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

To: Harvey Allen who wrote (32913)	2/9/1999 9:54:00 AM
From: Bill	Respond to of 67261

Anthony Lewis is a very dumb man who is not qualified to analyze a political or legal event. The Republican managers did not understand how their zealotry troubled their audience. As Philip Stephens of The Financial Times put it, they were "blinded by their moral righteousness." Who was? There was no morality play here. It was all legal. It was about a president who lied under oath, obstructed justice and trashed the very sexual-harassment laws he purported to champion. That is how far their heightened rhetoric was from the reality here: that the President tried to conceal illicit sex. People are convicted of sexual-harassment and rape every day. If the above defense has any validity, they too should be acquitted because they just tried to conceal illicit sex.

To: Harvey Allen who wrote (32913)	2/9/1999 10:12:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 67261

Slouching Toward Deliverance nytimes.com Shoot, you beat me to Anthony Lewis, Harvey. This is a news article from today, I'm sure the moral reformationists would prefer the headline "Slouching toward Gomorrah", after Bork. For all the "truth and justice" / "rule of law" ( in the civil tort system) bleaters, an obligatory legal literary reference is made: Any excitement in the air seemed related to the simple fact that the Senate court finally was rounding onto the promised closing date of Friday. Under the circumstances, after the year-long scandal's erosion of the nation's patience, the actual approach of "closure," as therapists would have it, seemed a stunning novelty, as if Dickens could be rewritten and his interminable tale of the Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce lawsuit in "Bleak House" could actually be ended. With the Starr Inquisition continuing on regardless, the "Bleak House" reference is still somewhat appropos. That comparison has problems, though, The Bleak House lawyers were relatively constrained in their methods. Notable also is the adulterous papal knight in his final rhetorical flourish: The senators were exhorted to "muster their courage" to remove the president. Hyde himself mustered a veritable Bartlett's Familiar Quotations in offering his last impassioned plea for conviction. "We happy few," he said, turning in Shakesperean tribute to his fellow House Republicans. Quoting the 18th-century historian, Edward Gibbon, Hyde acidly denounced the president by comparing him to a corrupt Roman emperor, Septimius Severus: "Severus promised, only to betray; he flattered, only to rule; and however he might occasionally bind himself by oath and treaty, his conscience, obsequious to his interest, always released him from the inconvenient obligation." I don't know, Clinton - Septimius Severus is a little obscure. Aside from lacking alliteration, it doesn't have the visceral hatred underneath that Clinton-Caligula or Clinton-Capone does. Of course, tying Clinton in to the Decline of the West is obligatory. Before the recent post here, I hadn't known that Hyde had his own little corner in the S&L cesspool, being a director of an institution that failed to the tune of $68 million. Only a couple million more than McDougal's S&L, of which the Whitewater loss was only a tiny fraction. Somehow, nobody hears much about Hyde's involvement. I can understand that it doesn't rate when compared to first son Neil Bush's involvement with the $2billion Silverado failure, though. Thus, with a final burst of the grinding passion that marked the past year of scandal investigation, the case against the president was completed at 6:35 p.m. before the Senate court. Senators left quickly, looking eager to at last break their silence and deliberate Clinton's fate. No one claimed this day proved crucial. "To the extent that any senator's mind will be moved one way or another on the final votes," said Sen. John Warner, R-Va., "That could only take place behind closed doors in a full deliberation of all 100, listening carefully to one another." He smiled at that looming duty. "No TV, no newspapers," he continued rather happily, moving toward Friday as if toward deliverance. The TGIF cry will never ring louder.