Would Clinton have better off or worse off if he had just told the truth?
Lying to Congress is a federal crime-and showing a reckless disregard for truth can be legally construed as equivilent to lying. Now when such , say, prevarications concern issues of war and peace, the lives of thousands of military men and women and the security of millions, once such prevarications are established no doubt they rise to “high crimes” status. Bush is technically quite impeachable. But of course, so was LBJ, Nixon and no doubt Reagan on the Central American sham. It’s politics, not any sense of justice at work here.
Not so. The OP (that would be me) simply states that for the purposes of this premise only, we are assuming that Bush is not doing a good job. If one thinks Bush is doing a good job, bully for them, and that can be argued elsewhere and isn’t the point of this thread.
The fundamental premise of your debate is that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. If we are asked not to address that premise, then of course the conclusion is reached. As I said (and as you, conveniently, left out out of your quote), are still beating your wife?
I’m sure you could blame all three. I don’t recall the media being behind the Clinton impeachment, but the media is part of this game. Either way, the joke is boring and oversimplifies things.
That’s your opinion. I think if intelligence that cast doubt on Iraqi weapons and terrorist ties was withheld Congress, that’s not doing the job to the best of his ability - it’s manipulating people to get what he wanted.
My understanding from other threads on this topic is that “high crimes” is vague enough that he could be impeached if Congress wanted to do so. It doesn’t matter if the President really really thinks he’s doing the right thing.
I don’t think manipulating people is a crime either.
This is fair, we can all be sued, or tried for anything at any time, it comes down to having enough evidence to sway people to believe your side. If enough people in Congress felt his actions were criminal, he could be impeached.
Clinton’s big mistake was to commit an identifiable crime while he had a strong opposition party gunning for him. Congress would have to make up a High Crime for Bush to have committed, that’s not quite as easy as pointing to existing law.
By this statement I have to assume you don’t get the joke.
GAAAAAHHHHH!
I’m so sick of the whole back and forth about Bush and Clinton. I’m ready to just say this: OK the Dems have had Clinton for two terms, the GOP will have had Bush for two. We’ve each had a divisive president that the other guys hate with a purple passion. Can we please, PLEASE find somebody somewhere in between, someone who is not reviled by half the country? (Bonus if they’re not named Bush or Clinton) Is that ever going to fucking be possible ever again? I’m beginning to think that there’s some “They” out there who is feasting on the fact we’re so polarized and stymied…that’s where their money is. [/tinfoil hat].
Lying to people can be. That was kind of the cruz of the Clinton thing. 
Hasn’t the “Clinton sold secrets to China” meme already been dismissed as just another right-wing hallucination, right up there with “Bill Clinton’s death squads killed Vince Foster”?
Or crux, if you will. I don’t speak much Spanish.
It is best not to read the political news after an evening of watching old Twilight Zone episodes, (particularly “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”).
There is. Which is why “lying under oath” does NOT = perjury. The lie must be deliberate and material.
Thus, it is quite possible that Bill’s “fib” was neither.
John, by “impeachment”, you do mean that he would be charged, correct? I would have to agree, under the conditions you describe, but even with a Democrat majority, do you really think they would convict and hang that albatross around the neck of every future president? I mean, it will be a cold day in Hell before another president gets “serviced” in the oval office, but could partisan politics go so far as to permanently emasculate the CiC?
It would depend on the make-up of the Democrat majority. I doubt that a Republican majority in 1987 would have brought the Clinton charges to a vote any more than the Democrats considered bringing Reagan’s Iran-Contra involvement to the point of impeachment.
The Gingrich “revolution” with its Contract on America and the cheerleading by Limbaugh and company swept in a really different breed of Congresscritter than we had seen since the founding of the republic. (There were a lot of firebrands at the end of the 1850s, but they were passionate about specific causes and did not feel that God had invested them with a mission to put the political party above the nation.)
If a Democratic sweep (however unlikely) carried in a bunch of partisan true believers rather than sincere people who happened to oppose Bush’s policies, then the Democrats might very well behave in the unprincipled manner of the 106th Congress. I see no reason to believe that Democrats are immune to extreme partisan politics.
On the other hand, the Democrats are generally fractious enough that it seems unlikely that they would ever muster enough true believers to their cause. So future Republican presidents will be safe because of the nature of the Democratic organization, not by virtue of the sterling qualities of Democrats.
I’m not a lawyer, but it was material, wasn’t it? (It definitely was deliberate.) Clinton was testifying in sexual harrassment lawsuit. And it is my understanding that in such lawsuits, the victim’s lawyer is allowed to take into account the harrasser’s past history, as in such cases it is often important to be able to show a pattern of behavior. Thus, it is material to the case.
Lawyers, Bricker, is this correct?
I wasn’t worried only about Republican presidents… I meant all future presidents who would have to worry, maybe to the point of terminal paralysis, about whether they were misinterpreting their PDBs.
I can’t speak off the cuff to the motivation of mid-nineteenth century conservatives, but I find it curious that your comparison assumes today’s partisans to be somehow less worthy based on a presumption of some monolithic religious fervor. I must have missed the mass baptism.
And, wasn’t it the Contract with America?
But was it? Really, he asked for* their* definition of what they meant (perfectly legit), and by a strict legalistic interpretation of* their own *definition, then no 'he did not have sex with that woman". Thus, it wasn’t “deliberate”. And whether or not it was “material” has benn hotly debated. Clinton wasn’t convicted or even charged (in a criminal court) of Perjury, so the offense could not have been that blatant. Sure, he prevaricated, but in a Civil case it can be OK to answer a question in a way that is lierally correct even though misleading. Thus, although he “lied under oath” it appears that his prevarication did not rise to criminal Perjury. Not a very nice thing for POTUS to do, sure.
Some of that seems possible. A lot of it seems ridiculous. But as I said, I am not a lawyer and would be unable to continue the debate without talking out of my ass.
So, lawyers out there, care to educate us?
It was not conservatives, particularly, who were zealots in pursuit of their beliefs in the period preceding the Civil War. However, none of those impassioned legislators placed party ahead of all else in the manner that the 104th through 106th Congresses did. There was no mass baptism; I would hardly consider most of the zealots Christian (although the Religious Right did make up a large number of their members).
My point is that I doubt that any Congress has been as rabidly partisan as the few recents assemblies beginning in 1995. (The closest would have been the Congress immediately following the Civil War.) I do not think that there is anything inherently evil in the Republican Party or inherently virtuous in the Democratic Party, but that it would take the extreme partisan zealotry of the 1995, 1997, and 1999 Congresses to threaten a president in the future. (Some of the effects of virulent partisanship have continued to the present, as many of the “class of '95” continue in office, but there are signs that the extremism has finally begun to wane as the members have matured into their roles as legislators. )
I suspect that we are in basic agreement that a repetiton of the Clinton impeachment is unlikely. However, you specifically mentioned Democrats and my position is that the extreme partisans happened to be Republican at the time, but that there is nothing inherent in Republican or Democrat approaches to government that presupposes such partisanship.