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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (8050)	10/8/1998 2:02:00 PM
From: Bill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 67261

So, you admit that you invented that stuff about Bush lying under oath. Is that what you're telling me? Are you telling this thread that you are a liar? Or are you telling this thread that you are ignorant?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (8050)	10/8/1998 2:09:00 PM
From: Borzou Daragahi	Respond to of 67261

Daniel, we're going to take a little trip down memory lane that I think you'll appreciate--I'll post old articles and columns as a I dig them up. Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company The New York Times December 28, 1992, Monday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 1; Editorial Desk LENGTH: 721 words HEADLINE: Abroad at Home; George Milhous Bush BYLINE: By ANTHONY LEWIS DATELINE: BOSTON BODY: Government officials may violate the law whenever they believe their actions are good for the country. That was President Bush's principal rationale for pardoning six men involved in the Iran-contra affair. They were motivated by "patriotism," Mr. Bush said. So it did not matter that what they did conflicted with judgments reached through our constitutional process and written into law. It did not matter that they covered up their actions by lies. Compassion for Caspar Weinberger would have been an acceptable basis for a pardon. But Mr. Bush deliberately broadened the ground to one that menaces the institutions of a country whose political system is founded on law. Mr. Bush's reason is the more troubling because the underlying governmental wrongdoing, Iran-contra, was so serious. It was a calculated assault on the constitutional balance of power, far worse than Watergate's cover-up of a political burglary. In 1985 and 1986 President Reagan approved the sale of arms to Iran as a trade, it was hoped, for American hostages. The sales violated the Arms Export Control Act, which forbade arms sales to countries that foster terrorism -- as Iran did. The President was also obliged by law to notify Congress of the arms shipments. He did not. Then the proceeds of the sales to Iran were used to arm the contras fighting Nicaragua's Sandinista Government. Congress in 1984 had forbidden aid to the contras. President Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, reportedly used the Iran-contra operations to plan an off-the-shelf covert action system free from the legally required scrutiny of Congressional intelligence committees. Those actions together represented an assertion of absolute Presidential power in foreign policy, above the law. They marked, I think, the boldest attempt in our history to establish in the White House the Royal Prerogative exercised by King George III. Critics of the prosecutions brought by the independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh say the proper remedy for all this was to impeach President Reagan, not to go after his subordinates. The difficulty with that argument is that Mr. Reagan and his subordinates carried out their illegalities in secret. It is hard for Congress to consider impeachment when the damning facts have been concealed, and the subordinates lie about them when questioned. In Watergate, the impeachment process pushed President Nixon to resign only after special prosecutors uncovered the facts. The personality of Ronald Reagan also made corrective action difficult in the case of Iran-contra. Members of Congress, and of the public, liked Mr. Reagan. They felt in him none of the malevolence that attached to Richard Nixon. And many wondered whether Mr. Reagan really understood what he was doing. Without great public outrage over the Iran-contra affair, Mr. Walsh was subject to partisan attack. His work was also hobbled by the Justice Department, which repeatedly raised dubious claims of secrecy to deny him evidence. And the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, dominated by Reagan and Bush appointees, made extreme interpretations of the law to throw out convictions he obtained. The pardons leave Mr. Walsh without recourse to undo the Iran-contra cover-up. But he still has one power and duty: to write a final report laying out what he knows about the cover-up -- and George's Bush's role in it. Gerald Ford was hurt politically by his pardon of Richard Nixon. But his reputation has recovered since, I think, because people recognize that he was trying honestly, if mistakenly, to put an episode behind us -- without any desire to warp the Constitution. The Bush pardons are very different. He used them to introduce a dangerous constitutional doctrine, and very likely to protect himself from the consequences of his repeated false statements that he was out of the Iran-contra loop. The pardons have about them, in fact, the distorting, self-justifying air of Richard Nixon. They remind us that George Bush was a creature of Mr. Nixon's, his appointee to various jobs, a defender of Mr. Nixon to the last moment of Watergate. President Bush had hoped to go out in these last days, and in history, as a man of honor. The pardons -- and the reason he gave for them -- end that possibility.