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

To: one_less who wrote (27682)	1/13/1999 4:18:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 67261

brees I think most here have said that supporting Clinton is as much a statement about the right as it is a statement about Clinton. For me, even more so... 90% of my feelings about this matter have to do with my dislike of the right, vs. any respect I might have for Clinton (I think Clinton has been a pretty good president btw). It is clear now that Clinton has become a weathervane for anti-conservative sentiment. The most obvious example of this was when Clintons numbers went up after impeachment. From one day to the next, everything is the same (economy etc) and Clintons numbers go up. There you go.

To: one_less who wrote (27682)	1/13/1999 5:21:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 67261

brees, I've been given the evasive label plenty of times too. Often wrapped in the "won't answer my question" guise. I don't whine about people not answering my questions, they're rhetorical as much as anything. Most of the "not answered" questions seem to be in the "when did you stop beating your wife" cheesy debate tactic mold anyway. On impeachment, I wouldn't judge the perjury / obstruction issues, they are technical legal matters, and I've posted references that indicate they're not as cut and dried as they're commonly made out to be. My view on the articles under discussion is that they don't rise to the "treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanor" threshold. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has expressed that view also. He was a lot more popular here before he came to that view, though. Others differ on what constitutes an impeachable offense, as is their right. Others are also fond of calling the unwashed masses who disagree with the moral imperative on impeachment idiots. That's their right too, though it seems politically counterproductive to me. On the other stuff, what can you say? Clinton's detractors bleat about "rule of law", "truth and justice", and a bunch of other high minded moralism, but they also pass on everything that gets leaked to Drudge as if it means something. They whine about the liberal press and quote the Washington Times. At this point, it's mostly entertainment to me, in the political off season. Mostly, I'm waiting for the next season to heat up, and the trial is just another part of the game. On Flynt and "the politics of personal destruction", you have to deal with Starr report and how it was dumped on the unsuspecting public before engaging in tongue clucking. Perhaps you might consider the introduction to the Andrew Sullivan NYT magazine article I've been pushing. I can't remember now at which point during the Starr report I stopped reading. Maybe it was the sudden prim reminder that the President's wife" was out of the country during one of President Clinton's hallway trysts. Or the superfluously wounding inference that the President was considering leaving his wife after his second term. Or the inclusion of the date for one of the President's liaisons: Easter Sunday. Or any one of the points when it simply became obvious that the narrative, compelling and lucid as it was, seemed to be building a case not so much for the President's public, legal impropriety but for a private, moral iniquity. And I stopped reading not because I sympathize with President Clinton's repeated public lies, or his abuse of power and of his office. (I still think he should resign.) Nor because I am instinctively a liberal. I stopped reading at some point because it became depressingly clear that the Starr report and its aftermath represents not simply a case study in what has gone wrong with an American Presidency, but also a case study in what has gone wrong with American conservatism. To be sure, Bill Clinton goaded the independent counsel into some of this detail by the hairsplitting of his legal defense. But not all of it. And to be sure, Bill Clinton, by his failure to settle, and then to apologize, and then to tell the truth, was responsible in the first place for the nine months of trauma. But again, not entirely. For Bill Clinton was responsible for none of the prurient, lip-pursing moralism of the report, nor for the subsequent, egregious outspilling of grand-jury testimony. Proof of perjury or obstruction of justice required none of this, as most Americans immediately understood. This moral obsessiveness was the creation of Kenneth Starr and something far larger than Kenneth Starr. It was the creation of a conservatism become puritanism, a conservatism that has long lost sight of the principles of privacy and restraint, modesty and constitutionalism, which used to be its hallmarks.