I agree with you.
Clinton did wrong, but it was not a very big wrong. It was a very, very small perjury.
There is of course a natural tendency to think it must have been a very big wrong, because look at the very big national turmoil we are in as a result. But we have not before so intruded on a President's private life while he was in office. And we now know that many have had extramarital affairs, and at least some while in office. Do we really want inquisitions into the sex lives of all of our elected officials? And perhaps the rest of us as well?
He lied to the American people. He said, famously, in response to relentless and furious demands for answers from the press: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky." Or was he lying to a rabid press?
Were the American people really demanding to know whether the President had had an affair while in office? Or did most of them want the area left alone, as it had been for Presidents in the past.
We are told this crisis is not about sex or adultery. It's about perjury, obstruction of justice, abuse of office. Really? It seems its only about the President's attempting to cover up his politically damaging affair, hoping his partner would do the same, and he treating her decently after he had to break it off by assisting her in finding employment outside his office. As he might a friend he was fond of. Really, it is all about a commonplace adultery, and trying to cover it up.
So how did we get here? And why on earth has the press, and the Washington establishment, gone on this unprecedented campaign search out and debate every detail?
This subject was cleverly and most successfully made "fair game" for the mainstream media through the instrument of a sexual harassment lawsuit. It was seized upon (and perhaps invented), funded, and fully directed, by zealous enemies of the President. These enemies did not just happen to learn of a great wrong they felt had been committed. They in fact had been routing around through Arkansas for years, searching for anything that could bring the candidate, and then the President, down. Whitewater was born of this search, and handed to Starr, and has produced nothing, as relates to the President and First Lady. They focused especially on the rumors of Clinton's infidelities, and found Paula Jones.
The great advantage of the Jones vehicle was they didn't have to prove the President actually did anything wrong to her. They could use a lawsuit that has been proved frivolous, and was dismissed, to conduct a literal inquisition, under oath and with power of subpoena, into every aspect of the President's consensual sex life, no matter how remote from Paula Jones. They could do this because, unfortunately, in sexual harassment lawsuits the issue of the relevance of such evidence as consensual relationships with unrelated women is an unsettled matter, up to the particular judge, and is usually only decided upon at trial. After the depositions have already been taken. And they knew that if they leaked any admission by the President of adultery, it would become instant and continuing headline news. Even though the leaks were illegal.
As it happened here, soon after the President was compelled to testify about his affair with Lewinsky, and misled under oath and probably committed perjury, the Lewinsky line of questioning was determined by the Judge to not be material, and she threw it out. Unfortunately, she was a bit late.
Whether Linda Tripp had long been involved with the affiliations of zealous opponents out to bring down the twice elected President, or only made contact later would be interesting to know. In any event, her tapes of Lewinsky's supposedly confidential girl talk contradicting the President's testimony, and the information that Clinton had testified about his relationship with Lewinsky in the Jones trial, made their way to Starr's office soon after Clinton's testimony.
Entrapment by zealous opponents, I'd say. Which revealed no more than a President trying to cover up, in limited ways, his adultery.
The rest we all know too, too well.
This is not the right way, or the right reason, to remove a President from office.
Doug |
