Compare and contrast

Bill Clinton certainly lied to the American people when he wagged his finger at the camera and said, "I did not have sex...ual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

When he testified in the Paula Jones lawsuit (in response to salacious tidbits that Ken Starr's team was feeding her lawyers), Clinton was responding to a specific definition of sexual relations that excluded oral sex. Yes, this is hairsplitting.

What Gonzo is supposedly doing is reserving to himself the right to redefine program in whatever way he chooses. He also refuses to clarify anything about the illegal surveillance done by the Bushists so that anyone in Congress doing Constitutional oversight could actually pin him down on such a simple fact as how many programs Gonzales wants to divide the surveillance program into.

The answer, of course, is just as many as he needs to claim after the fact that he didn't lie. His definition of lie is exceedingly narrow. He is only trying to leave himself enough wiggle room that there's some set of facts he can stretch his former answers to fit.

The key here is that lying includes those times when you tell "the truth" in a way intended to deceive. At best, that's what the Attorney General has done before Congress. I'm not for summary execution, but this man needs to do time.

Why should we believe the implication that the Bushists directed the NSA to do data-mining only on phone records? Really, that's basically a few SQL queries, hardly something that would qualify for the label data-mining. We will find in time that the Bushists had the NSA data-mining recorded domestic conversations by computer. They will claim, against all precedent and common sense, that this is not eavesdropping, since no human would ever listen to the innocent calls, only a machine. (Yes, I am asserting this with no evidence, only the thoroughly deceitful precedents of the Bushist apparatus.)

One last point: Clinton was lying about private sex. Gonzo is lying about ignoring the Constitution. What will we tell the children?