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The View From The Ground
3/7/99
Why Is This Hard To Understand?
Having just about exhausted thinking through all permutations of the Impeachment situation, I am left holding just one truth that I can't seem to rationalize away. It is one of those little things that seems patently obvious on its face, but about which I have not heard one person, anywhere, anytime state. I am no observational genius, so I am stumped.
We have heard, ad nauseum, from the President's flacks that lying under oath, while serious, does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense because the lie was about a personal pecadillo. The implication is that if he was lying about something suitably serious, say receiving bribes from the Chinese, that he would have been in deep trouble. The impeachability, therefore, is connected to the perceived seriousness of the offense being lied about.
Leaving aside for the now the argument that one law applied consistently is an essential foundation for a predictable and just system of justice, this is exactly, completely, totally, upside down. Impeachment is at heart a decision about the fitness of a person to hold the office of President. Lying under oath violates not only the immediate oath to tell the truth but the larger oath to execute the laws faithfully.
In this context, lying about a little thing is in fact more serious than lying about a big thing. I could be far more understanding of a President who lies under oath to avoid, say, ending up in the electric chair. One can understand the mental wrestling match such a President would face: "Do I break my solemn oath in order to stay alive, or do I remain true at the cost of being packed off to the great Lincoln Bedroom in the sky?" Lying about silly little things, for example to avoid political embarrassment over an extramarital affair, shows just how little the person cares about their oath. Lying about a speeding ticket ought to be immediately impeachable. A President who cares so little about his most serious and solemn oath that he would break it in order to hide a trivial problem demonstrates that he CAN NOT BE TRUSTED to observe any oath at any time.
President Clinton demonstrated, by the ease and casualness with which he lied about "just sex", that the oath he took means less to him than just about anything else. This probably doesn't surprise anyone, but I think it would have been a more effective focus of the impeachment effort, and a sound rebuttal to the "just about sex" argument. A President who is willing to lie about "just sex" is willing to lie about anything, anywhere, anytime. His oath turns out to be, like so many traditions he has desecrated, nothing more than a tool to be used or thrown away as the situation dictates.
Even if one had no inherent moral qualms with situational lying, there is still a certain utilitarian calculus most liars would apply: Is the risk of getting caught worth the reward that the lie would bring? To be the sort of liar who would abandon this calculus raises one to the level of the sociopath, to become one who would lie simply because one can. This is the sort of man we have decided to retain in the White House.
Yay, us.