NO Federal law was broken by Tripp, many were broken by Clinton and his cronies.
>>I am hearing on this thread that taping
a phone conversation without the second party's permission is NOT a Federal Offense??
Yes, yes and YES.
>>Europeans think we are lunatics, they see
his accomplishments and don't give a damn about his personal life
But we know they are. That's why we have to keep our military over there to control their lunacy. But you're right, Clinton is a international joke. It brings people together to laugh at him.
Good article:
June 6, 2000
Thank Senator Helms
The good news from President Clinton's weekend summit in Moscow is that it ended without a lame-duck deal damaging American security. For this successful failure we can thank Jesse Helms, George W. Bush and, reading between the lines, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Clinton was eager to strike a new arms deal that would burnish his legacy and lock in limits on U.S. nuclear defenses. "Clinton's Ticking Clock: A Rush for Arms Control," is how the New York Times described it yesterday. But the President's effort was stymied by a series of timely political interventions.
Prefers ABM boost phase
First came Mr. Helms, the Senate Foreign Relations chairman, to warn some weeks ago that he'd block any treaty that constrained America's ability to defend itself. Then, two weeks ago, Mr. Bush laid out his own strategic-nuclear thinking, asserting that he wouldn't need Russia's permission either to build defenses or to cut America's own weapons arsenal. Mr. Bush was flanked when he said this by Henry Kissinger and other pillars of the conservative strategic establishment.
Mr. Putin seems to have been paying attention, even if Mr. Clinton wasn't. To be sure, the Russian President insisted on a joint U.S.-Russian statement reasserting the "viability" of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And he resisted Mr. Clinton's attempts to modify the ABM accord to allow a single, inadequate defense site in Alaska.
But Boris Yeltsin's successor also dropped some hints that he isn't set in Cold War concrete. He acknowledged the mutual U.S. and Russian vulnerability to a terrorist nuclear launch. And he seemed open to the idea of countering such a threat with a theater-based defense located off, say, North Korea, that could intercept missiles in their boost phase.
This would rule out Mr. Clinton's Alaska plan, which would target incoming missiles on their descent. The best response to a Korean threat would be something like the Aegis Cruiser-based defense system now being developed by the U.S. Navy. Mr. Bush likes the Aegis concept and has said he'd invite Russia to work with the U.S. on it.
All of which underscores that nothing useful is going to happen on missile defenses until the next U.S. President withdraws from the ABM pact, as that treaty itself allows. As long as it stands, even limited, theater defenses will be technically impossible to build.
At his press conference, Mr. Putin also implied that he didn't want to strike any deals that could be made obsolete by the November U.S. election. "We know that today, in the United States, there is a campaign ongoing," he said. "No matter who gets to be president, we're willing to go forward." Message: Russia can do business with Mr. Bush and his strategic ideas as well as it can with Al Gore.
This makes sense for both Mr. Putin and the U.S. The Russian is just beginning his presidency, so his future relationship with the U.S. will be defined much more by the next American chief of state than by Mr. Clinton. Locking himself into a lame-duck deal would only complicate that relationship, especially because it is in both countries' interest to move their discussions away from arms competition.
What made this summit so strangely irrelevant to modern Russia was its preoccupation with Cold War arms-control. Credit this to the ideological obsessions not of Mr. Putin, but of the State Department's Strobe Talbott, who still has nightmares that Ronald Reagan was right about missile defenses.
Mr. Putin's more important priority is fixing the Russian economy, and on that score he also seems to be moving in the right direction by ignoring the U.S. Treasury. He has even offered up his own tax reform, including a 13% flat tax, which Mr. Clinton seemed to endorse. (How about the same for Americans, Mr. President?) This should help with voluntary tax collections as well as economic incentives.
The bad news is that Mr. Putin still seems willing to take money from the International Monetary Fund, which is the U.S. Treasury's way to continue meddling. Our own advice to Mr. Putin is that, like arms control, economics is also a subject better left to discussions with the next U.S. President.
hhttp://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB960245294294595756.htm |
