Think Progress takes a little
trip back in time today to find Karl Rove pontificating on the subject of presidential lies and apologies in 1998. They make the point that Rove hasn't apologized for his lies in the Plame case, which is true.
But when the Republicans got the long knives out after Bill Clinton, first they said it was about the money. Ill-gotten gains and influence peddling and all that, the kind of thing many Republicans do every day as a matter of their basic life strategy. When that didn't pan out they said it was about the sex. Then a bunch of them were caught having affairs that far surpassed anything Clinton did (which doesn't excuse what Clinton did, but still). Then they finally settled, famously, on this: "It's not about the sex. It's about the lying." And they impeached him for it.
Well, okay fine, but here's the thing.
For Bill Clinton's lies to even approach the magnitude of the disastrous effects of President Bush's lies about the Iraq War, Bill Clinton would have had to have received blow jobs from 1,862 different White House interns, then taken them into the basement and had them shot. He would then have to receive blow jobs from 14,021 other White House interns and had them wounded to varying degrees of hideousness and permanence. He would then have to spend
$188,345,000,000 (by the time you click the link, the number will be a lot higher) on the disposing of the interns' bodies, and figured out some way to actually publicize his brutal crimes enough to generate wave after wave of anti-American emotion and action around the world, alienate us from our allies, and sap American morale about the present and the future. He would have had to figure out some way for his blow job/murder policies to inspire terrorist attacks on our allies. He would have had to figure out some way to slow the robust economy by borrowing ruinous amounts of money from foreign countries, and he still would be a long way from figuring out how to put our nation at extreme risk by gutting the armed forces and basically destroying their ability to recruit. He would have had to nationally promote his blow job/murder policy in several State of the Union speeches and in a national campaign, and even when it became clear to everyone that he had lied about every single aspect of the blow job/murder policy, he would have to continue to urge Americans to stay the course.
He would have to do all of this, and it still wouldn't add up to the lies of George W. Bush, because once Clinton was out of office, the blow job murders would stop. The Iraq War, and its aftereffects, are going to be with us for a long, long time.
The MOQUOL--I Can Save You, America!