>>Charles Murray on the IQ controversy
IQ controversy? Did he post on the George Bush thread?
Serendipity.
...His sharpest judgment is reserved for President Clinton. Posner has little time for the ''Clinton-haters,'' as he unequivocally calls them, but he is meticulous in exposing how Clinton lied, committed perjury and obstructed justice for the better part of a year. Most of these lies are familiar even to the President's defenders -- his preposterous denial of sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, for example, or his denial of encouraging her to testify falsely in her affidavit in the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit. But Posner goes farther, to show how Clinton's casuistic evasions of the truth were also perjurious. Take the excruciating definition of ''sexual relations'' in the Jones suit, in which Clinton argued that in a sexual encounter between two people, it was possible for only one person to have sex. ''Even if Clinton was completely passive,'' Posner presses home, referring to the Jones definition, ''he 'cause[d] . . . contact with the genitalia . . . of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.' The 'any person' was himself, and he caused Lewinsky to make contact with his genitalia, for purposes of arousal or gratification of his sexual desire, by inviting her to do so.'' Quod erat demonstrandum.
This kind of precision punctuates Posner's account. So does his clear defense of the notion of perjury as something that cannot be evaded by deliberately clever, open-ended parsing or by self-evidently fallacious lapses of memory, every variation of which Clinton deployed. Could Clinton, for example, have plausibly claimed he and Lewinsky were never ''alone,'' because there had always been other people nearby, without committing perjury? By any reasonable legal judgment, not a chance. ''It is not a defense to perjury that the declarant assigns private meanings to words, provided he knows they're private,'' Posner writes.
The question, of course, is whether brazen perjury and obstruction of justice were sufficient for impeachment. Here, Posner concedes that the issue is far more complicated. He rightly, in my view, believes the independent counsel law to have been bad law, and is a fierce critic of the Supreme Court's perverse 1997 decision in Clinton v. Jones, which allowed Paula Jones's suit to go forward while Clinton was in office. He is also a skeptic about the scope of sexual harassment law. But given the fact that these laws exist, Posner credibly shows how Clinton's offenses were clearly within the realm of offenses that could be held to be impeachable. Impeachment, in other words, was in no measure a constitutional ''coup,'' as some Clinton apologists absurdly argued. Clinton's conduct -- not Kenneth Starr's excessive ''zeal'' -- put the possibility in play. Posner effectively dispenses with the notion that some other public figure -- like a mayor or governor -- would never have triggered the same sort of prosecutorial energy, and suggests that in a criminal trial a person who had done what President Clinton had done would have received ''a prison sentence of 30 to 37 months.'' Not the most serious offense in the world, but surely serious enough....
....But Posner is tougher on the Democrats. Two of his points against Clinton's more abject apologists stick in the mind. One was the notion that Clinton's crimes were excusable because they were ''about sex,'' or that, in fancier language, his right to privacy was a legitimate defense against his interrogators. Posner aptly points out that this was only a legitimate excuse if it meant consistently refusing to answer such questions about his private life -- not if it included lying about them under oath.
Another sophistry was the notion that the President had apologized, and so we should ''move on.'' The truth is that for the longest time the President apologized for nothing -- and never apologized for the relevant public behavior, that is lying, perjury and obstruction of justice. He still hasn't. (Neither, one might add, has his would-be-senator wife, for her participation in the smokescreen.)...
nytimes.com |
