You guys thinks it's worse lying about one's sexual escapades than lying about the reasons to send our young men to war and getting innocent civilians killed?
Not the same thing, for two reasons:
1. Even though I will be the first person to admit that George Bush was a well connected buffoon who started a war with a sovereign nation based on what his "gut" told him, liberals aren't allowed to retcon history to make it seem like he knew all along that there were no WMD in the country. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of those polled in September of 2002 would have said that Saddam Hussein
did actually possess WMD. The liberal argument against the invasion at the time was that containment was working, and there was no reason to divert from our mission in Afghanistan. The CIA, the State Department, the UN; just about everyone agreed that Saddam Hussein had WMD and/or the capacity to make WMD. It was The Perfect Storm of Asshattery, but it was not a war based on lies.
2. As someone who has fought in a war, I can tell you that the purpose of going to war is not to "kill innocent civilians." However, I understand that war is a horrible, nasty, bloody, and destructive undertaking, and that unintended consequences are par for the course. It always interests me when civilians talk about the horrors of war, as if they know what they're talking about. During combat, everything moves at 100 miles an hour, you have no time to think, you can't hear anything but your own breath and heartbeat, and your visibility is limited to about 15 yards. Add to that the knowledge that you can be killed in exactly 1/100 of nothing, and there's about fuck-all that you can do about it. Now dress your enemy like the local population, scatter them in small clumps within densely populated urban centers, and give
everyone an Ak-47. There is no FRAG-O ever drawn up that includes, "kill as many women and children as you can."
I think it sucks that our country is so voyeuristic, judgmental, and hypocritical that we're going to ride an otherwise decent politician out on a rail because he sent pictures of his junk to some people. But we don't live in France, or Sweden, or Italy, and we don't have that kind of culture, so instead of bemoaning the harsh reality of what our society is like, I'm more concerned about a man in office who is so narcissistic and short-sighted that he would engage in this kind of behavior, when - deep down - he knows that he's going to be caught at some point. What could have happened if he had been on a committee that received classified or eyes-only information, and he had been blackmailed for said information, instead of just being publicly humiliated and castigated? The days that he spent in damage control mode, spinning the situation and lying through his teeth, makes me not like him, personally. I wouldn't say that he can't do his job, but I'd think twice before adding his name to the list of candidates for a committee in charge of national security.