RUST COMMENTARY: PAINFUL SPEECH: TRUTH, OR POLL-DRIVEN?

It was painful watching President BILL CLINTON in his Monday night message to America, primarily because one cannot observe him without wondering how much he says is the truth and how much is poll driven to touch the listeners' feelings. Longtime aide Paul Begala was said to have drafted the speech. In politics when one loses his credibility and integrity ... negotiations in good faith cease!

The Tuesday Wall Street Journal had a long editorial entitled LYING TO OURSELVES.

Following are the opening two paragraphs and the ending paragraph:

"Told that his standards are out of date, a character in an Alan Bennett play replies: Of course, that's why they're called standards. The quip occurs to us because from now on the arc of Bill Clinton's presidency is not so much about his standards as about the nation's. By now the important question is whether we as a nation are going to keep lying to ourselves about Bill Clinton.

"For many years the American public has suspended disbelief about this president. To oust a befuddled George Bush, a plurality of voters wished away Gennifer Flowers and lying about the draft as the mistakes of youth. The public chose to overlook Whitewater, especially after it was consigned to a special counsel to investigate. It has given him a pass on election abuses involving foreigners and the Teamsters (etc., etc.). And for the last seven months, Americans have withheld judgment regarding an intern less than half his age.

"Perhaps the evidence in the end will warrant some lesser sanction than impeachment. But to shrink now from truth and judgment in the name of `healing' is to make all of us complicit with Mr. Clinton's behavior. If we as a nation want to define political deviancy back up, the first step is to admit to ourselves how much we've been willing to look the other way.

You can feel sorry for the president and you can forgive him ... but still expect justice to be done!

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You'll know who your real friends are when you get in trouble ... and see who stands with you in good times or bad. So where's AL GORE? ... in Hawaii on vacation. And RICHARD GEPHARDT is in Europe on vacation. Can you say distance?

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Our son REX was featured in a front-page photo by the Richmond (Va.) Times newspaper in an article about "AT HOME DOWNTOWN."

He was described as "a 28-year-old professional who works at a venture capital firm. He moved to Richmond about a year ago from Chicago to pursue a job offer. Before Chicago he lived in New York City."

"Rust is similar in many ways to most of the people he lives near: He is young, single, white and from somewhere else" (although the article goes on to put the number of African-Americans living in apartments downtown at about 30 percent).

Rex was quoted quite extensively ... along with others ... in their choice of "St. Louis like" downtown modernized updated loft living.

Apartments downtown are something Cape is seeing spring up ... with the river, food and entertainment options at their doorstep.

In fact, CHARLES HUTSON has just applied for a permit to build a luxury condo overlooking the Mississippi.

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Today, if you would like to get two autobiographies for the price of one, try the recently published "Two Lucky People" by Rose and Milton Friedman.

In addition, they throw in sketches of the social history of a bygone era in which they grew up and many valuable insights on economic issues and the politics that often surround these issues.

The Friedmans' early years, growing up in what would today be considered poverty, may give pause to some of those who seem to think that conservatives are just affluent people who don't know what it is to be poor. More than that, this book captures the very different mindset of people in that era, before there were so many demagogues painting a gloomy picture of low-income people's prospects, while making them dependents of the welfare state.

Milton Friedman's mother was an immigrant from Eastern Europe who worked in a sweatshop after arriving in America, as did so many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Friedman's father was also an immigrant from Eastern Europe. He worked as a peddler before moving up to owning a small store, where Milton and his sisters also worked. In a pattern common around the world, the family lived upstairs, over the store.

Like so many young people beginning their careers in the 1930s, Milton Friedman was a New Dealer. Indeed, he worked for the government during the Roosevelt administration. Friedman describes himself as "thoroughly Keynesian" at the time, though no one would do more than he to destroy Keynesian economics in later years.

Commenting on this period, Friedman said: "My experience in those years shaped the advice I regularly gave my graduate students in later years: by all means spend a few years in Washington -- but only a few."

Among other things, he learned "the first rule of bureaucracy -- that the only feasible way of doing anything is the way it is being done."

Today, when the name Milton Friedman conjures up an image of the Nobel Prize-winning economist, or the impressive host of the Free to Choose television series, or the author of weighty scholarly writings and best-selling books for the masses, it is good to know that he was not born as someone likely to be any of those things. -- Excerpts from book review by THOMAS SOWELL

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Deja vu: There are striking similarities between the 1950s and the 1990s. In a period of "peace and prosperity," the perception of the economy was rosier than the reality. Then, as now, balancing the budget and paying down the debt were the central tenets of federal policy. A historically high tax burden was justified as necessary to reduce the deficit. But the high tax burden exerted a drag on the economy. Real economic growth averaged about a half percentage point below the postwar trend. -- Institute for Policy Innovation

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A pat on the back will help build character if it is given often enough, hard enough, and low enough. -- Fulton J. Sheen

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Teamwork: What Americans came to revere was not Jefferson's but Congress's Declaration of Independence, the work not of a single man, or even a committee, but of a larger body of men with the good sense to recognize a "pretty good" draft, and who were able to identify and eliminate Jefferson's more outlandish assertions and unnecessary words. By exercising intelligence, political good sense and a discerning sense of language, the delegates managed to make the Declaration more accurate and more consonant with the convictions of their constituents, and to enhance both its power and eloquence. -- Pauline Maier, "American Scripture"

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We're like blind men on a corner -- we have to learn to trust people, or we'll never cross the street. -- George Foreman

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.