The Clinton Lies That Count

(Washington, D.C.): The emerging conventional wisdom is that President Clinton is going to
stop
lying about his relationship with “That Woman,” Monica Lewinsky. According to the pundits, if
he lies by claiming that he was selflessly doing it just to protect his family, the greatest escape
artist since Houdini may dodge the potentially fatal political bullet now apparently headed his
way.

This remarkable proposition depends not only on the willingness of a forgiving public to look
the
other way at presidential perjury. It also seems predicated upon an oft-heard response to
pollsters: the American people think that, as long as their President doesn’t lie about the
important things — like national security, for example — they aren’t inclined to be sticklers about
his chronic mendacity in personal matters.

Not Just Little Lies

Most Americans must know, however, an elementary fact of human behavior:
People who can’t
bring themselves to tell you the truth about small things generally seem incapable of being
consistently truthful about the big ones.

Whether this is actually a universal reality or not, it certainly seems to apply in Mr. Clinton’s
case.
In an instance perhaps of “it takes one to know one,” Joe Klein — the unmasked “anonymous”
author of Primary Colors, a book about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign
built on lies —
brilliantly described Clinton’s pathology a few years back in a Newsweek cover story
entitled “The
Politics of Promiscuity.”

Particularly revealing is a exchange that reportedly occurred in 1992 when James Carville
complains that Clinton’s playing fast-and-loose with the truth is giving his then-campaign manager
fits. Candidate Clinton’s smirking response that “I haven’t been caught yet” is not simply the
signature of a rake. It is emblematic of a gambler who is addicted to the thrill of staying one step
ahead of the law, the press, the women in his life, his political foes, etc.

The Big Lies Affecting the Nation’s Security

Unfortunately, the big things the President is currently lying about are not just putting his
personal
place in history and the Presidency in harm’s way. Increasingly, his inability to tell the truth is
jeopardizing the national security. Consider a few illustrative examples:

• Lying About the Missile Threat: The President has on more than 130
  occasions — including
  a State of the Union address — told the American people that there are no ballistic missiles
  targeted at them. This is either absolutely untrue or a temporary state of affairs that can
  change so speedily as to be strategically irrelevant, as the House Republican leadership and the
  blue-ribbon Rumsfeld Commission, among others, have pointed out to him.

The good news is that a national poll
commissioned last week by the Center for
Security Policy, the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation and the
Claremont Institute found that 65% of the American people don’t buy this
presidential line.⁽¹⁾ What is more, sizeable
majorities are unpersuaded by his
assurances that he has achieved effective “detargeting” agreements with Russia and
China. And fully 86% are worried about the missiles now being acquired by the likes
of Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

The bad news is that this latest poll confirms what earlier ones have found: Just
over one-in-four Americans (29%) could correctly answer that the United
States has no protection against the missiles that they recognize, despite the
President’s misrepresentations, are a real threat. Consequently, the public is
largely ignorant of the danger posed by the policy of assured U.S. vulnerability to
which the Clinton-Gore Administration is so attached that it is willing to
dissemble, rather than deploy the needed anti-missile defenses.

• Lying About Proliferation: The President has proven willing, in a
  quintessential Clinton
  phrase, to “fudge the facts” about the actual involvement of the Chinese and Russians in
  missile technology transfers and other proliferation activities. For instance, in the interest of
  clearing the way for the sale of American nuclear reactors to China, he has actually formally
  certified in writing that Beijing is behaving itself. And, as Congress sought to punish Russian
  entities for helping Iran’s rapidly progressing ballistic missile development program, Mr.
  Clinton and his team ran interference for Moscow, vetoing the sanctions legislation approved
  by overwhelming majorities in both houses. (Their excuses rang particularly hollow after the
  Kremlin finally got around to sanctioning seven of the Russian firms involved.)

• Lying About His Concern for the U.S. Military: Last September,
  President Clinton told the
  American military that “There is a line that I simply cannot cross, and that line is the safety and
  security of our men and women in uniform.” With these words, he rejected the intense
  pressure he was then under to sign an international ban on anti-personnel landmines. He
  seemed to recognize that such a ban would clearly have jeopardized not only the safety of the
  armed forces but also potentially impaired their ability to prevail on future battlefields.

It turns out, though, that what appeared to be a principled and courageous stance was
nothing more than one more expedient Clinton lie. In recent weeks, he has issued a
Presidential Decision Directive that requires the Defense Department to halt the use of
all anti-personnel landmines between now and 2006, by which time he intends to have
the U.S. sign up to the landmine ban. So much for the safety of U.S. troops and the
line he would not cross at their expense.

• Lying About His Treatment of Israel: Mr. Clinton recently declared that
  he had not given
  Israel a deadline to reach agreement on the surrender of additional territory to Yasser Arafat, a
  man he routinely describes and treats as a reliable partner for Middle East peace. These are
  lies with potentially profound implications for long-term U.S. interests in the region and the
  security of this nation’s most important ally there.

The truth is that the United States has for months been using successive deadlines as
part a Clinton campaign to euchre Israel into making concessions with which it literally
cannot live. All the while, the President has continued to ignore and to conceal
Arafat’s systematic and comprehensive failure to live up to his obligations — the
essential test of his reliability.

The Bottom Line

This is an illustrative — though hardly exhaustive — litany of Presidential mendaciousness
about
matters that qualify, by any reasonable definition, as “big” things. It would be vastly more
important for Mr. Clinton to issue “mea culpas” about these sorts of lies, than about his
relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. At the very least, by so doing he might allow some
corrective
actions to be taken — and thus avoid, perhaps, the sort of lasting damage that usually
comes of lying.

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1. For a fuller treatment of the results of this poll, see the Center’s
website at www.security-policy.org