I suspect that O’Neill was “lying” — in the sense of stretching the truth — when he told Nixon that he had been in Cambodia… but not all lies are cut from the same flesh.

There is the lie of kindness: Yes, Aunt Nellie, that dress makes you look ten pounds lighter!

The lie of convenience: Yes, Aunt Nellis; I walked all the way around the house, and there are no burglars lurking in the shrubbery.

The lie of story-telling (I’m a novelist; this is my favorite): Sure I was in Cambodia — in fact, I captured three Viet Cong hiding there. Let me tell you about the VC and the thin, red line….

Each of these is harmless, innocuous. But then, there is the lie of bearing false witness: Sure I was in Cambodia; Nixon sent me there, that dirty Republican, while lying to the American people about our invasion of a neutral country.

There is reason that the Bible warns against bearing false witness (“you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” in the original Hebrew), but not against lying in general: to falsely accuse is the worst of all lies. In this category we also find the lie of theft and fraud: “Yes, that’s my billfold; I dropped it a few minutes ago;” “the mine detonated under my boat, PCF 94;” “I was in command when Alston was wounded.”

O’Neill’s only lie was to stretch the truth a bit in order to tell a good story. He was not running for office; he could not possibly be benefitted to another man’s undeserved diminishment by saying he was in Cambodia. He did nothing worse that I do when I get paid for it.

But Kerry’s lie, that he was in Cambodia on a secret mission, was meant to shiv the Republicans between the ribs and into the heart: see what a dishonorable man Nixon was? He sent us into Cambodia and lied to the American people! My Swiftie brothers committed atrocities and war crimes, just as I did!

This sort of lie is so low and despicable it leaves a slime trail like a slug. The comparison is stark.

Dafydd

You are right that some people on our side of the aisle were quick to jump on Kerry’s lie about Cambodia. I was not among them. Try searching my blog for the word “Cambodia,” and you’ll only find three posts. The first, dated April 16, had nothing to do with John Kerry or his Excellent Adventure / Bogus Journey. The other two were dated August 18 and 25, respectively, both well after every conceivable version of the Christmas in Cambodia story had been thoroughly debunked.

Did some people on our side of the aisle jump the gun? Probably. I don’t remember it that way myself; mostly, I remember Captain Ed and others asking questions that became increasingly critical, followed by “clarifications” from the Kerry camp that made no sense, and were themselves not true. But ultimately, it became clear that this was not a case of in vs. near hair-splitting. It was an outright fabrication, followed by a series of desperate attempts to save the story by offering up alternative stories that were also lies. If in the end, any semi-coherent version of Kerry’s story had proved true, with truth vs. lie turning on a perfect vs. imperfect memory or some petty semantic quibbling over whether a person patrolling a border should be considered “in” the neighboring country, I would be calling on Kerry’s critics to apologize for calling him a liar over this.

Conversely, if some occasional linguistic sloppiness makes O’Neill a liar, then I’m surely a liar myself. I’ll bet you are too, along with just about every other blogger whose archive goes back more than a few weeks. No one’s language is 100% precise, 100% of the time.

That’s the crux of what I don’t get about your defense of O’Neill, X. Your hypothetical is exactly what happened! Kerry’s first (or one of his first, it’s hard to keep track) defense when this story broke was that he may have just been “near” Cambodia. I don’t recall what you wrote at the time, if anything, but the overwhelming consensus among Kerry critics was that Kerry had been caught in a lie, and that his fudging from in to near completely changed the point of his story. I didn’t see anyone on our side of the political aisle saying, “Oh, I guess that explains it then.”