Repeat the Lie Enough Times...

Every once in a while, a gross popular misconception from days of old will come back into the spotlight, offering a valuable chance for a public reexamination and perhaps correction. Traditionally, such moments are clumsily missed, squandered or disregarded. It's a different story, but with the same result, in cases where that misconception was intentionally created in the first place. Then such opportunities are more often deliberately avoided.
So shall it be, yet again, with Bill Clinton's acts of perjury.


"Been a long time since law school, Newt. What's this "pudgery" thang again?"


The commission of a felony by a sitting President of the United States was studiously ignored once more this week when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich publicly acknowledged during an interview that he was having an extramarital affair during the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton on perjury charges.
The most commonly circulated version of the story was written by Ben Evans with the notoriously partisan Associated Press. The lead starts with a convoluted non sequitur culminating with a simple statement of falsehood.

"Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair"

First things first.
First: Not that it has anything whatsoever to do with the matter at hand, but... Gingrich was indeed having an affair during Clinton's 1998 impeachment on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The affair was acknowledged during Gingrich's divorce proceedings in 1999. He has since married the congressional aide with whom he was involved. All of this is utterly beside the point because...
Second: No, Gingrich did not lead any "charge against President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair" or any other of Clinton's reputed plethora of affairs.
Not true.
False.
Didn't happen.
Gingrich and others, including reluctant special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, prosecuted Clinton for the crime of perjury.
During a sworn deposition, the President of the United States perjured himself, denying his messing around with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This is a high crime. For anyone who had the wrong idea, or has willfully tried to forget, that's what it was about.
Several paragraphs into the dispatch, well past the point at which many hurried, harried, smaller news operations simply stop reading wire stories, Evans finally lets Gingrich explain this fundamental point.

"'The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge,' the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. '...you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials.'"

For those who actually read that far, there it is.
It was not about Altoids, cigars, blue dresses or the correct definition of the word "is." It was not about what Clinton did in the Oval Office.
It was about what he said under oath, the fact that it was a lie and the fact that such a lie constitutes perjury.

NOT A CRIME: Clinton lies about sex in a press conference, denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

In the years since Clinton was impeached, openly partisan operatives and their fellow travelers in the media have repeatedly tried to minimize, distort, and distract from this simple fact by studiously attaching irrelevant qualifying clauses to the truth. A popular version of their narrative is that some nasty people tried to "get" President Clinton for lying... "about sex."
Lying about sex?
Well, gee whiz. Everybody does that.
There is, however, a world of difference between "lying about sex" and committing perjury in a sworn deposition. "Everybody" may perhaps "lie about sex." but perjury is a crime. The actual content of an act of perjury is irrelevant.
Again, the actual subject matter Clinton was lying about doesn't matter. Clinton could have been lying about his golf game or his fishing prowess. What matters is not that he merely "lied." Hell, even when Clinton stood before the media, raised his finger and, with the straightest face imaginable, lied to the whole world saying "I did not have sex with that woman," not even that rose to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor.

CRIME: Clinton perjures himself under oath in a sworn deposition, denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

But when Clinton denied the affair in a sworn deposition, that was an act of perjury, a crime, an impeachable offense. Ben Evans' AP story continues its distortion with more gymnastics in falsehood and irrelevancy.

"Gingrich in the interivew, however, said that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity."

Ah, always fun to hear nutjobs try to assume some moral high ground by throwing around the word "hypocrite." Of course an adulterer like Gingrich truly would be the most shameless hypocrite if he had atually been "pursuing Clinton's infidelity."
In point of fact he wasn't.
One more time... Gingrich was pursuing Clinton for an act that was criminal, not merely sinful.
Not that anyone in the Clinton-worshipping newsrooms of America, or abroad care about the facts.
"Gingrich had affair while hounding Clinton over Monica," barks a headline in The Times Online.
Once again: Yes he did and no he wasn't.
Unsurprisingly, the AP writeup was picked up and repeated by battalions of news organizations, big and small, with its historical errors and false assertions largely intact and unchallenged.
Some of them honestly may not have known any better.
Others, clearly, would rather grind political axes than honestly inform the public.
One might expect better from The New York Times, at least going by its journalistic history. But, based on its twisted ideological bent, the Gray Lady was true to form, running the AP lie largely unchanged beneath an ostensibly neutral and accurate headline “Gingrich Says He Cheated on His Wife.”
Likewise CBS' website sticks to the facts in the headline, but parrots the same AP fabrication, complete with the prevarication its opening graf.
Anti-American British rag The Independent ran its own bit of fiction by Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles:

“Newt Gingrich, the conservative who led the Republican revolution of the early 1990s, has admitted he was having an extramarital affair even as he called for the impeachment of Bill Clinton nine years ago over his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.”

This mythical concoction rephrases the fib that Clinton was impeached for cheating but also manages to squeeze in slams against conservatives and Republicans while dismissing Clinton’s involvement with Monica as a “dalliance.” (Of course Clinton could have simply shaken her hand and lying about it under oath would still be a crime.)
The Irish Independent spews its own double barreled lie… about sex, of course… going from its untrue headline, “Gingrich had affair while hounding Bill over Monica" ("Hounding," you gotta love that.), to its untrue lead.

Mar 10th: NEWT Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, admitted yesterday that he was cheating on his own wife when he led the Republican charge to impeach Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair.

ABC manages a better pretense at impartiality. At the very, very least, it sticks to reality in its story on its website, and in its factual, if strained headline Gingrich Admits to Affair During Clinton Impeachment.
Yes it does, however, still indulge in the non sequitur of shoehorning a mention of Clinton’s impeachment into the story of Gingrich’s confession. While the impeachment reference is not in its proper place, namely nowhere near the Gingrich piece, it is at least accurately made, and better placed, in the story’s 6th graf.

“Gingrich also acknowledged cheating on (his then-wife Marianne) Ginther while leading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton for allegations of perjury involving the Paula Jones sexual harassment civil case and the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky. ...Gingrich argued that the Clinton case was different from his personal transgressions.”

Finally! At a minimum, this account mentions that the impeachment was about Clinton's actual crime, perjury. The story does not mention that Gingrich admits to having an affair during the rampage of Hurricane Mitch, the Asia Pacific currency crisis or the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, other major events which were just as irrelevant to Gingrich’s infidelity as Clinton’s impeachment was.
The American voters delivered their verdict on Clinton's rampant adultery in the 1992 presidential election. By then, his serial cheating was common knowledge and their decision was simply "we don't care." That was the end of the matter regarding Clinton's "affairs" or Clinton's "infidelity." Still, Clinton's allies have managed for almost a decade to keep alive the myth that it was all "about sex."
At the height of the scandal, the true vermin came out of the woodwork. Pornographer Larry Flynt gained a lot of publicity calling for the exposure of other politicians who'd had extrmarital affairs, again ignoring the point of the investigation and, again, highlighting a non sequitur in the scandal. In that effort, Flynt did manage to destroy one of the few truly tragic figures of this tawdry drama, Louisiana Congressman Robert Livingston. After fellow Republicans turned on Gingrich and Gingrich resigned as Speaker of the House, Livingston was named as his successor. When Flynt unearthed evidence Livingston had once had an affair, Livingston resigned, calling on Clinton to do the same..
...as if there were any comparison whatsoever between what he'd done and what Clinton had.
Like Gingrich, Livingston was never accused of perjury. Still, by his own failure to stick to the actual issue at hand, Livingston bought, and then bolstered, the line of Clinton's apologists by implying that Clinton's offense was adultery, when it was really perjury.
By pointlessly falling on his sword, Livingston ended his own career in Congress and helped the Clinton sleaze machine obfuscate still further.
Gingrich, at least, has stuck to his guns and refuses to back off on the truth.
Is Gingrich's confession news at all?
Certainly. Given that he remains a potential 2008 presidential contender whose base includes Christian groups, his coming clean before an audience of them warrants attention.
Does it have anything to do with Clinton's impeachment?
Nothing whatsoever.
Except....
Perhaps...
If one insists...
When it came time to go to court, Gingrich owned up to his personal failings in 1999 and dealt with the consequences then and there in his divorce.
Clinton opted to commit a crime in an attempt to cover up his own lapse, and perjured himself.
So there's the actual bottom line of any comparison between the affairs of messers Clinton and Gingrich. Under any scrutiny that actually includes the facts, Gingrich stands up considerably better.
However, the unchanged games of partisan media players demonstrate that, yet again, the truth is unlikely to get any more play now than it has in the years since the whole disgraceful mess blew up all over this country like a disgusting stain on a blue dress.