Neocon, as promised, a final post for you, I wouldn't want to burden your civility with any more "ludicrous" references that cause your polite soul to be embarrassed for me. Nor would I want to trouble you by not addressing the "broader thrusts" you care to send my way. Arguing against endless one sentence assertions of conservative dogma is pretty pointless, anyway. This is just to wrap up, most of the references I've posted before. If you choose to view it as "extreme provocation", in the fashion of the premier ad hominem ad nauseum artist here, well, fine, enjoy your articulate and well thought out opinions, sadly unappreciated by us perpetually stupid or mistaken 2/3.
Where I first engaged you was, I believe, in response to this post:
Actually, Paula decided to come forward after an allusion to the incident in David Brock's original article on Clinton's abuse of office and reckless behavior in Little Rock. She was not enlisted. Her original attorneys were straightforward litigators. It was only after it became too expensive to support the suit that conservative groups stepped in. http://www2.techstocks.com/~wsapi/investor/reply-7457480
As I posted too many times before, actually, this is quite disingenuous. Brock was put on the Arkansas troopers story by political operative Smith assisted by Starr law partner Porter. "Paula decided to come forward". On her own? She wasn't enlisted? I don't know if we'll ever find out, maybe it's true she just wandered in off the street into that conservative conference. Her original attorneys were straightforward litigators? Conservative groups only stepped in later? That's not the story "simple litigator" Cammarata tells in nytimes.com . I hope we'll get the full story on that at some point, just for closure, but who knows. I wager there will be a lot of non-recollection on the matter, if the principles are ever asked to talk about it.
For a broader take, and for a different view on your "Clinton-Capone" analysis, that the evil Clinton must be brought down by any means available, you might look at the op-ed from last Sunday.
To me, at least, the most distinctive characteristic of the Starr investigation is the way it has transformed an arm of the Federal Government into a powerful force committed to destroying a single man: in this case, the President of the United States. For that, there seems to be only one recent historical analogy -- and it is an uncomfortable one for many of Mr. Starr's opponents.
In the early 1960's, Attorney General Robert Kennedy set the Justice Department on a similarly ruthless crusade against Jimmy Hoffa, unleashing the F.B.I. and other investigators to uncover anything that would allow the Government to "get" the controversial teamster leader. Hoffa was finally convicted on relatively minor charges of jury tampering and fraud.
Mr. Starr's investigation, like Kennedy's, has been unconstrained by the normal standards of criminal prosecution. The Office of Independent Counsel was created as a (theoretically) disinterested body, intended to absolve officials of wrongdoing as often as to convict them. Mr. Starr has transformed it into the equivalent of a Federal racketeering investigation against a mob leader -- the kind of investigation that the crusade against Hoffa helped legitimize. Even admirers of Kennedy, of whom I am one, have found his relentless assault on a single man troubling, even frightening.
In the end, however, Mr. Starr's place in history will largely depend on the results of his efforts. To justify his critics' placement of him on the roster of great and largely reviled inquisitors -- from Torquemada to the Salem witch trial judges to McCarthy -- Mr. Starr would have to succeed in driving Mr. Clinton from office, and in making his kind of crusade at least a temporary norm of American life.
But it is now all but certain that Mr. Clinton will survive Mr. Starr's assault. Moreover, it seems probable that Mr. Starr's unpopularity will doom the independent counsel statute to extinction.
Indeed, the Starr investigation's principal result may well be to persuade the nation to shun such heavyhanded uses of official power in the future. In that case, Kenneth Starr will be remembered by history -- to the limited degree he is remembered at all -- as a strange, aberrant and ultimately ineffectual figure, most notable for his repudiation by the American public. nytimes.com
We can hope, anyway. The above was written by Columbia history professor Allan Brinkley, a quick search at the Times under his name came up with this book review, by "stupid man" Anthony Lewis. The book reviewed is NEW FEDERALIST PAPERS: Essays in Defense of the Constitution. By Alan Brinkley, Nelson W. Polsby and Kathleen M. Sullivan. From nytimes.com :
Brinkley explains how we have lost what was the premise of 1787: the belief that government can work. Fewer and fewer citizens perform their essential duty -- voting. Most see politics on a television screen, and regard it as a closed world ''in which nothing is real and nothing is true.''
Public contempt for government, he says, produces a vicious circle that makes government worse. Suspicion of scandal immobilizes bureaucracies. Official discretion is feared, so that we surround every potential decision with conditions that prevent action.
Sullivan examines the current attempts to impose social or economic policies by amending the Constitution. We tried that once before, she notes, with the Prohibition amendment: not a happy precedent. If we had had a balanced budget amendment in force for the last 50 years, she says, ''the nation's economic health would be a great deal weaker now.''
POLSBY asks Americans, movingly, to think about how well we have done in governing a continental nation: ''If one accepts the premise that tribalism is a human universal, then the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the exclusion of Jews from universities and the professions in the 1920's and 1930's, the ruthless persecution of Mormons, the removal of Indian tribes and the maintenance of a brutal, racial caste system in the pre-1960's South seem less remarkable than the eventual alleviation, reversal or abandonment of all these social policies by the American political system.''
It is not possible to give more than a few examples of the themes in ''New Federalist Papers.'' Some of it examines particular issues of only passing interest. But there is much here that goes to the roots of our political system and its present illness.
The authors do not offer easy remedies, and I do not suppose there are any. But the more Americans read and understand this wise book, the healthier our political society will be. We might become less cynical about politics. We might be less susceptible to political quackery about the evil of the United States Government.
Ultimately, that last paragraph is what bothers me most about the conservative movement in general. Relentless derision of government and those who serve in it (at least if they don't spout the conservative dogma of the moment) can hardly lead to a more civil political environment. Yet that's what I see. The "objective truth" that Drudge presents is somehow considered more credible than the good gray Times. The Times publishes a lot, and covers many issues in great depth. I guarantee to all that the bits I put out here are just a very small part of the story. The Times has seldom been kind to Clinton, they are sometimes given credit for breaking the original Whitewater story, such as it was. But among the hounds of politics as a blood sport here, Drudge rules and the Times is all WH spin.
Among the anti-Clinton crowd here, acceptable opinions on Clinton range from vitriolic hatred to "despising", anything less judgmental and you're a Clinton lover and a WH agent. If you say so, I'm sure James Bowers is happy to know he's a Clinton lover. The impeachment inquiry is all about "truth and justice" and "the rule of law", except when it's pointed out that nothing like conventional criminal law is going on here. Then the Starr inquisition and the impeachment process is "properly" political, if it leads to more "reasonable" standards for removing Clinton. As to the "truth" part, we've been through that, of course. It doesn't matter if Brock's original American Spectator article was the "truth" wrt Paula Jones, the Smith/Porter operation behind it was in search of a larger "truth", right, Neocon?
One last recycled bit, from the "Man of the Year" Time magazine. I noticed when I looked this up here that the last time I posted it the author was labeled "an avowed socialist", by the same civil guy who labeled Anthony Lewis a "stupid man". I didn't know Time magazine was in the habit of employing "avowed socialists" to write opinion pieces for them, but maybe the ghost of Luce has been well and truly vanquished. I don't read Time enough to judge.
So on one side we have the physical and ethical gropings of Bill Clinton. But on the other are the hidden tape recorders and pornographic inquiries of Ken Starr. What most people decided this year is that if those are our choices, then Clinton at his most unbuckled and slippery is still less a threat to American values than Starr. They decided that Starr's questions are worse than Clinton's lies. That's a moral judgment too. cnn.com
There's no indication that the stupid / mistaken 2/3 is in any danger of wavering on that particular moral judgment, no matter how much the hounds of politics as a blood sport continue to bay here and elsewhere. If you guys want to push the issue all the way up to the next election, be my guest. The Clinton haters here have shown great stamina in the past, I'm sure this august forum will devolve to "all Clinton hatred, all the time" quickly enough as everybody else moves on. That'll help a lot on the hearts and minds front for anybody new who stumbles in here, don't you think? I'm sure the ad hominem ad nauseum crowd has won many converts in the past. |
