From today's Daily Dish:
It occurs to me that the two most famous statements of the last two presidents will be "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," and "We do not torture." And both were lies in plain English, were understood to be lies by the two men involved, and yet both were subject to mental and legal asterisks that could give both men some kind of formal, if absurd, deniability.I really have nothing to add to that.
For one statement, we impeached. For another, we kept on walking.
Sometimes history is not tragedy repeated as farce; it's farce repeated as tragedy.
5 comments:
I think he's wrong. I just need to go back to the same point and hammer it again: torture is a gradient and sexual relations is not.
Having a gradient doesn't give the excuse that all acts are permissible, but it's demonstrably not the same thing as "She didn't blow me in the Oval Office." when she, actually, blew him in the Oval Office.
A human *can* actually believe that water boarding is not torture.
A person can actually believe a blow job is not sex. In fact, a survey taken before the scandal found that a significant fraction of young people held that opinion. Some even believed that anal sex was not sex.
Did Bill Clinton have sex with Monica Lewinski is an open question that depends on how you define sex.
Oh yeah, and as creepy as you and I think a fifty year old fucking a twenty something is, we're in the minority. I have been mocked by people who frequently post on this blog for my position that I find women my age more alluring than twenty-year-olds.
I was talking about "sexual relations" not "sex" which is maybe a quibble. I think it's insane to think Bill Clinton wasn't lying about not having had sexual relations with that woman.
And my mind still boggles at the whole "definition of the word "'is'". That was surreal. In fact I think it was so unbelievable a thing to say that collectively the world just sort of has tried to forget it because we all kind of know how weird it was and we're pretending we didn't notice.
I think 20 year-olds can look more beautiful than basically anything else ever, but that's a very different feeling than the one that would lead me to have any kind of sexual/romantic relationship with someone 30 years younger than me.
The fact that there is a continuum of torture does not strip the word of all meaning. Bush repeatedly and insistently asserted that his administration did not engage in a practice that it's pretty indisputable that they did.
And this was really the point -- both Clinton and Bush lied. Clinton's was a bald-faced lie (let's be honest), and Bush's lie was predicated on his personal redefinition of the term in a way that was not shared by any other disinterested person on the planet. If you want to say "well, it wasn't a lie if he actually believed it," I refer you to Sully's caveat of the "mental asterisks," which I am sure allows W to believe in his heart that he told the truth.
And of course, the real point is the many-times-repeated observation that the lie about a blowjob merited impeachment, but the lies regarding torture will not.
Post a Comment