It's too facile to say that all politicians lie and that leaders commonly deceive in pursuit of their goals. We are entitled to expect more from someone who campaigned on a pledge to "restore integrity to the White House."

If you wanted a quintessential example of what the Bush administration and its legislative cronies are about, it was right there on the front page of The Times last Thursday:

"Tax Law Omits $400 Child Credit for Millions."

The fat cats will get their tax cuts. But in the new American plutocracy, there won't even be crumbs left over for the working folks at the bottom of the pyramid to scramble after.

When House and Senate negotiators met to put the finishing touches to President Bush's tax bill, they coldly deleted a provision that would have allowed millions of low-income working families to benefit from the bill's increased child tax credit.

It was a mean-spirited and wholly unnecessary act, a clear display of the current regime's outright hostility toward America's poor and working classes.

The negotiators eliminated a provision in the Senate version of the tax bill that would have extended benefits from the child tax credit to families with incomes between $10,500 and $26,625. This is not a small group. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the families that would have benefited include about 12 million children — one of every six kids in the U.S. under the age of 17.

While the tax bill will lavish hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits on people higher up the income scale, it leaves this group of working families very ignominiously behind.

Everyone agreed that it was not the sex. It was the lying, right? If having extramarital sex in the White House were an impeachable offense, the impeachment of presidents would long ago have become a routine affair. We'd have seen Roosevelt, Ike, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Bush the Elder in the dock for sure, and maybe Ron, too.

But everyone agreed it wasn't the sex that got President Clinton in trouble. It was the lying. The audacious bending of the meaning of the word is and the word sex. Right?

But has lying ever been practiced so blatantly as it is being practiced today in the White House?

At least President Clinton's lies were about his personal behavior. This administration has done its share of that kind of lying, to be sure. For example about the President's cowardly conduct during the 9/11 attacks, or about Vice President Cheney's dealings with Enron executives as the company was tanking. Or about President Bush's year as an AWOL guardsman during the Vietnam War.

But this administration's lying has gone far beyond that, and has led to the deaths of thousands, including well over a hundred Americans (and counting). This is prevarication on a scale that rivals the Johnson Adminstration's lie about the purposted attack on an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, or the Nixon Administration's lie about its secret war in Cambodia.

The First Ten Amendments to the constitution of the United States printed on sturdy, pocket-sized, pieces of metal.

The next time you travel by air, take the Security Edition of the Bill of Rights along with you. When asked to empty your pockets, proudly toss the Bill of Rights in the plastic bin.

You need to get used to offering up the bill of rights for inspection and government workers need to get used to deciding if you'll be allowed to keep the Bill of Rights with you when you travel.

Iraq: They told us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but they've found none. Were they lying?

One key tactic of the British and United States governments in their campaign on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was to talk up suspicions and to portray possibility as fact. The clearest example was the quotation and misquotation of the reports of United Nations weapons inspectors.

A nation whose announced national security policy is to eradicate dictators possessing weapons of mass destruction is then immediately faced with North Korea. Indeed, we are faced with a good number of nations fitting this description. Either we mean what we say, or we pick and choose. And if we pick and choose, what standards do we use? Whom do we invade and with whom do we negotiate? And if we can adopt this preemptive policy, why cannot other nations? If we can engage in preventive wars, why then cannot India or Pakistan or a rather large number of other antagonists do the same thing? Wipe out your enemy now on the grounds that he may someday represent a threat to you. And what about eradicating dictators who assault their own people - an argument used against Saddam Hussein? There are certainly plenty of those around.

A president who campaigned on a platform of humility in international dealings and resistance to ''nation-building'' now finds himself waving a big stick at almost everyone and rebuilding nations right and left. When exactly did this transformation occur? Was it 9/11 or was it the project of a handful of advisers perpetually eager to remake the Middle East? And how did the Philippines suddenly get into all of this? If the invasion of Iraq is simply the completion of Gulf War I, then perhaps deployment of special forces to the Philippines is the completion of the Spanish-American war. Who can tell? No one in Washington, including in my own Democratic Party, seems to be up to asking any tough questions.

A short year and a half ago America was astride the world like a moral colossus. Virtually the entire world united behind us in our grim search for justice against Al Qaeda. Sometime last fall, however, when Saddam replaced bin Laden as our white whale, we started on our own crusade and left the rest of the world behind. You can either believe much of the rest of the world became, almost overnight, obtuse and anti-American, or you can more plausibly believe we unilaterally launched ourselves on a mission that made little sense to much of the rest of the world.