Honestly, candidates, stop the truth-parsing

MEMORY PLAYS funny tricks on the political mind.

Hillary Clinton remembers sniper fire during a 1996 visit to war-torn Bosnia.

Barack Obama can't remember exactly what he heard at church over the past 20 years.

After the past eight years, it's no joke. The truth matters.

In 2000, George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency as the candidate who would bring honesty back to the White House. Now, many statements he made in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and afterward are considered blatant lies. Today, the president's credibility on subjects foreign and domestic is in tatters.

Clinton was rightly forced to acknowledge that she did not land "under sniper fire" and did not run for her life afterward. Confronted with video news clips that showed her greeting smiling children on the tarmac, she said, "I made a mistake. That proves I'm human, which for some people is a revelation."

Obama had trouble acknowledging what he heard from the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright and when he heard it.

In the speech on race he delivered on March 18, Obama said: "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." Yet, in a March 14 posting on Huffington Post, Obama wrote: "The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach."

Note the Clintonian phrasing: Obama was addressing only the statements "that are the cause of this controversy," referring to specific video clips of Wright's inflammatory remarks.

Speaking of Clintonian phrasing, Bill Clinton remembered smoking marijuana, but not inhaling it.

Bush remembered showing up for National Guard duty, even though no one else remembered seeing him. John Kerry remembered being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve in 1968, when he may have only been near the Cambodian border, not across it. Mitt Romney remembered marching with his father and Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit, an event he was forced to acknowledge never took place.

On the other hand, John McCain conveniently forgets the lobbyists or former lobbyists who raised money for him. Amnesia is the only explanation for this McCain statement of November 2007: "Everybody says they're against the special interests, but I'm the only one the special interests don't give any money to."

For Hillary Clinton, lack of credibility is a real political problem. When asked whether the candidates were "honest and trustworthy," voters in a recent USA Today/Gallup survey gave Clinton the lowest rating - 44 percent. McCain won with 67 percent, and Obama scored 63 percent.

As a candidate, Clinton carries the weight of her husband's long list of lies about sex and other matters, as well as her own dishonesty during and after his administration. Dick Morris, a onetime Clinton friend turned nemesis, lists as Hillary Clinton's "admitted lies": being under sniper fire in Bosnia; saying that daughter Chelsea Clinton was jogging around the Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, when she was actually watching it on TV; contending that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary; and learning from the Wall Street Journal how to play the futures market. His list of "whoppers she won't confess to" is even longer.

Obama does some truth-parsing, too. The Wright matter is one example; a recent report involving Canada and the North American Free Trade Agreement is another. The candidate at first denied a story that a top staffer from his campaign telephoned the Canadian ambassador to warn him that the candidate would be speaking against the trade agreement but that it would only be campaign rhetoric. As it turned out, a senior Obama campaign staffer did talk about NAFTA with a senior Canadian diplomat.

Judicial Watch, a Washington-based public interest group, which forced the release of Clinton's White House schedules as first lady, also contends that Obama has a "records problem" from his time in the Illinois Legislature. His "story keeps changing" about whether such records exist, the group charged yesterday.

At some point, selective memory syndrome turns into outright lying. And for any presidential candidate, that's no laughing matter.

Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.