Kenneth Starr Pursuing Moby Clinton.
Kenneth Starr Pursuing Moby Clinton.
It just gets more and more hysterical.
Just when you think those weirdos in Washington have finally come to their senses, they go out and do something even more wildly, hysterically, absurd than anything they have done before. First they allow Kenneth Starr, having failed to uncover and serious wrong-doing, start to investigate the President's sex life. Then you have the House Judiciary Committee solemnly declare that witnesses aren't necessary: impeach the pervert! Then you have the revelations about Henry Hyde's indiscretions. Then the new Speaker. Then the Senate hearings, where witnesses are suddenly essential. It's too much.
I won't repeat all the details here-- you can find them at the news web-sites or on my previous rants on the subject. What I want to talk about this time is the weird fanaticism of people like Bob Barr, Lindsay Graham, Henry Hyde, Asa Hutchinson, James Rogan, and Bob McCollum.
Americans should be worried about these guys. These guys are Congressional Representatives. Congressmen sometimes run for President. Even worse, sometimes they grow up to be Majority Leader and start to pull a lot of strings behind the scenes.
I've known people, on a personal basis, who remind me a lot of these guys. They speak softly, with apparent reason. They say, "can't you see? You're wrong and I'm right." When our church debated whether women should be allowed to serve in the governing body-- the "consistory"-- one of them told me that he didn't even really think that women should have the vote. We discussed the issue at great length. He didn't have particularly good arguments. When it became as clear to him as it was to me that he was merely expressing his personal prejudice, which he had absorbed from his father, he clammed up. But he didn't change his vote.
Normally, that doesn't frighten you. But when a man like that says, "of course the earth is flat", you better watch it. Not only is he going to be impervious to all the evidence you can muster that the earth is round. He is going to find you dangerous, because you might contaminate other people and lead them astray. These are men who, in their impeccable three-piece suits and bibles, could quietly vote to have you disbarred, indicted, imprisoned, banned, excluded, shunned, dissected, electrocuted. These are men who, when they recognize that their arguments fail to convince, don't change their minds. They retreat into their confidentialities, their encryptions, their secret cabals, their closed meetings, their lost records. When they perceive that they are losing the game, they change the rules. First it had to be non-partisan. There were no need for witnesses. The perjury was in the Jones case. Now it's partisan all the way, we want witnesses, the perjury was before the Grand Jury. And it was never, ever, not for one minute, about sex!
That is why the public information about the House Manager's program is so sparse. What is going on here? Where was this decided? Why do they all, including everyone in their party, use the same phrases and arguments when talking to the press? Why do they all have that glassy look on their faces as they stare into the camera, as if they are working from rote memory?
None of them will tell reporters why they want to call those disreputable "Jane Does", women who were discovered by the National Enquirer, as witnesses to the Senate, when even Kenneth Starr was too ashamed to use their testimony.
These men left the House convinced that they had absolutely convincing proof that the President lied under oath and tried to obstruct justice. They have never made any serious attempt to argue that these offenses are important enough to justify impeachment-- and that is astonishing. When the Democrats say they believe Clinton might have lied, but that it wasn't a serious enough lie to justify removal, they don't argue, "Yes, it was serious enough." They simply say, "If you admit he lied, then he has to be impeached!"
They must have seriously believed that they could sway the minds of enough Democrats to win a conviction. Once they realized that that wasn't happening, they didn't acknowledge defeat. They didn't say, "well, we tried our best, but I guess our opponents were more convincing." And they didn't say, "well, we didn't win, but we respect the process we agreed to." Oh no. What they did was this: we will change the rules. We told them that we have sufficient evidence-- now we'll change the evidence to see if that works. If that doesn't work, maybe we can call witnesses and get something explosive. Maybe we can bring in people whose testimony was discredited during the house hearings, and give them another shot at it. Maybe we can prevent the President from defending himself. Maybe we can hide things that don't help us. Maybe we can twist some arms. We can pretend to be non-partisan to force the Democrats to compromise, until it is our turn to be non-partisan, and then do as we please. Maybe we can release as many salacious details as possible, to the public, because we believe that most people are prudes like ourselves, and they will be shocked, like they were shocked at Nixon, and they will demand impeachment.
It is all very strange. On the surface, the Republican strategy looks suicidal. That's okay, says Henry Hyde: that's because we act on principle. Principle? This is a man, you will recall, who authorized the publication of secret Grand Jury testimony on the basis of openness and truth, and then was outraged-- OUTRAGED-- when Salon Magazine reported oh his own dalliance. These are Congressmen who have been unable to enact campaign finance reform because they are too busy doing legislative favours for the high rollers who finance their re-election campaigns. These are men who spend $25 million dollars to get a $100,000 a year job. These are men who show up for photo-ops with known members of White supremecists groups. These are men who vote against every law that is enacted to protect the environment, raise minimum wages, or improve health care. Principles?!
This trial is being held in a Senate that is virtually entirely comprised of elderly white protestant males.
This is a Flat Earth debate. It is insane. Even if all of the charges are proven true, nothing that President Clinton did is even close to anything approaching "high crimes and misdemeanors". Nothing he did is anything close to a threat to the rule of law or justice. And to the people who think that he must have done something really awful to have elicited so much coverage from the media, you should know that what the media is covering is itself. The media is covering the media covering Republicans who seem to be doing something important because the media is covering them. These are men who eat, drink, and sleep Washington politics. These are Sam Donaldson and Larry King and Dan Rather and Bernard Shaw and Wolf Bitzer and other people who haven't lived real lives or talked to real people in twenty-five years.
If you listen to the Republicans try to defend their obsession with this issue, they will frequently slip in a reference to "the people" wanting to see justice done. If there was ever a time in history when the people has made it as absolutely clear as possible what they want, this is it. A full year of poll after poll have proven the same point over and over again: the American people want the impeachment process shut down and they want Bill Clinton to serve out his term. And as if the November elections didn't even happen, they will even, sometimes, insist that every single polls since January 1998, by all the different news agencies and polling organizations, is wrong.
Asa Hutchinson and Dave Barr and their fellow merry inquisitors will then take on their long-suffering faces and declare that they would like nothing more than for it to be over, but, God help us, they must carry out their constitutional duties. They must act according to conscience.
Horseshit. These men have the most selective and blind consciences in history. When the Grand Inquisitors of the Holy Inquisition burned witches at the stake--- they too, acted purely from conscience.
Now, I know some people are going to say, "Bill, how do you know these people don't have a conscience? They look awfully sincere." Because people with a conscience do good things. They ameliorate suffering. They help those in need. They make people feel good about themselves. They prevent harm. They have a sense of proportionality. They forgive sins. They accept forgiveness from others. They have grace and class and dignity.
