10/24/2005

Hate the Lie, Hate the Liars:
Here's some festive quotes fer ya:
"[N]ot a single person who works for him seems to have the honor to leave himself."

"[N]one of his staff, no member of his administration, and almost no...official seems to want to hold the president truly accountable for his actions."

"[A]re there no honorable men around him? Can his staff and cabinet be lied to without consequence? Is there nothing that will impel them to depart? They need not become vociferous critics of the president. They need not denounce him. A quiet, principled leave-taking would suffice. But it would be refreshing if one of them refused to be complicit any longer in the ongoing lie that is the...White House. Apparently, not one of them is willing to do that."

"Personal loyalty is an admirable trait, and so is political loyalty. Up to a point. Government officials work for the nation, not simply for the president. They swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. To remain loyal to a president who lies is to make oneself complicit in his lies. To remain loyal to a man who has brought shame to his office is to make oneself complicit in that shame. At some point, blind loyalty must yield to principled honor. When?"

All the quotes are from William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, from his editorial in the August 31, 1998 issue titled "Where Are the Resignations?" Kristol was second to none in his outrage over Bill Clinton's lie to the American people, demanding that Clinton resign, fluffing that impeachment hard-on like the frantic young lover of a Viagra-less eighty-year old man.

Kristol was on ABC's This Week during the lead-up to and during the impeachment of Clinton, beating the drum that if Clinton lied, he should go; that once a President looks directly at the American people and lies, then that President is no longer effective, and, certainly, that to commit perjury is to lead the nation down a path of immorality from which it may never recover. (Amazing the way conservatives define "immorality," no?)

Of course, one could say that Kristol doesn't think that George W. Bush lied to the American people or at all, but at some point, it becomes pathetically foolish to believe that, like a teenager who won't give it up about Santa Claus. But Kristol is a desperate fuck these days, clinging to a disgraced ideology like a child-molesting priest reciting the "Hail Mary" in jail. When Kristol says that Tom DeLay, Scooter, and Turd Blossom did not act as criminals, when he says that the left is out to "criminalize conservatives," we are hearing the mad bleatings of the lamb about to be slaughtered, the horrible squeal of swine headed up the final ramp.