liars the White House has ever seen.
I sleep at night knowing that I don’t pick and choose whose lies are okay and whose lies are not okay.
After everything that is said on this post, you wonder how I can sleep? Are you kidding?
You can go right ahead and be a fool if you want-but I’m not going to. I’m going to call a spade a spade. Clinton is a liar, Romney is a liar, and while we’re at it, so is Bush, so is Obama, and so is everyone else in office.
I’ll tell you what, Idealist.. I’ll become the world’s biggest hypocrite and make a complete tool of myself, just so I can get your respect.
I’m not here to make anyone mad. I’m not here to take sides. I’m not here to do anything but embrace my right to express my opinion and hopefully get a little bit of intelligent conversation and back and forth. For example, Lexmanifest and I can have a conversation without throwing insults and at the end of the day, we can respect each other.
However, I will say this: if anyone wants to start in, BRING IT ON. We’re on a website posting comments. I respect your right to have an opinion, perhaps you should respect mine.
If you want to be duped by something that’s so obvious, you go right ahead. I will watch from the sidelines, because I want no part of that.
If I can’t make a comment about something that seems so wrong, then maybe I should start to worry more about social issues rather than comments. If we as Americans, let people make such comments after being guilty of the same damn thing, then we are in big, big trouble.
Lee, what you’re referring to are a bunch of shootings. The Seattle Jewish shooting? I live in Seattle and even the moronic liberals here didn’t consider that a terrorist attack. I was two blocks away at the time of that shooting and everyone considered that a hate crime more so than a terrorist attack.
If you honestly think of the sniper shootings as a terrorist attack, then that’s your right. However, al Qaeda was then and is now on the run. They were not during the Clinton administration. In fact, Clinton was offered bin Laden twice and didn’t act.
If you’re going to consider those as terrorist attacks, then let’s consider all of the “terrorism” before Bush’s term.. Ruby Ridge (in my opinion, not a terrorist attack), Waco (again, not a terrorist attack in my opinion)..
Do you consider those terrorist attacks?
As far as Bush’s respnose to Katrina, are you forgetting that FEMA offered assistance prior to the onset of the hurricane? And that nutjob mayor turned them away. Do you remember that?
It wasn’t the hurricane that was the problem. I’m in the construction materials business myself, and I can tell you that the problem was the levee system. If you want to blame anyone, blame the US Corp of Engineers.
How can you blame Bush for what FEMA does anyway? I don’t get that. FEMA was turned away by Mayor Nagin. They were going to “shelter in place”.
Pretty much everyone knows that now, so I don’t understand why someone as intelligent as you seem would even bring that up. That is really reaching, in my opinion.
I posted the whole paragraph (and click) for context.That was the first google article I clicked. I could find you more but you can do that on your own. If you care to remember.
As fir Katrina remember Brownie? Don;t give a Bush did fine on that response, Brownie was his man.
Erich,
Yeah Erich I said that. Obama has conducted himself with class and dignity while President.
No I do not think that Clinton did. He had boundless political talent and could have accomplished great things. Instead, he pissed it all away because he had no class. He had a zipper problem and his escapades and his lies about it derailed our government for two years.
I can see that you feel strongly about my comments. I think however you may have missed the point I was trying to make.
“Just maybe, America has become a culture of liars” was the first statement in the post. And I mean generally, when I use the word culture, all of us. Indeed I’m sure everyone of our 44 Presidents have lied to the American people in some form. That being said I do distinguish between lies based on their content, context and circumstances. I don’t see everything in concrete black and white terms.
The development of my point in case you might of missed it and I suspect you did, is simply that Romney and his handlers set a new high watermark for prevarication. The factual truth simply didn’t matter to them. And they said as much, (won’t let fact checkers dictate our campaign). Not to mention the Jeeping (yes I know it’s not a word, at least until now) of himself in his last desperate attempts to salvage Ohio. It really has nothing to do with whether he is a R or if he had been a D.
History has judged Bush’s lies to orchestrate the invasion of Iraq harshly for the fraud it was. Our fourth estate is still feeling chastised for their abject failure to engage in any semblance of responsible independent questioning and reporting about the WMD fraud being perpetrated on not just Americans, but the rest of the world as well.
I guess the bottom line is that there are ignorant people and intelligent people. The difference has nothing to do with whether you are educated or not. It has to do with the individuals capacity to understand and appreciate nuance.
The profligate lieing that characterized Romney’s campaign was pervasive. At some point it must be said to either encompass pathology or bad character. Romney self defined himself as having poor character, if not psychopathy. His effort to characterize Obama as dishonest were pretty much limited to his repetition of his menu of “you promised in 2007 that you would” do this and this and this and you didn’t. His lame attempt to skewer Obama on these failed political promises is a whole different kettle of fish from his assuming a position, getting questioned about it and trying to spin his way through it and then when finally cornered simply denying that he had ever taken the position in the first place.
So if you want to boil it all down, there are liars and there people and presidents who have told lies. They aren’t all the same. Some lies are more damaging than others. Our responsibility as voters is to make an informed and hopefully sophisticated judgement about the candidates. In a perfect world nobody would lie about anything. It not being a perfect world, I made my judgement that Romney was, is and will probably remain a liar. That judgement made my choice on who to vote for easy.
Regards, Lexmanifesta
Erich,
I wonder how you can sleep together with yourself. Really.
Doesn’t the thought of imperfect presidents keep you tossing and turning.
Lex, just a question. I read your entire post.. You said that Obama has “class and dignity” in office. Am I correct?
Do you think Clinton did? Clinton turned the Oval Office into a massage parlor-and didn’t even have the decency to at least have a good looking woman get his rocks off.
Then he lied UNDER OATH. Now, all of the sudden, he’s the moral fiber of America and demands that our President be honest.
I will never understand why people attack someone else from the other side when one of their party’s elected officials makes a complete ass out of themselves. Like it’s going to change the fact that Clinton looks like a horse’s ass.
It’s like whenever someone brings up the fact that Obama said that he’d been to 58 or 59 states in the first campaign, people bring up Bush and all the stupid things he said.
Whenever it’s a member of your own party saying something so incredibly stuipid or ubsurd, it’s okay. There’s always some excuse. But then the next move is to attack the other side.
When in the living hell will we ever hold anyone accountable, other than Bush? Seriously. The fact of the matter is, most Americans have absolutely no idea about economics, but are so quick to blame the economy on Bush, four years later. Bush took office 21 Jan. of 2001 but a recession started in March of 2001. If that’s not inheriting a recession, I don’t know what is, but does anyone remember that?
Clinton was absolutely horrible for our economy, but people still believe that we had a surplus during his terms… Clinton took credit for the surge in the economy which was actually due to the high tech boom, which was so mismanaged it created a huge mess. Why didn’t Clinton tax investment when he watched capital being poured into companies which had no sustainable business plan and never turned a profit? Why didn’t Clinton slow the growth?
Because he was too busy chasing skirt and taking credit for “the largest economic expansion in American history”, which is the biggest bunch of nonsense ever. If he didn’t “borrow” from Social Security and all the other sources, we would have had a deficit, which we actually did have because a deficit is the difference between the revenue and the expenses. And borrowing is not “revenue”.
Call a spade a spade. When someone makes a stupid comment, don’t let them get away with it. Wake up, America. We’re being played from both sides. If we don’t do something to stop this garbage, we’re all going to be in bad shape soon. Think about the trade deficit between the US and China. Do you realize that our economy and money supply shrinks every quarter by billions of dollars? We don’t have the money to spend to excite the economy because we’re buying everything from China.
And that’s another thing. Obama appointed some jackass from GM to create American jobs. The only problem with that, was the fact that the guy from General Motors had just sent billions of dollars of jobs over to China himself. Does anyone care about that?
Do people really understand how the economy works? I’m not talking about people who are posting, because the people who are posting seem intelligent. But ask yourself this: how many Americans know the difference between “debt” and “deficit”? I’ve heard more people say that we have a sixteen trillion dollars deficit more than I care to hear.
And the scary thing is: THESE PEOPLE VOTE.
People are so misinformed it should scare you. People are sheep. They try and talk about things they know nothing about and don’t realize how stupid they actually sound and look.
Hey Lexmanifest, so it’s okay to lie about certain things?
Who decides what the acceptable things are? You? The Democrats? The Republicans?
The problem with what you said, and I appreciate the fact that you’re obviously an intelligent person, is you excuse some but not others.
Here’s something to think about:
We were attacked 6 times under Clinton.. World Trade Center 1, Nairobi, Dar es Salam, USS Cole in Yemen, Saudi Arabia army barracks, and OK City.
Clinton did absolutely NOTHING to stop the terrorist attacks. Bush put an end to it.
Clinton enforced a no fly zone in Iraq in 1997(?)-why? Because Hussien was not in compliance with Resoluation 1441? Or, did he order air attacks in the no fly zone because he wanted to shift the Lewinsky “BJ” from the news?
Did you complain about Clinton’s air strikes? Or is it something that you only care about when the other party does it?
That’s my point… We need to start calling politicians out, regardless of what party they’re in.
I, personally, don’t care about Republican or Democrat. I like some of the things and hate some of the things they all do. I like Clinton telling China that they are on the “wrong side of the fence when it comes to human rights” and I like Clinton’s reform of welfare. But I’m not a Democrat. That doesn’t mean I can’t like some of the things he did.
I like the fact that Bush had the terrorists on the run rathan than attacking us. I don’t like the fact that Bush didn’t release the 87 other security cameras of when the “airplane” hit the Pentagon. I don’t think an airliner hit the Pentagon.
I personally like the idea of holding everyone, regardless of their party, to the highest standard possible.
No, President Clinton, it’s not okay to lie. No, Bush, it’s not okay to hide from the truth. No, Obama, you’re not going to fix anything playing golf in every country other than the country of which you are the President.
If you’re going to be calling people out, at least be fair about it. Don’t make excuses for some and attack others.
That’s my two cents.
Bush put a stop to terrorist attacks, says Erich. No, he did hot. “As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf wrote after Jeb Bush’s Tampa speech :
What people mean when they say he kept [us] safe seems to be that there wasn’t another terrorist attack like 9/11. By that standard, he kept us no safer than Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama. And even leaving out 9/11, for reasons that are never explained, Bush was president during the anthrax attacks, the Beltway sniper incident, the Los Angeles airport shooting, the Mohammed Reza SUV incident, the Seattle Jewish Federation shooting, and the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina. Again, I don’t blame Bush for the victims of those incidents, but to harken back to his tenure as a time when the president kept America safe is ahistorical” http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2012/09/11/no-bush-didnt-keep-us-safe
“
So Clinton lied because he didn’t want his daughter to find out? But he doesn’t care about his daughter knowing that he lies? That makes zero sense.
Clinton was the one who had the press conference when he said, “Read my lips, I did not have sexual intercourse with that woman.” That wasn’t something Ken Starr set up…
The bottom line is: when it comes to politics, people lose their common sense.
I don’t care why Clinton lied. I just don’t care. But what scares me, is when a known liar-who was impeached for lying under oath-says that we need a President in the White House who tells the truth.
Do we really not see the problem with that? Seriously. Take your head out of your pooper and land the shuttle. Come back to planet earth.
Clinton lied, Bush lied, Obama lied, Reagan lied, Nixon lied, Carter lied, even honest Gerry lied.. That’s what politicians do-they lie and they lie like it’s nothing.
My fear is, we, the people who elect these morons, fall for their nonsense without even questioning their past! That’s what happened in Germany before WW2.
We need to question authority. We need to hold these jackasses to the highest standard. When Clinton makes a comment like that, we need to let him know that we don’t want to be fed a line of absolute crap.
Lexmanifesta,
You said it!
Sure Clinton shocked us, at least some who were naive such
as I. But then we learned.
Your comments about Romney’s disdain for holding to the same message is very pertinent.
Some say that Obama does not fully have the nation’s support. To that I say BS. He, as did Romney, concentrated on the battleground states. And he won them, that is how it works now. The elctoral count shows that.
Idealist,
I just cringe at the thought of what it would have said about us had the Romney approach prevailed. Romney’s cynical approach was too much even for a cynic.
Just maybe, America has has become a culture of liars. Let’s start at Nixon. He lied and it was likely the result of serious pathology. Clinton lied but it was at least from a human perspective, understandable why. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton, Wolfowitz and probably Powell, lied floridly to justify an unwarranted act of aggression without any legtimate basis. Remember Rummy smarming it up with the flippant contention that the Iraqi oil would pay for the war?
Old Sicilian saying, “the fish rots from the head down.” Where we have a history of the head (president) lieing floridly and suffering no or little consequence, it is probable that the rest of us will adopt the view that it is OK to do so as well. There is seemingly no premium in the realm of politics for veracity and integrity.n Tis is a sorry lesson for all of us.
The disturbing thing is that we just saw a campaign to become the new head of state where one of the candidates had handlers that kicked off the general election campaign with an etch-a -sketch metaphor. Essentially acknowledging that much of what had been previously represented, with all sincerity at the time, were just words and would in fact be retracted or revised. This of course was followed up by the candidate’s managers with the pearl of “We are not going to let the fact checkers dictate our campaign” That was possibly the last truthful declaration to come out of the Romney campaign.
Romney proceeded to execute the plan with verve. He was a stranger to the truth. He lied so frequently and floridly that the media bemoaned the fact that they couldn’t keep up with his lies. When confronted with the fact of opposite positions adamantly maintained as representing his strong beliefs he would contend he hadn’t or had never taken that position. His campaign made a bet that the electorate could be sold the big lie and all the little lies as well because they were to ignorant to not be susceptible to being manipulated by the PAC money that Rove and others had available to propagandize them with. Romney made the wrong bet. The majority recognized him for what he was, someone that so craved power that he would say absolutely anything to acquire it. The electorate and the media were left struggling to determine where Romney stood and what he represented. The electorate determined that Romney wasn’t trustworthy.
Way back at the beginning of the campaign a comedic talent was asked by a certain liberal political commentator if he thought that Romney was a “flip-flopper”. With perfect timing and dead pan delivery he said; I’m not saying he’s a flip-flopper but if someone told Mitt Romney that the next president of the United States was going to be a black woman—he’d schedule his operation tomorrow. As we were to learn during the remainder of the campaign, life does imitate art and yes I do consider what comedians, especially satirists do, as art.
I believe what Americans want in a president is; intelligence, integrity, leadership, an advocate for social justice, respect for all of us and the willingness to strive always to subordinate the interests of the special interests to the long term good of the country
Though Obama has been less than perfect and has been a great disappointment on many issues that are very important to me, he has in general I believe tried to improve this country. Notwithstanding some pretty outrageous attacks on his quotient of “Americanism” he has conducted himself with class and dignity that is a credit to the office. Without question America’s standing and image in the rest of the increasingly shrinking world we live in has been enhanced by Obama’s policy’s. Considering where we were four years ago, in my mind that warrants a second term.
Regards, Lexmanifesta
He said he lied because he didnt want his daughter to find out about it from the TV. I believe him. He had a teenage daughter. Would you want your daughter learning about someting like that from some repiorter and the news?
Does it bother anyone that a lying President says that we need a President who tells the truth?
Anyone?
Who in the hell cares what Clinton lied about. The fact that he lied about something insignificant should make it all the worse! Usually people lie because they’ve got good reason to. If Clinton lied about something that was none of our business, then he lied just to lie?
I urge Americans to think-long and hard about the things you swallow. Put partisanship aside, because Democrats and Republicans all lie and hide behind this ubsurd ideology “the other side is lying to you”.
If you’re going to lie, at least have a good reason. Clinton lied outright and nobody-not a single person on this earth can make that fact go away. Regardless of what he lied about, the man lied his Irish ass off.
I’m not attacking him because he’s a democrat. I’m not attacking him at all, actually. I’m saying that the man is throwing stones from a glass house, and for some reason, the intelligence of those who fall for his stupid remark should be questioned.
When did we forget about common sense? Calling Clinton out for making such a stupid comment doesn’t mean you can’t like the guy. I like some of the things the guy. However, who in the hell does he think he is making comments about the American voters electing a President who “doesn’t lie”? Does he think that we’re THAT stupid?
Apparently, some of us are…