A certain president by the name of Clinton was impeached because he lied about sex. An ignoble act--and a criminal one, as he did it in grand jury testimony--but when you consider that the case against him in which he was testifying was later dismissed by the judge (who said that Paula Jones had no case even if she was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth), well, the whole thing seems kinda moot.

A certain president by the name of Bush told us that we were attacking Iraq because it held tons and tons of chemical weapons. He said Saddam Hussein was actively working on developing nuclear weapons. He said we had to stop Iraq before Iraq used its weapons of mass destruction.

It's been a month since what was left of the old Iraqi government turned tail and split. To my knowledge, no one had found one speck of anthrax, VX, sarin or even old-fashioned mustard gas. There is little evidence of the supposed nuclear program, either.

The U.S. under Bush (the old), Clinton and Bush (the dim) continuously claimed that Hussein shifted his labs around so that inspectors couldn't see what he was doing. United Nations weapons inspectors somewhat supported these claims--though we also ridiculed those inspectors because they failed to find what we wanted them to find.

What if there wasn't much of anything to be found?

I'm not saying that Hussein didn't have any chemical weapons. We know he had a decent stockpile of the stuff--we gave it to him, after all. He used some on the Kurds more than a decade ago, and he may have used some in the first U.S.-Iraq war. The man is/was far from a saint.

The current theory expounded by the dingbats at the White House is that Hussein either hid or destroyed all of his chemical and nuclear labs just before the war started. This theory makes sense in the abstract, but I can't see how Hussein could have hidden or destroyed everything without us noticing. Iraq has been under almost constant satellite surveillance since 1991 (not to mention a good amount of U2 coverage as well), and if Hussein tried to dispose of as much stuff as we say he did, then there ought to be a photo of that somewhere. It seems the concept of producing proof for such a theory didn't occur the apparently walnut-sized brains that are running the country these days.

So the Prez may very well have been wrong about Iraq's chemical and nuclear capabilities. Does this make him a liar?

Well, yes.

If you're one of the four people watching "24" every Tuesday night, you know that the plot for this season turns on proving that a particular digital audio file was created by a programmer and not a simple recording of a meeting. If the recording is proved a fake, then the U.S. shouldn't go war against three "innocent" nations (as innocent, say, as Saudi Arabia was in 9/11 terms). If the recording is real, then the war (already in progress) will be justified. Those who want war (for a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with business interests) don't care if the audio is fake or not; they simply want to make sure that everyone believes that it is real. Those who truly do not know whether or not the audio is real but still insist on acting as if it were are engaging in intellectual dishonesty. They are abrogating their responsibility as public officials to search out the truth. In other words, they are lying.

For all the nonsense surrounding the astonishing durability of Kiefer Sutherland's character (he's been in a plane crash, survived a close encounter with a nuclear explosion and even been revived from torture-induced death-- all within 24 hours time), the philosophical edge to the plot rides very close to current events. I think that the Prez truly believes that Saddam Hussein had all sorts of weapons of mass destruction and that Hussein intended to use them against the U.S. and its allies. I also believe that the Prez didn't bother to question those views and, in fact, worked very hard to cobble together some decidedly dubious evidence in an attempt to support his beliefs.

And many of his claims against Iraq proved false. Those aluminum tubes that he claimed could be used for nuclear weapons? Turns out they can't. That bizzaro Al-Queda-Prague-Bagdhad connection? Nopers. In fact, while it seems a couple Al-Queda honchos did spend some time in Baghdad resting up from high times in Afghanistan, apparently there weren't any high-level meetings between the terrorists in question and Hussein. I'm not saying Hussein never dealt with terrorists. I think it's perfectly fair to describe his entire governmental apparatus as terroristic. It's just that this particular connection doesn't seem to fit.

A few months ago I asked which was worse, lying about sex or lying about war. When you consider that one act didn't hurt anyone (and probably helped those closest to the "action"--Hillary Clinton is now a senator, each Clinton now has a $10 million book deal and Monica Lewinsky has her own TV show) while the other has resulted in the deaths of thousands, I think the answer is clear.

It's funny; I'm not the only one asking about the surprising failure to locate Iraq's supposed arsenal--the trigger for our actions in Iraq. Even so, you'd think any news organization that takes its fourth estate charge seriously (this, then, excludes all television news) would be all over this. But they're not. It's as if the Prez never said anything about such things in the first place. It's like a bad amnesia movie

Interesting thing about amnesia in the movies: The memories always come back with a vengeance.

Jon Worley would like to be impeached, but he's too poor to get elected.