We all lie, right? I mean every last one of us. There is not a single soul on the face of the earth that hasn’t at least told a little fib, correct? It starts when you’re a couple months old and, for the first time, you start bawling in the middle of the night even though you’re not really hungry. It escalates into lies about whether or not you’re wearing underwear during those free-wheeling five-year-old years. From there, it just snowballs on and on until one day you become president of the United States.

Then, all of a sudden you’re not allowed to lie. You’re supposed to suppress the instinct that you’ve been acting on for decades. Now you are expected to be the even-handed, stone-faced, commander-in-chief type of guy. And believe it or not, you make a mistake from time to time. This is an understandable lapse.

That’s why I do not hold the fact that President Clinton lied about his sex life against him. First of all, we all lie from time to time. It’s just human nature. As long as Clinton wasn’t lying about important things such as nuclear launch codes or whether he wears briefs or boxers, what’s the big deal?

Second of all, if you’re going to lie about something, it probably is going to be your sex life. Take anybody’s sex life, write it down on paper, throw it into the mass media shark tank, and what comes out is not going to be pretty. It’s going to look like an excessively boring Penthouse Letter. Not that any Penthouse letter could possibly be boring. Not that I have ever read Penthouse.

And that is where my support of Clinton ends abruptly. Even though I can understand and even appreciate why he lied, I do not support the president in any way, shape or form. I didn’t vote for him, and I never would. Although I don’t have any problem with him lying about his sexual relations, I still see him as a man completely devoid of character and shame.

I get the feeling that if Clinton’s pollsters and advisors told him that doing his next press conference in a set of lacy pink lingerie while speaking exclusively in pig latin would move his approval rating up a point, he would do it. He seems like the type of guy who, at Oxford, would have run through the dining hall in leopard skin underwear if he thought it would make him a friend.

This is the type of guy who in second grade kept shoving fruit wrinkles up his nose until he got a sinus infection because the whole class was cheering him on. If you’re going to be the leader of the free world, I expect you to at least have a conscience.

Back to the task at hand — I do have one problem with the whole line of Clinton sex scandals. The problem is, I shouldn’t know about them. Nobody outside of the Beltway should. Keeping an affair secret shouldn’t be a terribly tough task for most middle-aged men. Pick the right woman, be careful with the place and the time and do not tell a soul.

So I repeat, why do we know that President Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky? Here’s the (arguably) most powerful man on earth, and he can’t keep one lousy, little affair secret?

He has the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines and the Coast Guard at his disposal, and he can’t keep hidden the simple fact that he snuck off into the broom closet with a woman half his age?

That’s what separates Clinton from other philandering presidents such as Kennedy, Roosevelt and Jefferson. These guys were capable of keeping their extra-office duties under wraps.

It is true that they never had to deal with the uncanny news gathering abilities of TV shows such as Hard Copy, but burying one’s dirty laundry is still an important and admirable presidential trait.

We didn’t hear about Jefferson’s mistress until nearly 200 years after it happened.

Two hundred years after Clinton is out of office, 23rd century history students are going to care so little about him that they’ll be getting him confused with Alex Trebeck.

So what are we left with? We have a president who, whether you care about his soiree or not, is a laughingstock of the country. We have a man who cannot even keep a little action on the side secret in charge of our Armed Forces.

If I was the head of the CIA, I would stop sending Clinton any national intelligence of importance for fear that he might start telling people on the street. Instead, I’d send him items like, “Dennis Rodman was in Ames for the ‘Baywatch’ wedding, and he stayed at Klay Edwards’ house.” At least if that leaked, nobody would believe it.

But really, when it comes down to it, Clinton is not all that evil or even that extraordinary. He’s just a reflection of society.

As George Carlin once said, “When you have an ignorant, selfish society, you’ll have ignorant, selfish politicians. Garbage in means garbage out.”

As long as we have a society where we care more about surface than substance, we’ll get guys like Clinton turning the oval office into the Playboy Mansion and then broadcasting it to the nation. And that is why I often can’t sleep at night.

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David Roepke is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication from Aurora, Iowa.