LOD, you are very naive if you believe this:
Just as with Richard Nixon, it is all about the lie.
Every president has lied, and lied about things material to the governance of the land. Eisenhower lied about the U-2, Kennedy lied about clandestine activity in Cuba. Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Nixon lied about US involvement in SE Asia, Carter lied about forswearing military action against Iran, Reagan lied about the Iran-Contra affair. I could go on and on with the litany of lies, and I'm sure you could add a few yourself.
You have mad a common error in your tacit assumption that impeachment followed by conviction in the Senate is a punishment. It is not. It is removal from office, and rthe failure to impeach or convict does not preclude criminal action after Clinton leaves office. If Clinton committed perjury he should face the consequences. Nixon avoided those consequences because he was pardoned by Ford.
Nixon was not threatened with impeachment because he lied. Nixon attempted to subvert democracy in this country by destroying the opposition through covert, illegal activity, which included the use of official government agencies and resources. Are you aware, for example, that the "plumbers" engineered a break-in at Republican Senator Lowell Weicker's office, that they did the same kind of thing at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in order to discredit Ellsberg? Reason: Ellsberg blew the whistle on illegal military activity in SE Asia. Republican Senator Howard Baker referred to these activities as "the White House Horrors". Do you honestly believe that there is any similarity between the transgressions of Clinton and the horrors of the Nixon Administration, where obstruction of justice involved directing members of the White House staff to shred documents, to instructing the head of the FBI to go slow, to firing Archibald Cox who was investigating the whole sorry affair.
I seriously suggest you go to the library and read contemporaneous newspaper accounts of Watergate. Maybe read "All The President's Men". Follow in particular the investigative reports of the Washington Post and the New York Times. Discover how Nixon and his cronies threatened Bradlee. Maybe after all of that you could get a flavor for how serious a threat Watergate was to the Republic.
I do agree with you on one point. Clinton brought much of this mess on himself by a combination of hubris and obstinance. He also relied on lawyers.
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