When Harry Truman decided that the military should be racially integrated, he knew that he would meet all kinds of opposition from the military itself. All this brass was lined up in the conference room and they had their arguments about why the military should not be integrated deployed and ready to fire. It had all the ear-marks of a long, hard battle. Then Truman walked into the conference room and, as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, he issued an executive order—a command. Then he turned on his heel and walked out. End of story.

Clinton made a mistake (apart from not keeping his damned fly zipped in the first place). Rather than messing with the issue at all, and quibbling over the meaning of "is," and then flat-out lying ("I never had sex with that woman."), he should have responded, "My sex life is a private matter and is of no concern to anyone except me and my immediate family. You have no right to ask these questions of any citizen, president or otherwise, and I will not validate them by responding. I have more important issues to be concerned with, and so do you!" [Turn on heel and walk out.]

No one who wanted to attack him would have found that acceptable, but all they could do is howl and gnash their teeth. The matter would have fallen to the tabloid journalists and gossip-mongers and Clinton could have got on with matters of state. There would be a lot of speculation, of course, but I think Clinton would have gained respect instead of losing it. At least no one could say that he lied.

But since he did lie about it, he was wrong. Yet I find a lie about one's sex life (which is nobody's business in the first place) qualitatively quite different from a president lying to the citizens and to the world in an effort to gain support for a war of aggression.

And I wonder about the quality of mind of people who keep bringing up Clinton's peccadilloes and trying to say there's no difference between lying about that—something that affects no one outside of those directly involved (himself, Hillary, and Monica)—and lying about something that's going to bog the country down for years to come, all but destroy any attempts to reduce the budget deficit, establish a foreign policy that leads the world to regard us, quite rightly, with apprehension and suspicion, and kill a lot of people, both Iraqis and Americans—not to forget the British troops who got snookered into this as well. Perhaps I'm peculiar, but, to me, there is a difference.

Don Firth