2004 Elections: Democratic Party Contenders

In the Jones lawsuit, Clinton's perjury occurred during discovery - an area where perjury is often a problem. Legal commentator Stuart Taylor Jr. writes: "I fear [that] the discovery process has been clogged by a culture of evasion and deceit that accounts for much of its grotesque wastefulness, and the adversary system has been perverted from an engine of truth into a license for lawyerly lies."

These problems may get worse in the coming years. A 1996 study by the Josephson Institute of Ethics found that today's fifteen- to thirty-year-old generation is more likely to engage in dishonest and irresponsible behavior than previous generations. The same organization reported in 1998 that huge numbers of young people admit to lying to their parents, cheating on tests and stealing from stores.

Blatant perjury and obstruction of justice by the President of the United States, and a dismissive attitude toward those crimes by many government officials, will only exacerbate this sorry situation in our legal system and among young people. Great statesmen and philosophers have recognized for millennia that the actions of government leaders set a moral tone for the rest of society.

For example, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."

By ignoring or minimizing the potential effect of Clinton's horrible example, government officials and the legal profession are turning a blind eye not only to society's need for proper role models but also to the tremendous harm that perjury causes.

The great nineteenth-century lawyer and orator Robert Ingersoll eloquently described that harm: "f there is an infamous crime in the world it is the crime of perjury. All the sneaking instincts; all the groveling, crawling instincts unite and blend in this one crime called perjury. It clothes itself . . . in the shining vestments of an oath in order that it may tell a lie.

"The Party leaders are so timid, spineless, and lacking in confidence that to compare them to jellyfish would be an insult to invertebrates."

"Honestly and honorably, they have very different ideas about what the Democratic Party should be and where it should go. They should present those ideas to voters in a competitive fashion. But they should not be providing fodder, and entertainment, for [Bush adviser] Karl Rove.
"[T]he two factions have to behave less like factions and more like people who are fighting a common enemy."

"The Republican Party is ideologically homogeneous because the conservative movement has taken ownership of it. But the Democratic Party is, and will remain for a while, a heterogeneous party."

"If you want to be something more than Karl Rove's doormat, keep more of an eye on Texas in the coming months than on the polls. Taking risks might prove to be politically effective. And even if it doesn't win votes in the short term, it will win back some self-respect."

I just want to make a statement -- and that's that I've given up on Sofia and Max, both of whom seem to speak sensibly but whose intellectual integrity and social values are highly questionable, in my view. They are not alone in this, but their challenges to the more thoughtful, moral folk are both mean-spirited and just as slippery as the "is, is" statement of the man they're going after in these pages. They represent a section of our political culture which is more interested in which lies win than in which truths lose.

I am curious to know if you showed the same indignation for the contempt which Erlichmann, Haldeman and North showed for the Senate, and the investigatory powers of the Congress?