>>The "right" thing, indeed.
Of course. That's how history will record it. Let the Dems vote for the precedent of permissable presidential perjury and obstruction of justice. That cannot stand the test of time - it just sets off all the crap detectors.
Here's my absolute fav, the smartest talking head extant:
Shaky 'Stability' Theory
By George F. Will
Thursday, December 31, 1998; Page A27
There may be sound reasons for not removing President Clinton, but Sen.
Pat Moynihan's reason is not among them. Indeed, Moynihan's enunciation
of it becomes a reason for removing Clinton. Otherwise, retaining Clinton
may seem to ratify Moynihan's reasoning, which is unjust to the nation.
Identifying Moynihan as the Senate's preeminent intellectual is akin to
identifying Iowa's tallest mountain -- faint praise for the finest senator of his
generation. When Moynihan leaves the Senate in 2000, public life will lose
(in the words of Michael Barone, author of the Almanac of American
Politics) "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and the
best politician among thinkers since Jefferson." That encomium is, if
anything, too tepid for the 71-year-old legislator whose cherubic face
should be the sixth painted on the wall of the Senate reception room, next
to portraits of Clay, Calhoun, Webster, La Follette and Taft.
Still, Homer nods and so, occasionally, does Moynihan. He did last week,
with brio, when he said the removal of Clinton might "destabilize" the
presidency, and that risk is intolerable because America is an
"indispensable nation."
That analysis, by a remarkably gifted social scientist, is notably unempirical
regarding America's political stability. And linking Clinton's fate to
America's world role may not be a kindness to Clinton.
It is odd to assert that the health of the presidential office is served by
Clinton's continuation in it. The assertion's unspoken postulate is that the
office is so brittle that it might be gravely damaged by severing Clinton
from it.
Moynihan is correct about America's indispensability. That is
demonstrated, powerfully if negatively, by the collapse of Clinton
statecraft, from Iraq to North Korea. Yet Moynihan links his
"indispensability" and "instability" points:
"There has to be a commander in chief. You could very readily destabilize
the presidency, move to a randomness. That's an institution that has to be
stable, not in dispute."
Well, yes, but the commander in chief was removed during the depth of the
Cold War, with Soviet power waxing and U.S. forces engaged in
Southeast Asia. The result was not randomness but the Ford presidency.
Moynihan's argument implies that for the duration of America's
indispensability, the Constitution's impeachment clause is a dead letter, too
dangerous to act on.
In a television interview last Sunday morning, Moynihan said "it would be
hard to imagine, but stranger things in the world have occurred, where a
congressional majority began routinely removing presidents, speakers
become president, no one knows who is the commander in chief, who is
the chief executive officer, and the whole stability of this nation, on which
the stability of the world rests, could be seriously and grievously
undermined." He also said, "We could so easily" -- so easily? or is it "hard
to imagine"? -- "mutate into a president of the month."
Gracious. Can we please deal with Clinton without indicting the American
public? Conservatives denounce the public as strangely anesthetized;
Moynihan suggests the public is on the verge of tolerating wild political
volatility. A plea to the political class: Keep Clinton or spare him, but spare
the rest of us these theories that make the rest of us the problem.
In a sense, instability in the presidency is, by now, old hat, and hardly
unnerving to this Republic in its maturity. Six of the seven presidencies
immediately prior to Clinton's were truncated -- by assassination
(Kennedy), intra-party strife (Johnson), scandal (Nixon), or disgruntled
voters (Ford, Carter, Bush). Then came Clinton, whose sorrows are the
result not of "randomness" engulfing the presidential office, but of his
lubriciousness making him ridiculous and felonious.
The great datum of the moment -- like the purloined letter, it is in plain
view and for that reason is unnoticed -- is the disconnection between
presidential instability and national stability. A New York Times headline --
Page 1, column six, no less -- records astonishment: "Politics No
Distraction." That is the Times' bulletin about what the headline calls the
December "surge of shopping." (Now, there is news.) A Wall Street
Journal headline -- Page 1, column six -- expresses similar amazement:
"Despite Everything, America Still Embraces a Culture of Optimism."
Despite "everything"? No, despite just one thing, the president's pratfalls.
And presidents are rarely -- very rarely -- indispensable. De Gaulle was
right. Graveyards (including, since 1970, one at
Colombey-les-deux-Eglises) are full of indispensable men.
Political journalists believe that political news, and hence political
journalists, are central to the nation's neurological health. That is news to
other Americans, or would be if they were paying attention, which they are
too wholesomely busy to do.
washingtonpost.com |
