{"id":1620,"date":"2004-04-20T10:56:21","date_gmt":"2004-04-20T15:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1620.html"},"modified":"2004-04-20T10:56:21","modified_gmt":"2004-04-20T15:56:21","slug":"a-tale-of-the-tape-for-two-white-house-scandals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-tale-of-the-tape-for-two-white-house-scandals\/","title":{"rendered":"A tale-of-the-tape for two White House scandals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Alterman noticed<\/a> yesterday that the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd drew a parallel<\/a> between Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal and Bush’s abysmal Iraq policies. Dowd wrote:<\/p>\n

“Just as the the Democratic president ducked behind the parsed line, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman,’ so the Republican president ducked behind the parsed line, ‘I have no war plans on my desk.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alterman didn’t much care for the “moral equivalence” of Dowd’s comparison.<\/p>\n

Let’s do a tally, shall we?<\/p>\n

People dead from Clinton’s lie: 0
\nPeople dead from Bush’s: tens of thousands.<\/p>\n

Cost to nation of Clinton’s lie, in dollars: 0
\nCost to nation of Bush’s lie, in dollars: many hundreds of billions.
\n(Note: the seventy or so billion wasted by the Republican scandal machine chasing this one lie can hardly be blamed on Clinton.)<\/p>\n

Reaction of world to Clinton’s lie: “ho-hum”
\nReaction of world to Bush’s lie: universal hatred, increased terrorism<\/p>\n

Endless quagmires caused by Clinton’s lie: 0
\nEndless quagmires caused by Bush’s lie: 1<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sounds right to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Alterman noticed yesterday that the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd drew a parallel between Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal and Bush’s abysmal Iraq policies. Dowd wrote: “Just as the the Democratic president ducked behind the parsed line, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman,’ so the Republican president ducked behind the parsed line, ‘I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}