- Anything Else -
Actually, Mike, that WASN'T my point...
Posted by: Samuel Day Fassbinder ( Citizens for Mustard Greens, USA ) on March 16, 1999 at 16:51:50:
In Reply to: No, but that ain't the point! posted by Mike Bacon on March 11, 1999 at 11:55:08:
Look Mike, whatever it was that Clinton did with Lewinsky didn't interfere with his job performance (note that the unconstitutional bombing I cite happened on the same day as the impeachment vote, with hardly a mention by Congress of Clinton's REAL Constitutional violations at that time or later), and secondly, impeachment is about "terminating" a popularly-elected President, not just some guy at a private firm -- the Christian Right, the real interest group behind all this, talks about contravening millions of popular votes without any real sense of the stature of the crime it is trying to "punish".What do you think, Mike, of the fact that it didn't require a heavy-handed and legally-suspicious multi-million-dollar investigation (coming out of your wallet, after all) to reveal to the public the adulterous affairs of Bob Barr, Helen Chenowith, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton etc., or the adultery-cum-perjury of Henry Hyde? Does it piss you off any more that your tax dollars are contributing to the salaries of THESE PEOPLE, or is that okay, because after all, they belong to the right political party? The whole Starr investigation had a deeper point, which was brought out in an article by Renata Adler in the LOS ANGELES TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS: The pernicious aftermath of the entire affair has been this; not just the obvious undermining of trust, in the Presidency, elected officials, and, for that matter, judges. Not even just, through the relentless generation of sensational, and therefore "interesting," misinformation, the subversion of sanity and of caring whether anything is true or not. But this: the notion that it is the business of government to inquire into people's intimate lives, and of citizens to go (whether out of fear or malice or exuberance or for any other reason) to the government with testimony about the intimate lives of otehr people -- even to wire themselves to record conversation for testimony of that kind -- has never been the way, in this or in any other free country. People have had, in the past, no reason to fear that their friends or family or intimates or former intimates will, or even can, betray their confidences to prosecutors. The scandal and the danger is that until the Starr ethic is emphatically repudiated, people now have ample reason for that fear. Let's have an impeachment trial that upholds the law of the land, not one that merely subverts everyone's privacy. The last one was completely bogus, let's try again with something more than a sleazy story concocted by Kenneth Starr and Linda Tripp. America can do better. Impeach Clinton -- for the right reasons.
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