Sex, Lies and the Angry Left

by James Taranto Saturday, Oct. 04, 2003 at 4:40 PM

It was OK for Clinton hit on young women recently, and to lie because that was 'only about sex.' But it's terrible for Arnold to have hit on young women 30 years ago, and to have been truthful about it.



You just have to laugh at the Angry Left. How can these people expect anyone to take them seriously when they publish books with titles like "The Big Lies of George W. Bush and the Big Lying Liars of George W. Bush Who Tell Them?"--and their hero is Bill Clinton? Reasonable people can disagree with Bush policies, of course, but constantly calling him a "liar" serves only to remind people of how honest he is compared with his predecessor.

That's not all, folks. Clinton's lies, the nascent Angry Left told us at the time, were excusable because they were "about sex." A state employee accuses him of dropping his trousers, a campaign volunteer charges him with groping her in the Oval Office, a nursing-home operator says he raped her in the 1970s--those are all just "personal peccadilloes." It's time to move on!

In fact, there was a Web site called MoveOn.org set up in 1998 to oppose impeachment, which has remained in operation and turned into a center of Angry Left activity. So what are the folks at MoveOn up to these days? For one thing, they're beating the BUSH LIED!!!! drum, using a witless adjunct site called Misleader.org. Then there's this: "We're asking you to help fund a television ad devoted to putting [Arnold] Schwarzenegger's problem with women into the public eye. We need to raise at least 0,000 to make this happen."

The Drudge Report reproduces a MoveOn.org news release announcing a press conference this morning in Los Angeles, featuring MoveOn co-founder Joan Blades, former candidate and "Green Acres" star Arianna Huffington and an unnamed "woman cited in the Los Angeles Times article" on Schwarzenegger's past boorishness.

So let's see if we have this straight. Bush is bad because he "lies." Schwarzenegger is bad because he (admittedly) treated women in an offensive way. But Clinton's behavior was no big deal because he lied about offensive treatment of women. Does MoveOn really mean to assert as its guiding principle that it's acceptable to molest and even assault women if and only if you lie about it?

Original: Sex, Lies and the Angry Left