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Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PiMac who wrote (12276)	5/10/1999 12:50:00 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13994

Since the first paragraph is not, how shall I say, perfectly lucid, I think I will pass on commenting on it... We are better off of as a nation for having asserted the subordination of our rulers to the impartial majesty of the law. We would have been even better off had the man been removed from office... The magnitude and nature of the fines were irrelevant to the question of whether or not Clinton appealed. Had he won, they would have been reduced or absolved. Had he lost, he would have paid them, and been none the worse off. Whatever verbal threat may have been involved had to do with the possibility that the hearings would drag out at even greater length Clinton's illegalities... Les made the obvious point that Clinton could have appealed the ruling that he had to answer those questions. Under the statute that he signed into law, he had to answer those questions. Only when his own ox was being gored did he decide that he was against such discovery. To ratify that is the very essence of the rule of men, not law, or the privileged status of the well- connected... The assumption is that the judge ruled correctly until she is overturned, not that Clinton was justified until she is NOT overturned... It may sometimes be right to take the law into one's own hands, but not, I think, in this instance...

To: PiMac who wrote (12276)	5/10/1999 4:26:00 AM
From: Bob Lao-Tse	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13994

"...I do not think there was a right to those questions, the Clinton lawyers' thought they had no right, the President thought there no right..." If that is the case, why did he lie? If he genuinely viewed the questions as being beyond the scope of the law, then why didn't he say "I believe that that question is not within your power to ask and I will not answer it."? Squirm all you like, rationalize all you like, the simple truth is that he lied because he didn't want to tell the truth. There was no higher principle; he was just trying to save his butt. On the ongoing subject of the rule of law: we the people have no right to, without penalty, ignore or violate a law for any reason. Yes, we certainly have a right if not an obligation to fight against and even to deliberately violate a law we feel to be unjust, but when we violate that law we will be tried for that crime. We then have an opportunity to argue our innocence based on our perception of the law in question, but Clinton didn't do that, did he? Again, if he believed that the discovery was illegal why didn't he defend himself on that basis? Why did he choose instead to defend himself by claiming that, based on his private definition of "sexual relations," he didn't lie at all? What's the higher principle that was being served when he denied that he broke the law that you claim he broke simply as some grand gesture intended to demonstrate his interpretation of the court's power? If he did it deliberately in order to convey his disagreement with the discovery process (and again, I don't see how lying conveys anything other than untruth), his subsequent denial that he had even broken the law was contrary to his (by your view) intention to heroically stand up to a court that he believed had overstepped its bounds. He didn't protest, he didn't resist, he didn't question; he lied. And he got caught. -BLT