There is no nice way to say this: we can’t afford another famous liar in the White House. America is a strong country, but it may not be able to sustain another fabulist; one can be called an accident, a trick of history, but two would amount to a culture of governance, a way of being.
It is by institutionalizing the acceptability of lies that a great power becomes a punch line.
Bill Clinton lied about many, many things and a lot of Clinton's lies had two common characteristics. They were about very personal things and they were usually denials of things he had been accused of doing. That is, Clinton's lies were at least based in reality. He denied making sexual advances on Paula Jones. He denied having sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky. He denied groping Kathleen Willey. He denied raping Juanita Broderick.
While Clinton's lies were about personal things he had been accused of doing, the settings of these lies exposed him to serious consequences for his lies. He lied under oath during Paula Jones' civil lawsuit against him. He lied to his Cabinet and the country. The consequences include a settlement of the Jones lawsuit, a finding of contempt and a $90,000 fine by a federal judge, impeachment by the House of Representatives. If you read to the bottom good for you. You just read extracts from Peggy Noonan above the fold and Thomas Jipping from below the fold. I've not put snark tags on this because I want to see who recs this without reading through properly. What are we Daily kill Bill? Here's some more cover for the experiment from Reason magazine. The truth has never tested very well for Clinton, and his abilities as a statesman have been most spectacular when crafting cover stories for actual public policy. In 1993, Clinton failed to deliver his promised middle class tax cut, and the country's recovery sputtered: First-quarter gross domestic product growth fell nearly to zero, and full-year growth barely matched that of 1992, the year dubbed by candidate Clinton as showcasing "the worst economy in 50 years."