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

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (24670)	12/27/1998 9:26:00 PM
From: Bob Lao-Tse	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

>>All year the political right awaited the moment when everyone would agree that Ken Starr's investigation was the institutional expression of a national consensus, namely that the President's relationship with Lewinsky was not simply wrong but criminal. Nice spin on that one. It's odd, but I don't see Republicans making that claim. What I see are Democrats accusing Republicans of making that claim. Republicans are mostly making the claim that the President's testimony in the Paula Jones case was criminal. The fact that that testimony was about Lewinsky is irrelevant. I believe that the Dems recognize that on the legal issue of perjury they don't have a leg to stand on, and that's why they have to put the argument in moral terms. They can't legitimately argue legal relativism, but they're old hands at moral relativism.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (24670)	12/27/1998 9:26:00 PM
From: Bearcatbob	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

Daniel, Now let us think a minute. Once the current two articles are resolved do you think the Clinton scandals are over? There is still a grand jury and all the other things - like China and campaing finance. I say if the dems want him for two more years - they can have them. I also say that for the good of the country Clinton should resign for all the reasons that Livingston gave re his own problems being a hindrance for him to lead. Clinton will never be able to lead - he will only be able to survive at best. Bob

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (24670)	12/27/1998 9:38:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

The Outrage That Wasn't cnn.com. Then, we have Michael Kinsley, also reflective on the tin ears of the moral reformationinsts versus The Rest of Us. Funny, my first introduction to the wit and debating style of the Clinton haters was on Slate, before BJgate was a gleam in Starr's eye. At that point, the whole thing seemed insubstantial enough that I didn't feel like hanging around for the abuse. Don't much feel like it here anymore, either, as things wind down one way or the other. This little bit comes out of the middle of Kinsley's piece. "What ever happened to the scarlet letter?" has become a major despairing theme of conservative political commentary. (Or, "Values, shmalues," as America's leading value peddler, William Bennett, summarized the apparent new culture consensus to the New York Times recently.) Social conservatives used to be smug populists who tarred their critics as out-of-touch elitists. Now they shoot furious thunderbolts at the formerly all-wise American people. Although the dismay of the sanctimony set is enjoyable to watch, their despair may be somewhat misplaced. Americans don't necessarily think adultery and perjury are perfectly O.K. What they may think--what they certainly know, from personal experience--is that life is complicated and people often make a mess of it. It's complicated and messy in ways the language of politics can't describe or even acknowledge. They may think Hillary doesn't love him, or they may think all men have their brains in their crotch, or they may think Monica made it too easy, or they may have no theory at all. But while Washington boils the narrative down to issues--adultery, lies under oath--Americans who come to the story out of human interest rather than professional obligation are more likely to fill it out with details derived from their own life and the lives around them. Most people don't want to live in a society that actually tries to make life as normal as we pretend. Or a society that stops us from pretending to more normality than we achieve. Not that everybody is an adulterer or a perjurer. Perhaps there are people who have nothing to be ashamed of. Even they have messes and complications. Is there anybody with no secrets he or she would be tempted to commit perjury for? That's not a blanket excuse for perjury. But when the perjury was a your-secrets-or-your-life stickup staged by a prosecutor who couldn't nail his target on anything else, anyone with an ounce of imagination is tempted to excuse it. People who flesh out the Bill-and-Monica story rather than stripping it down do not imagine that Bill Clinton will go unpunished unless Congress takes him to the woodshed. He'll suffer plenty. This is not a morally bankrupt notion. In fact, there are obvious biblical resonances: original sin, the flesh is weak and so on. The anti-Clinton vengeance seekers claim to hate the sin while loving the sinner, but their hatred of the sinner is so obvious and so extreme that it even casts doubt on how much they actually hate the sin. Most people don't even pretend to love this particular sinner. But they see how a guy can go from succumbing to momentary temptation to lying about it to a grand jury, and they see it as a seamless human story, not as a series of discrete actions. That's why the Starr report's prurient narrative backfired so badly: by putting flesh on the bones, it made the story plausible. And that is the fatal first step toward empathy. Comic details like gifts of poetry and the semen-stained dress make it harder, not easier, for reasonable people to remain solemn enough for an impeachment. Personally, I'd have a very hard time remaining solemn for an impeachment where cigars kept coming up. I'm sure the moral reformationists here and elsewhere will keep harranging us all till the cows come home, but who cares? The Republicans can think they're making hay out of this if they want, but it sure looks like they're making hay of themselves. Or maybe a little more preaching, a little more bleating is all we need to turn the masses around. Keep trying, guys.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (24670)	12/28/1998 11:39:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 67261

Republicans Not Expecting Long-Term Damage From Impeachment nytimes.com Back to the news, we have today's whistling past the graveyard story. I get so confused, here it's taken for granted that Clinton's going down, then Gore, but then there's all these stories about how it's all going to blow over in a few weeks with no lasting damage to the prosecuting party. Different explanations for different audiences, I guess. But in dozens of interviews, prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill and far beyond this city contended that voters would reward politicians who fearlessly pressed on -- even against the polls -- and followed their convictions. "There's no question about the short-term damage," said former Rep. Vin Weber of Minnesota, an influential conservative who expects the coming presidential campaign to obscure the White House scandal. "The only reason that I'm not in full panic mode about the long-term damage is I think the presidential race will to a great degree define the parties going into 2000." Gov. John Engler of Michigan put it this way: "This will be long past by 2000. And those who defended the president most vigorously may be the ones most embarrassed." Other Republicans expressed less certainty about the outcome but said they had no alternative but to plunge forward rather than allow themselves to be swayed by scenarios of what may or may not happen. Though they may cite principles, the Republicans are being prodded toward the Senate trial by intense pressure from conservatives; many want to see Clinton forced out of office, no matter the repercussions for the party. And conservatives are some Republican senators' most outspoken and reliable supporters. "In the long run this will not be damaging to the Republican Party," said former Vice President Dan Quayle, a favorite of conservatives who is expected to run for president in 2000. "I'll be very surprised in November of 2000 if Democrats are going to make the impeachment of Bill Clinton an issue -- whether he's there or not. The American people aren't going to want to rehash that." Dismissing the notion of a protracted trial as "scare tactics" from Democrats, Quayle said: "I don't think this will drag out. The Senate won't let that happen." Even the general chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, agreed with Republicans who thought voter unease about the impeachment matter would fade. "The American people are going to quickly look beyond that," he said. "If you get a political party in the year 2000 that says, 'I'm going to better educate your child,' the people will forget this." Conceding that his comments were at odds with other Democrats who think Republicans are damaging themselves, Romer said, "I could have taken a hard partisan shot here and tried to help Democrats, but I just don't think it's true." Many other Democrats disagreed. "If I were running as a Democrat in the year 2000, I'd be after those guys from right now," said former Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988. "They say memories are short," he said of Republicans. "I'm not so sure." He said Republicans should remember their surprisingly poor showing in the midterm elections this year. "Something rather big happened in November," Dukakis said. "How do you explain that?" I'll leave it to the astute observers here to make some sense out of those viewpoints, in conjunction with the popular viewpoint here that Clinton's still going down, and Gore's next. There's a bit in this story about Gore that's equally contradictory, without going into the locally popular "Gore's next" thing.