It Depends on What the Meaning of 'True' Is

Many Republicans were apoplectic regarding Bill Clinton's equivocation about the word 'is' during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And, I must say, they had a point. It was time for Clinton to come clean, and his continued attempts to dance around his transgressions only made matters worse.

It is interesting, however, to compare their fury over Clinton's manipulations of the truth with their silence about, or even defense of, very similar maneuvering on the part of the Bush administration. What's more, Clinton was doing his minuet around events that, while sleazy and showing poor judgment, were quite peripheral to key affairs of state. But the Bush administration is performing the same set of steps to a tune that led the country into war, a matter of life-and-death, not stains on a blue dress.

(As an aside, I think it is interesting to note public reaction to the two scandals. Democrats often said, during the Clinton scandal, that polls showed the American people did not care about a politician's private life. I think they now ought to admit that the current affair shows that the American people don't care about anything a politician does, so long as it doesn't endanger one of their entitlements.)

Consider Condoleezza Rice's recent remarks about President Bush's claim, in his State of the Union address, that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium from Niger. It turned out that the assertion rested on forged documents, and, further, that it was known within the CIA and the administration that the documents were unreliable well before Bush's speech was delivered.

Rice doesn't deny these facts. Instead, she "defends" Bush by trying to demonstrate that he was carefully covering his butt by phrasing his claim in a very particular way. To quote the International Herald Tribune:

As questionable as Rice's tack is as a defense of Bush, it doesn't even really work on its own terms. Bush did not say, "The British government has said that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." He said they had learned it. That implies that it is true, and that the speaker is attesting to its veracity. We might say, for instance, say "Timmy said 2 + 2 = 5, but since then he has learned that 2 + 2 = 4."

In short, this defense is no more robust than was Clinton's puzzling over the meaning of the word 'is.'

Or consider this comment, from the same article: "Bush insisted Saturday that Tenet retained his confidence and urged the country to move on to other matters."

Oh, now it's time to "move on," is it? When did I last hear a president telling the country "it's time to move on"?

This plea strikes me as similar to a murder suspect who has had his alibi blown. "OK," he tells the police, "so I wasn't at that party at the time of the murder. Now that we know that, isn't it time to move on?"

No one in the US government has been punished or forced to resign over a lie that helped lead to the death of thousands of US and Iraqi troops and Iraqi civilians. So, as the details of the lie begin to come to light, why, exactly, is it time to "move on" to other matters? Why shouldn't we, instead, "move on" to the whole truth?