Definitely O/T. This is probably not the appropriate forum to express this....
but I am amazed that STARR was ever a judge. Here is an individual who is expected to be an impartial, neutral, and non-partisan "investigator" of the facts who:
1. does not release his findings with respect to whitewater, travel-gate, and file-gate after having spent 3 years and countless tax payer dollars investigating those events. Why? Because he has no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on the part of the president, etc. with respect to those events; and
2. he releases his "findings" on the lewinsky matter and it is evident, if you read the circumstances under which he undertook and conducted that investigation, that he and his staff actively collaborated and colluded with the paula jones people to "set-up" and "entrap" the president.
I am not under any circumstances condoning the conduct of the prez here. he obviously exercised extremely bad judgment and was less than candid in his testimony in the jones civil deposition. He also obviously failed to learn one of the most important lessons from watergate, i.e. fess up at the OUTSET and the american people will bend over backwards to forgive you. But does that misconduct rise to the level of a "high crime and misdemeanor"? get real. I have witnessed literally hundreds of instances where people (in the context of a civil lawsuit) have "lied" and technically "perjured" themselves. It is certainly not right, but in the context of civil litigation the fact is that it does happen rather frequently and it is seldom, if ever, prosecuted. It was certainly not right for clinton to lie or be less than candid in the jones deposition, but in the process of reaching my personal opinion I am not going to overlook the fact that he was being "set-up" by the starr and jones legal staff and that he was dealing with an extremely embarrasing personal situation (I would venture to say that a lot of men -faced with that situation- would have been initially inclined to deny it. It is, regrettably, human nature). It looks like we are going to spend countless months arguing and debating this issue. The czars of ethics and moral conduct are going to crawl out of the woodwork now. In the meantime, the truly significant problems confronting us, i.e. social security, medicare, hmo rights, campaign finance reform, trade deficit, bosnia, north korea, tax reform, the world financial crisis, etc., will all go unaddressed.
I feel sorry for our country, Mrs. Clinton, and their daughter. As to "judge" starr and his "political associates": you make me want to puke. |
