'Impeachment' Brings Yawns in the Capital nytimes.com
On that subject, there's this article from the Sunday NYT. All a bit surreal. Slouching toward disengagement. Conclusion from old Watergate hand Len Garment:
The issues that provoked this clash between the executive and legislative branches are less threatening to the Constitution than those in Watergate, say some who lived through both. "There was a sense of awe and of great drama," recalled Elizabeth Drew, a journalist who covered Watergate for The New Yorker. Now, she said, "the issues involved are nowhere near the scale."
Terry Eastland, the publisher of the American Spectator, said people simply did not want to follow a story when they thought they knew the end, and they believed that the Senate would not convict Clinton.
Garment, the lawyer, saw something deeper, an anesthesia and amnesia producing a "dazed Disneyland" in modern politics.
"The end of the cold war ended a sense of apprehension that major political events can affect our lives in a very serious way," he said. "There's a collapse of a sort of emotional memory about vital, energetic, pointed, pungent politics. It's just all games, dirty jokes."
Or just politics, in the depressing modern sense. Me, I don't watch tv, I was listening a little on the radio in the car, but after a couple minutes I realize the kids shouldn't be hearing it. I hate it when that happens.
Cheers, Dan. |
