THE FAILED, DYSFUNCTIONAL CLINTON PRESIDENCY (HEAR his Hofstra lies, Douglas Brinkley refutation!)

Hofstra University, History News Network ^ | 12.27.05 | Mia T

[Mia T]

THE FAILED, DYSFUNCTIONAL CLINTON PRESIDENCY
(DECONSTRUCTING CLINTON'S HOFSTRA SPEECH)
part1: The "Brinkley" Lie

by Mia T, 12.26.05



(viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)

 

ne would think that after bill clinton's shameless--pathetic, really--Hofstra apologia, Doris Kearns Goodwin and those 400 other hog-and-bow-tied-save-clinton retrograde-obsessing historiographers would finally get it. But then, we are talking leftist lobe here....

The speech, full of poses, poll-tested phrases and prevarication, was just another example of the clintons' utter contempt. For the people, for the presidents, for the presidency, for the country, for the Constitution... and, ultimately I suspect, for themselves.

This endeavor is the first in a series of essays with video that will attempt to deconstruct this very revealing speech.

The clintons' fundamental error: They are too arrogant and dim-witted to understand that the demagogic process in this fiberoptic age isn't about counting spun heads; it's about not discounting circumambient brains. (Did bill clinton really think Douglas Brinkley would let the "clinton greatness but for impeachment" lie stand? Is clinton delusional? Or just plain dumb?)

 

 

COPYRIGHT MIA T 2005

 

I M P E A C H M E N T
h e a r --c l i n t o n --l o s e --i t


by Mia T, 11.11.05

This legacy confab is in and of itself proof certain of clinton's deeply flawed character, and a demonstration in real time of the way in which the clinton years were about a legacy that was incidentally a presidency.

Madeleine Albright captured the essence of this dysfunctional presidency best when she explained why clinton couldn't go after bin Laden.

According to Richard Miniter, the Albright revelation occurred at the cabinet meeting that would decide the disposition of the USS Cole bombing by al Qaeda [that is to say, that would decide to do what it had always done when a "bimbo" was not spilling the beans on the clintons: Nothing]. Only Clarke wanted to retaliate militarily for this unambiguous act of war.

Albright explained that a [sham] Mideast accord would yield [if not peace for the principals, surely] a Nobel Peace Prize for clinton. Kill or capture bin Laden and clinton could kiss the 'accord' and the Peace Prize good-bye.

If clinton liberalism, smallness, cowardice, corruption, perfidy--and, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Cuomo, clinton cluelessness--played a part, it was, in the end, the Nobel Peace Prize that produced the puerile pertinacity that enabled the clintons to shrug off terrorism's global danger.

COMPLETE ARTICLE

C-SPAN asked noted presidential historians to rank the American presidents¹ along the following ten dimensions: public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with congress, vision/setting an agenda, pursued equal justice for all, and performance within context of times.

bill clinton emerged as middling in most dimensions; he was surpassed in others by a settled mediocrity (Carter) and a putative failure (Nixon). In moral authority, bill clinton was rated dead last.² He did fairly well in public persuasion, not a surprising finding given the volume of snake oil he managed to peddle during his putative presidency.

"It's NOT the economy, stupid!"

Clinton's best scores were on the economic management and pursued equal justice for all dimensions. However, both of these results are meaningful only insofar as they redound to the moral authority dimension: they are wholly based on clinton fraudulence, cooked books and black poses, respectively; and clinton's shameless Rosa Parks eulogy last week assured us that the insidious brand of clinton racism is alive and well during these tiptoe years of what the clintons hope will be their interregnum.

Note that although Brinkley doesn't place much importance on the economic management dimension--he argues that the economy variable is not durable over time--he fails to recognize that the evaluation of the clinton economy by the historians is erroneous to begin with.

Note also that C-SPAN historians found no evidence of clinton "greatness" irrespective of his moral-authority deficit, contrary to Douglas Brinkley's claim made at the clinton revisionist confab³.

(NOTE: Later research has revealed that Brinkley's qualified mention of clinton "greatness" was not a claim but rather a polite guest's white lie about an abject loser. Instead of taking the AP report at face value, one must carefully parse Brinkley's actual words and especially note the subjunctive construction.)

MIDDLING

Twenty presidents rank higher than bill clinton and 20 rank lower. But this placement assumes equal weight for each of the dimensions. And therein lies the flaw.

If 9/11 taught us anything, it is that presidential character and moral authority count, and count most.⁴ If the variables are properly weighted, bill clinton will always come out dead last.

That is, unless Americans are dumb enough to make the same mistake twice.

Mia T, 11.10.05
Historian massages clinton numbers, ego + legacy at revisionist confab
C-SPAN historians find no clinton "greatness" irrespective of moral-authority deficit

 

 

IT TAKES A CLINTON TO RAZE A COUNTRY
by Mia T, 11.14.05

(viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)
 

A CALL TO IMPEACH CLINTON IN ABSENTIA


by Mia T, 11.17.05

 

 

id you see it? More to the point, did the American press?

bill clinton made page one of Al Jazeera today. A schizophrenic mix of schadenfreude and agitprop, it was the story of an impeached ex-president of America trashing America--to standing Os--in the Arab state of Dubai--in the middle of a war zone--only several hundred miles from the American troops--American troops protecting his--and his missus'--sorry, self-serving, pusillanimous, seditious....

And, to rub it in, the traitor pocketed no less than $200,000 from the enemy for his troubles.

Having failed to snare the Nobel Peace Prize by ignoring terrorism, clinton has apparently decided to intensify his America-bashing on foreign soil, the method employed by Jimmy Carter to great (if somewhat belated) effect.

(The Nobel committee, sufficiently mollified only after 24 years of the peanut president's America-bashing, awarded Carter his 1978 Peace Prize finally in 2002.)

Meanwhile, back in the Senate, the missus, the other half of the clinton construct, maintains her hawkish pose (although not without bird problems of another sort).

Yet another example of the clinton conflation ploy, (see SCHEMA PINOCCHIO: how the clintons are handling the hillary dud factor), this variant allows "clinton, the construct" to hold two mutually exclusive positions simultaneously, thereby enabling the missus to avoid in '08 the trap that repeatedly ensnared the ever 'nuanced' Kerry in '04.

Do you now understand how stupid the clintons think you are?

COPYRIGHT MIA T 2004

WHY DID BILL CLINTON IGNORE TERRORISM?
Was it simply the constraints of his liberal mindset, or was it something even more threatening to our national security?

by Mia T, 8.18.05

(viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)
thanx to jla and Wolverine for the audio

hy did bill clinton ignore terrorism? Was it simply the constraints of his liberal mindset, or was it something even more threatening to our national security?

To understand why clinton failed so utterly to protect America from bin Laden, we begin by examining what clinton, himself, has said on the matter:

"Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in '91 and he went to the Sudan.

We'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again. They released him [bin Laden].

At the time, '96, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.

So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have; but they thought it was a hot potato. They didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."

bill clinton
Sunday, Aug. 11, 2002
Clinton Reveals on Secret Audio:
I Nixed Bin Laden Extradition Offer

We note first that this is classic clinton snake oil, exploiting liberal credulousness and the gestalt concepts of structural economy and closure (the tendency to perceive incomplete forms as complete), sleight of hand that enabled clinton to tell the story of his utter failure to fight terrorism, his failure to take bin Laden from Sudan, his repeated failures to decapitate a nascent, still stoppable al Qaeda, without explicitly admitting it.

"The Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again; [so] they released him [to America]."

Note that the linkage between the above two sentences and the indirect object of the second sentence are each implied, giving clinton plausible deniability.

"[H]e had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America."

This position is surprising because:

1. clinton has never been one to let the rule of law get in his way.
   

2. We now know the State Department warned clinton in July 1996 that bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven, that bin Laden sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," that bin Laden in Afghanistan "could prove more dangerous to US interests... almost worldwide."
   

3. Bin Laden had repeatedly declared war on America, committed acts of war against America.

Clearly, the impeached ex-president treated terrorism not as war but as a law enforcement problem, which, by definition is defensive, after-the-fact and fatally-too-late.

He appears not to understand that when terrorists declare war on you…and then proceed to kill you… you are, perforce, at war. At that point, you really have only one decision to make: Do you fight the terrorists… or do you surrender?

Critical to the understanding of the clintons' (and the left's) inability to protect America from terrorism is the analysis of clinton's final phrase, "though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America."

"I did not bring him [Osama bin Laden] here... though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America."

This phrase is clinton's explicit rejection of both bin Laden's repeated declarations/acts of war and the (Bush) doctrine of preemption to fight terror.

This phrase underscores clinton's failure to understand that:

• a terrorist war requires only one consenting player
  

• the War on Terror is global and irreducible, the Left's postmodern posture notwithstanding.
  

• defining bin Laden's acts of war as "crimes'' is a dangerous, anachronistic, postmodern conceit (It doesn't depend on what the meaning of the word "war" is) and amounts to surrender
  

• preemptive action, and even more so, preventative action, serve a necessary, critically protective, as well as offensive function in any war on terror.

The sorry endpoint of this massive, 8-year clinton blunder was, of course, 9/11 and the exponential growth of al Qaeda.

 

ASIDE: It is beyond farce, therefore, for Richard Clarke to exalt clinton, even as he attempts to take down Bush, who, unlike clinton, does have the vision, courage and tenacity to fight terrorism, even in the face of seditious undermining by Clarke, the power-hungry clintons and the rest of the leftist lackey accomplices.

 

 

"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have; but they thought it was a hot potato."

Finally, this last paragraph documents the clinton propensity for passing the tough problems (and the buck) to others (while arrogating their solutions as his own). It would have been a simple matter for him to take bin Laden. Why did he turn the offer down?

The answer to this question is the answer to the overarching question.

Why did clinton ignore terrorism?

Richard Miniter's account of clinton's utter failure to combat terrorism provides a clue. (C-SPAN interview and LOSING BIN LADEN: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror)

The answer was inadvertently if somewhat obliquely provided by Madeleine Albright at the cabinet meeting that would decide the disposition of the USS Cole bombing by al Qaeda [that is to say, that would decide to do what it had always done when a "bimbo" was not spilling the beans on the clintons: Nothing]. Only Clarke wanted to retaliate militarily for this unambiguous act of war.

According to Albright, a [sham] Mideast accord would yield [if not peace for the principals, surely] a Nobel Peace Prize for clinton. Kill or capture bin Laden and clinton could kiss the accord and the Peace Prize good-bye.

WASHINGTON -- Two Norwegian public-relations executives and one member of the Norwegian Parliament say they were contacted by the White House to help campaign for President Clinton to receive this year's Nobel Peace Prize for his work in trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East.

Clinton Lobbies for Nobel Prize: What a Punk
White House Lobbied For Clinton Nobel Peace Prize Updated
Friday, October 13, 2000
By Rita Cosby

 

 

 

There's been speculation in the last few months that Clinton was pursuing a Mideast peace accord in an effort to win the prize and secure his legacy as president.

AIDES PUSH CLINTON FOR THE NOBEL

 

 

 

At the time, clinton observed: "I made more progress in the Middle East than I did between Socks and Buddy." Retrospectively, it is clear that clinton's characterization was not correct.

Mia T, Buddy Death Report Raises More Questions Than It Answers

 

Pathologic self-interest (Nobel Gas)

If clinton liberalism, smallness, cowardice, corruption, perfidy--and, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Cuomo, clinton cluelessness--played a part, it was, in the end, the Nobel Peace Prize that produced the puerile pertinacity that enabled the clintons to shrug off terrorism's global danger.

The clintons made their decision not to go after the terrorists for reasons of their own legacy and power. The clintons reasoned that inaction would MAXIMIZE THEIR CHANCES TO RECEIVE THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. No matter that the inaction would also maximize the terrorists' power, maximize America's danger

ASIDE: There was an analogous treasonous miscalculation in the clintons' mass proliferation of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology.

For more than a half decade, the Clinton administration was shoveling atomic secrets out the door as fast as it could, literally by the ton. Millions of previously classified ideas and documents relating to nuclear arms were released to all comers, including China's bomb makers.

William J. Broad
Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes,
The New York Times, May 30, 1999

Broad would have us believe we are watching "Being There" and not "The Manchurian Candidate." His argument is superficially appealing as most reasonable people would conclude that it requires the simplemindedness of a Chauncy Gardener (in "Being There") to reason that instructing China and a motley assortment of terrorist nations on how to beef up their atom bombs and how not to omit the "key steps" when building hydrogen bombs would somehow blunt and not stimulate their appetites for bigger and better bombs and a higher position in the power food chain.

But it is Broad's failure to fully connect the dots -- clinton's wholesale release of atomic secrets, decades of Chinese money sluicing into clinton's campaigns, clinton's pushing of the test ban treaty, clinton's concomitant sale of supercomputers, and clinton's noxious legacy -- that blows his argument to smithereens and reduces his piece to just another clinton apologia by The New York Times.

But even a Times apologia cannot save clinton from the gallows. Clinton can be both an absolute (albeit postmodern) moron and a traitor. The strict liability Gump-ism, "Treason is as treason does" applies.

The idea that an individual can be convicted of the crime of treason only if there is treasonous intent or *mens rea* runs contrary to the concept of strict liability crimes. That doctrine (Park v United States, (1974) 421 US 658,668) established the principle of 'strict liability' or 'liability without fault' in certain criminal cases, usually involving crimes which endanger the public welfare.

Calling his position on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty "an historic milestone," (if he must say so himself) clinton believed that if he could get China to sign it, he would go down in history as the savior of mankind. This was 11 August 1995.

Mia T, 2.11.04
BUSH, THE CLINTONS + WMD PROLIFERATION:
The REAL "Imminent Threat"

HIROSHIMA'S NUCLEAR LESSON
bill clinton is no Harry Truman

 

 

"PAPER TIGER"

Feckless clinton inaction and feckless clinton action serve only to reinforce the almost universally held notion: the clinton calculus was, is, and always will be, solely self-serving.

It is the clintons' bin-Laden-emboldening inaction to the attack on the USS Cole and the clintons' bin-Laden-emboldening token, ineffectual, August 1998 missile strikes of aspirin factories and empty tents that eliminate "bin-Laden-emboldenment avoidance" as the rationale for the latter decision and support "wag the dog," instead.

In the case of the non-response to the attack on the Cole, an unambiguous act of war, the clinton rationale was a clinton Nobel Peace Prize by Arab appeasement. i.e., a clinton Nobel Peace Prize by bin-Laden-emboldenment.

And in the case of the curiously-timed, ineffectual (and, therefore, bin-Laden-emboldening) token missile strikes, the clinton rationale was Lewinsky-recantation distraction -- clearly not bin-Laden-emboldenment avoidance. (This is not to say there wasn't a Nobel factor here, too. Obsolete intelligence, bolstered by the redundancy of a clinton tipoff, ensured that both bin Laden and the Mideast Muslim ego would escape unscathed.)

"I remember exactly what happened. Bruce Lindsey said to me on the phone, 'My God, a second plane has hit the tower.' And I said, 'Bin Laden did this.' that's the first thing I said. He said, 'How can you be sure?' I said 'Because only bin Laden and the Iranians could set up the network to do this and they [the Iranians] wouldn't do it because they have a country in targets. Bin Laden did it.'

I thought that my virtual obsession with him was well placed and I was full of regret that I didn't get him.

bill clinton
Sunday, Sept 3, 2002
Larry King Live

INTERVIEW Osama bin Laden (may 1998)   In the first part of this interview which occurred in May 1998, a little over two months before the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Osama bin Laden answers questions posed to him by some of his followers at his mountaintop camp in southern Afghanistan. In the latter part of the interview, ABC reporter John Miller is asking the questions.   Describe the situation when your men took down the American forces in Somalia.   After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press after the Gulf War in which it destroyed the infrastructure and the milk and dairy industry that was vital for the infants and the children and the civilians and blew up dams which were necessary for the crops people grew to feed their families. Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim....   The American people, by and large, do not know the name bin Laden, but they soon likely will. Do you have a message for the American people? I say to them that they have put themselves at the mercy of a disloyal government, and this is most evident in Clinton's administration....

BIN LADEN FINGERS CLINTON FOR TERROR SUCCESS (SEE FOOTAGE)
THE THREAT OF TERRORISM IS AS CLOSE AS A CLINTON IS TO THE OVAL OFFICE

COPYRIGHT MIA T 2005

 

NANO-PRESIDENT
the danger of the unrelenting smallness of bill + hillary clinton

by Mia T, 7.31.05


(viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)
MAD hillary series #4
WHY MISSUS CLINTON IS DANGEROUS
FOR THE CHILDREN
FOR AMERICA
FOR THE WORLD

Ian Hunter recently observed that our leaders are shrinking. "From a Churchill (or, for that matter, a Margaret Thatcher) to a [pre-9/11] Tony Blair; from Eisenhower to Clinton; from Diefenbaker to Joe Clark; from Trudeau to Chretien -- we seem destined to be governed by pygmies."

Mindless rhinestone-studded-and-tented kleptocracy
Mia T, November 1999

ur leaders are inexorably shrinking.  According to current mathematical models, they are shrinking at a rate of 6.7 per linear dimension per election cycle per terrorist attack.  At this rate, most leaders will be nanoleaders by the 2020s.

The leader-shrinkage function is discontinuous for
1992 =< t <= 2000 and continuous for all other t.

The 1990s saw in America a sudden, discontinuous drop in leader size, a drop that retrospectively, post-9/11, has been theorized to be its greatest lower bound.
(Can anything be lower than a clinton?)

"Two for the price of one," the clinton pitch in '92 -- (Did the clintons understand at the time that one was not enough?) -- only made matters worse. Missus clinton in the West Wing actually added to this discontinuous decrease in leader size.

History will record, therefore, that the clintons--the twofer, (1992-2000), were America's first nano-president.

The clintons continue to imperil virtually every sector of society, indeed, continue to imperil America and the world, with their exponentially increasing facility in manipulating electoral/policy matter and energy at ever smaller scales. Their "school uniforms" of the '90s became "nanotech uniforms" today; both are proxies for "fight terrorism," which the clintons have neither the stomach nor the know-how to do.

The twofer construct, transposed to circumvent the 22nd Amendment, is now poised to retake power. A self-replicating, Constitution-specific pathogen, the clinton nano-presidency, post-9/11, is a danger that we cannot -- we must not -- abide.

 

 

 

 

[bmwcyle]

bttt

[libertylover]

I would argue that Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich gives him a poor score on equal justice for all.

Not to mention the reason for Clinton's impeachment was due to the crimes he committed from the White House in order to make sure that Paula Jones did not get equal justice.

[Tuba Guy]

Thanks Mia T., well done !!

[Erik Latranyi]

My tagline sums up the short-sightedness of the Clinton Administration............

[JohnnyP]

Whatever happened to Monsoor Ijaz?

[Bon mots]

[Bon mots]

Now the Clintonistas are gearing up for PART II - The Hillary Years.

I would love to see the thesis she wrote for Saul Alinsky, or should I call it the "Hillary Manifesto"???

.

Don't believe her latest posturing... I believe her strategy is one of "Signal right, turn left."

[Wolverine]

bump

[Mia T]

Thank you, Brian. :)
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you.

[malia]

clinton is responding to your version of the 'clinton history' on C-SPAN now.

Seems to me he is re-writing history.

[Mia T]

bump

[Mia T]

thanx :)

[Mia T]

good question....

[Mia T]

AFTERWORD: ON CLINTON SMALLNESS--BRINKLEY MISSES THE POINT

THE FAILED, DYSFUNCTIONAL CLINTON PRESIDENCY
(DECONSTRUCTING CLINTON'S HOFSTRA SPEECH)
part1: The "Brinkley" Lie

[Mia T]

bump

[jla]

bump

[Rocky]

Bookmarked for later, when I get broadband.

[Mia T]

Well, with the help of the 100 corrupt and cowardly cullions, clinton walked. The senators' justification for their acquittal votes requires the suspension of rational thought (and, in the curious case of Arlen Specter, national jurisdiction).

Mia T, Musings: Senatorial Courtesy Perverted

"Impeachment did not have to be for criminal offenses -- but only for a 'course of conduct' that suggested an abuse of power or a disregard for the office of the President of the United States ... A person's 'course of conduct' while not particularly criminal could be of such a nature that it destroys trust, discourages allegiance, and demands action by the Congress...The office of the President is such that it calls for a higher level of conduct than the average citizen in the United States."

Hillary Clinton
Democrat assistant, 1974
effort to impeach president Nixon

THE OTHER NIXON

 

by Mia T, 01.11.99

ypocrisy abounds in this Age of clinton, a Postmodern Oz rife with constitutional deconstruction and semantic subversion, a virtual surreality polymarked by presidential alleles peccantly misplaced or, in the case of Jefferson, posthumously misappropriated.

Shameless pharisees in stark relief crowd the Capitol frieze:

Baucus, Biden, Bingaman, Breaux, Bryan, Byrd, Cohen, Conrad, Daschle, Dodd, Gore, Graham, Harkin, Hollings, Inouye, Kennedy, Kerrey, Kerry, Kohl, Lautenberg, Leahy, Levin, Lieberman, Mikulski, Moynihan, Reid, Robb, Rockefeller, Sarbanes, Schumer.

These are the 28 sitting Democratic senators, the current Vice President and Secretary of Defense -- clinton defenders all -- who, in 1989, voted to oust U.S. District Judge Walter Nixon for making "false or misleading statements to a grand jury."

In 1989 each and every one of these men insisted that perjury was an impeachable offense. (What a difference a decade and a decadent Democrat make.)

Senator Herb Kohl (November 7, 1989):

"But Judge Nixon took an oath to tell the truth and the whole truth. As a grand jury witness, it was not for him to decide what would be material. That was for the grand jury to decide. Of all people, Federal Judge Walter Nixon certainly knew this.

"So I am going to vote 'guilty' on articles one and two. Judge Nixon lied to the grand jury. He misled the grand jury. These acts are indisputably criminal and warrant impeachment."

 

Senator Tom Daschle (November 3, 1989):

"This morning we impeached a judge from Mississippi for failing to tell the truth. Those decisions are always very difficult and certainly, in this case, it came after a great deal of concern and thoughtful analysis of the facts."  

 

Congressman Charles Schumer (May 10, 1989):  

"Perjury, of course, is a very difficult, difficult thing to decide; but as we looked and examined all of the records and in fact found many things that were not in the record it became very clear to us that this impeachment was meritorious."

 

Senator Carl Levin (November 3, 1989):

"The record amply supports the finding in the criminal trial that Judge Nixon's statements to the grand jury were false and misleading and constituted perjury. Those are the statements cited in articles I and II, and it is on those articles that I vote to convict Judge Nixon and remove him from office."

 

* * * * *

"The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself," observed the philosopher Hannah Arendt. "What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."

If hypocrisy is the vice of vices, then perjury is the crime of crimes, for perjury provides the necessary cover for all other crimes.

David Lowenthal, professor emeritus of political science at Boston College makes the novel and compelling argument that perjury is "bribery consummate, using false words instead of money or other things of value to pervert the course of justice" and, thus, perjury is a constitutionally enumerated high crime.

The Democrats' defense of clinton's perjury -- and their own hypocrisy -- is three-pronged. 

ONE:

clinton's perjuries were "just about sex" and therefore "do not rise to the level of an impeachable offense."

This argument is spurious. The courts make no distinction between perjuries. Perjury is perjury. Perjury attacks the very essence of democracy. Perjury is bribery consummate.

Moreover, (the clinton spinners notwithstanding), clinton's perjury was not "just about sex." clinton's perjury was about clinton denying a citizen justice by lying in a civil rights-sexual harassment case about his sexual history with subordinates.

TWO:

Presidents and judges are held to different standards under the Constitution.

Because the Constitution stipulates that federal judges, who are appointed for life, "shall hold their offices during good behavior,'' and because there is no similar language concerning the popularly elected, term-limited president, it must have been perfectly agreeable to the Framers, so the (implicit) argument goes, to have a perjurious, justice-obstructing reprobate as president.

clinton's defenders ignore Federalist No. 57, and Hillary Rodham's constitutional treatise on impeachable acts -- written in 1974 when she wanted to impeach a president; both mention "bad conduct" as grounds for impeachment.

"Impeachment," wrote Rodham, "did not have to be for criminal offenses -- but only for a 'course of conduct' that suggested an abuse of power or a disregard for the office of the President of the United States...A person's 'course of conduct' while not particularly criminal could be of such a nature that it destroys trust, discourages allegiance, and demands action by the Congress...The office of the President is such that it calls for a higher level of conduct than the average citizen in the United States."

deconstructing clinton… "just because I could"


(viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)
FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU! FOOL ME TWICE, SHAME ON ME! 

Hamilton (or Madison) discussed the importance of wisdom and virtue in Federalist 57. "The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust."

(Contrast this with clinton, who recklessly, reflexively and feloniously subordinates the common good to his personal appetites.)

Because the Framers did not anticipate the demagogic efficiency of the electronic bully pulpit, they ruled out the possibility of an MTV mis-leader (and impeachment-thwarter!) like clinton. In Federalist No. 64, John Jay said: "There is reason to presume" the president would fall only to those "who have become the most distinguished by their abilities and virtue." He imagined that the electorate would not "be deceived by those brilliant appearances of genius and patriotism which, like transient meteors, sometimes mislead as well as dazzle."

(If the clinton debacle teaches us anything, it is this: If we are to retain our democracy in this age of the electronic demagogue, we must recalibrate the constitutional balance of power.)

THREE:

The president can be prosecuted for his alleged felonies after he leaves office. (Nota bene ROBERT RAY.)

This clinton-created censure contrivance -- borne out of what I have come to call the "Lieberman Paradigm" (clinton is an unfit president; therefore clinton must remain president) -- is nothing less than a postmodern deconstruction in which the Oval Office would serve for two years as a holding cell for the perjurer-obstructor.

Such indecorous, dual-purpose architectonics not only threatens the delicate constitutional framework -- it disturbs the cultural aesthetic. The senators must, therefore, roundly reject this elliptic scheme.

In this postmodern Age of clinton, we may, from time to time, selectively stomach corruption. But we must never abide ugliness. Never.

Sen. Dale Bumpers (AR): "There's only two years left. What harm can he do?"

 

COPYRIGHT MIA T 2005

[Mia T]

thx. hope you get it soon. :)

[Mia T]

bump