Compare and contrast.

Today Eric Alterman howls at the outrageous conduct of the Bush administration. The complaints are about huge matters of war and civil liberties and presidential actions that have extraordinary consequences for the entire world:

It’s hard to say which is the best representation of what this war is doing to and has done to this country. Is it the lies that were told to get us into it? Is the fact that we are picking up innocent people off the street and torturing them? Is it that we have suspended the most basic civil liberties in our own country? Is it that the work of professional intelligence agencies has been corrupted? Is it that we have drawn resources away from the fight against Al Qaida which has completely regrouped? Is it that we are creating more terrorists? Is it that more than seven hundred Americans have been killed and thousands have been seriously injured? Is it that thousands of Iraqis have been killed but nobody is keeping an account of the numbers of their deaths? Is it that we are now more hated around the world than we have ever been? Is it that we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars while actually decreasing our security? Is it that we are doing all this while starving the most crucial homeland security programs? Is it that everyone who told the truth about what was being planned has been dismissed and seen their characters attacked? The usually soft-spoken and moderate intelligence analyst and author Thomas Powers does not exaggerate when he notes that Bush and the neocons have “caused the greatest foreign policy catastrophe in modern U.S. history.”

Now take a look at a similar howl of outrage from William Kristol The Weakly Standard, August 31, 1998

WHERE ARE THE RESIGNATIONS?

…For seven months, the president asked his staffers and supporters to lie. He assured them — some of them personally — that he had told the truth when he denied a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ann Lewis and Paul Begala; Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala; Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt: All of them were lied to by the president. And all of them, in turn, were sent out to lie to the rest of us on his behalf.

[…]

As Charles Krauthammer said, “This is the point at which cynicism turns into moral depravity.” And the night of August 17 was the moment at which loyal service to Bill Clinton (already morally problematic) crossed the line into self-abasement.

Does no one in the administration realize this? The president engages in sordid activity in the White House — in the Oval Office — with a 21-year-old intern. He lies about it. He attempts to cover it up. Now he admits (albeit grudgingly and partially) to the truth. Yet none of his staff, no member of his administration, and almost no Democratic official seems to want to hold the president truly accountable for his actions — by demanding that he resign. And, in the absence of Clinton’s willingness to go, not a single person who works for him seems to have the honor to leave himself.

Is this an unrealistically high expectation? I don’t think so. I worked in two administrations, first for Bill Bennett, then for Dan Quayle. It goes without saying that neither of them would have done what Bill Clinton has done. It also goes without saying that, if either of them had done something even remotely so disgraceful, he would have resigned. But I honestly believe that, if either man had resisted resignation, my colleagues and I would have told him he had to go. Failing that, we ourselves would have resigned.

Bill Clinton is not a man of honor. But are there no honorable men around him? Can his staff and cabinet be lied to without consequence? Is there nothing that will impel them to depart? They need not become vociferous critics of the president. They need not denounce him. A quiet, principled leave-taking would suffice. But it would be refreshing if one of them refused to be complicit any longer in the ongoing lie that is the Clinton White House. Apparently, not one of them is willing to do that.

[…]

Personal loyalty is an admirable trait, and so is political loyalty. Up to a point. Government officials work for the nation, not simply for the president. They swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. To remain loyal to a president who lies is to make oneself complicit in his lies. To remain loyal to a man who has brought shame to his office is to make oneself complicit in that shame. At some point, blind loyalty must yield to principled honor. When?

Stirring, wasn’t it? From the son of the Neocon Godfather himself.

How did the nation survive the great Fellatio Threat of 1998 — a year which, not incidentally, Clinton bombed the shit out of Iraq (likely taking out any possible remaining WMD) and came this close to killing bin Laden. Not good enough for old Bill, PNAC wetdreams notwithstanding. Clinton’s manly member was causing a constitutional crisis.

Today we have lying on a massive scale about matters of war and national security and Bill isn’t worried. He isn’t exercized about the president asserting a right to set aside laws and order torture. Back in 1998, Clinton’s lie about his sex life required that the entire white house staff resign if the president didn’t. But, when it comes to lying about terrorism, nuclear weapons or Bush-approved pictures of Iraqi men being sexually tortured, Republicans are “outraged at the outrage.”

What absurd people these neocons, especially, are. It was clear then that those who were in high dudgeon about this naughty nothingness as if it meant something important were much too trivial to be entrusted with real power. For all of their dreams of world domination, (it seems almost cartoonish now) they are incredibly childlike and naive. They may have more respect for book learning, but these people have much more in common with Bush’s embarrassingly immature worldview than they’d ever admit to their cosmopolitan friends in Georgetown.

More broken Kristol at Liberal Oasis.