Then I owe you an apology. I wasn’t trying to put words in your mouth. Sorry.
You are right in that there is not a “smoking gun” in regards to Bush’s cocaine use.
But, to put it in lawyer’s terms, there is a very good case to be made with the abundant amount of circumstantial evidence available. Again, in legal terms, building a case based on circumstantial evidence is less desirable than having a dozen eyewitnesses, fingerprints on the coke spoon, etc.
But plenty of circumstantial cases have led to convictions in courts of law.
So, I think it’s disingenuous to say that there are people who merely want to believe that Bush did cocaine. There are plenty of people who have looked at the circumstantial evidence and reached a defendable conclusion, not just a 'belief."
Are you willing to provide some of this circumstantial evidence?
ElvisL1ves
Blinkerboy? Blinkerboy?
Anyway, where does the burden of proof lie in this situation? Let’s look at the legal definition.
Burden of proof: the duty of proving a particular position in a court of law, a failure in the performance of which duty calls for judgment against the party on whom the duty is imposed.
Now, although the accusation did not take place in a court of law, the concept still applies. It is not George W. Bush’s responsiblity to provide proof that he is innocent, it is the responsibity of those bringing up the accusation to provide proof that he is guilty. To simplify it even further, this is the concept of “innocent until proven guilty”.
If he said, “I want to address the accusations against me regarding my alleged use of cocaine. Let it be known that I did not use cocaine.” Would that ‘prove’ that he didn’t use cocaine. Of course not. Neither does his refusal to deny the accusation ‘prove’ that he did use cocaine. The facts are not known. Although I concede that his refusal to deny the accusation outright could be construed as suspicious, I view those who keep bringing up the accusation as though it were the truth as equally suspicious.
And thanks for labeling me as a partisan hypocrite. As the boys on the playground say, “Takes one to know one”.
Spiff
It was not my intention to characterize any defendable conclusions as a ‘belief’ to be dismissed out of hand. However, could you point me towards the circumstantial evidence available regarding George W. Bush’s alleged cocaine use?
No, Jimmy grew pignuts.
[sub]But more people cared about his brother.[/sub]
PP, if he could have said “No”, he certainly would have. Do the math, Blinkerboy.
Lib, read the transcript and point out the lie. Or did you just swallow that particular meme whole, without examination? That’s not what we’re about here, d00d.
I really don’t want to get into the whole Clinton thing again. That horse isn’t just dead, it’s been buried, eaten by maggots, further digested by bacteria, and released back to the soil, where it helps ferns grow. And, for the record, Lib is correct.
I’m not a partisan, nor a muckraker, and I continue to be upset when people say it was nobody’s business, when the court that was at issue said, rightly so I might add, that IT DID MATTER. It wasn’t about whether or not he cheated on his wife, it was about his penchant for sexual relations with his subordinates.
By “same kind of business” you mean lying under oath? I’m hard pressed to find any evidence that Bush or Schwarzenegger did that. Why must anybody who gives a shit that a standing president lied under oath, be seen as obsessed with his sexual proclivities? To me, it didn’t matter that he was cheating on his wife, but it certainly does matter when he lies under oath to cover it up.
When Bush was running for President in August 1999, the press began questioning him about his past cocaine use.
Why did they choose to do this? I don’t know, but I can imagine it was because it there were rumors surfacing about the coke snorting, and perhaps some of those rumors were propagated by one or more of the other candidates in the race, both Democrats and Republicans.
Anyway, the press (being fair, and all …) asked every other major candidate the same questions about past drug use. Gore and some other candidates admitted to past pot smoking. Other candidates said that they had no past illegal drug use at all.
Bush only said this (and he said it over and over again whenever the illegal drug question arose):
(Above quote is from this CNN story.)
Bush’s line was always that what he did or did not injest 25+ years ago is off limits and he would not respond to any reporter questions other than reciting his mantra (quoted above).
However, I did find this, from an interview with a New Hampshire TV station:
(Underlining mine. Found the above quote in a Salon article.)
Hmmm … In an interview about illegal drug use, Bush admits that he did some uncool stuff. Wonder what that was?
Anyway, your point is well taken, Psycho Pirate, and I don’t claim that I have enough proof to convict Bush in a court of law. But when he repeatedly states that whatever he did 25+ years ago re illegal drug use is not fair game and that he will not “dignify” such questions with a response, I can reach a very defendable conclusion.
And I conclude that Bush used illegal drugs when he was a young Texas buck shipped off to college at an Ivy League school where cocaine was very popular.
I mean, c’mon, why else would he be weaseling out of answering the question, especially at the time during the campaign when his dodging of the question was doing very serious damage to his efforts and he had everything to gain by issuing a very clear statement on the matter?
ElvisL1ves
If he had said no, would you have believed him? How does his saying ‘no’ prove that he indeed didn’t use cocaine? How does his refusal to say no prove that he did use cocaine? See my point? Care to address that point, or would you rather stick to name-calling and blind allegiance to your point of view? If you choose the latter, then why frequent a board dedicated to fighting ignorance and go around spreading your own?
Spiff
Your point is also well taken. I certainly won’t deny that Bush’s refusal to answer the question directly is suspicious. It’s downright frustrating, in fact. And you can certainly draw the conclusion that he did indeed use illegal drugs.
It just bugs me when people put out as fact “Bush used cocaine” when they don’t know for a fact that he did. Like I said earlier, there is plenty to nail the man to the wall against if that is your wont without turning to any unproven offenses.
Fine, you care. All I said was I, and I think a great many other people, don’t. We don’t care weather he fucked or fingered Monica, we don’t care that he lied to a partisan abuse of the judicial system. I never claimed to speak for anyone but myself.
You haven’t denied being a pedophile, a murderer, and embezzler, or any of a 100 other things.
“You are guilty of what you fail to deny,” is an interesting standard.
I see that Libertarian has not denied swallowing a Meme, nor has he denied goat rape and gerbilcide.
::Looks at Libertarian. ::
I kind of like this standard. The fun part will be when they do deny it and we can claim they’re in denial.
Did you get this standard from Slander for Dummies or what?
If anything should be apparent it is that a fair number of people on these boards do care, and care very much, about how this country is governed. We would not be here if we didn’t. Admittedly some of the items in the litany that started this thread are inconsequential and some are irrelevant, but to the extent they have anything to do with the government of the country we care about it. The scandal mongering has gotten out of hand at times but partisan scandal mongering is an integral part of popular politics (as opposed to practical politics where the critical question is “how can I use you to active my goals”).
Without a good slanderous rumor it is sometimes difficult to get the attention of the great mass of people who have little interest in the nuts and bolts of federal and state economic policy, foreign affairs or judicial administration. You need a good juicy sex scandal or a failed attempt to do the old state house two step to attract the attention of the congenitally disinterested and the perpetually jaded…
Scandal is what the partisan rangers use to beat their opponents about the head and shoulders when there is no substantive issue like a flat economy or a foreign affairs debacle. Thus there is no need to exhume rumors about President Bush but plenty of reason to have gone in search of dirt on President Clinton. When your job assembling refrigerators packs up and moves to Mexico or China you do not need a Presidential sex scandal to focus your attention. When your kid’s high school football coach is off on an eighteen month active duty tour with his reserve unit you tend not to place the President"s recreational phamicuticals very high on your list of priorities.
Elvis
[IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
EASTERN DISTRICT OF ARKANSAS
WESTERN DIVISION
No. LR-C-94-290
PAULA CORBIN JONES,
Plaintiff
vs.
WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON
and DANNY FERGUSON,
Defendants.
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER](http://www.ardemgaz.com/prev/clinton/wrightsorder13.html)
d00d!
Superscyllious, I’ve never been asked those questions. Bush, along with all the candidates, was asked. All the others said either “No” or “Yes, and here’s the circumstances …” Capisce, signore?
Now, please explain who you’re trying to convince and of what, or if you’ve even thought about that beyond a purely visceral level. Your increasingly indignant denials of what almost everyone else can see has been comical, but is also becoming quite boring. Is it really that enraging to you that there are people here who see you for what you are?
Blinkerboy, what I would have thought if he’d asnwered “No” is irrelevant because the situation isn’t factual. But, since this is apparently important to you, yes, I would have believed him. Not because he’s trustworthy; we know otherwise; but because he and Rove would have known that at least one of his party pals would be expected to emerge and say otherwise.
The fact, though, is that he refused to give a straight answer, and so did his campaign. There is no reasonable way to infer any possible reason but one. That is a sufficient argument to convict in court, since you bring that up. Capisce, signore?
Lib, you’re quoting someone else’s opinion, even if she’s a judge. You’re not stating the facts. We have a higher standard here, even in the Pit. Now, what lie did he tell under oath? Chapter and verse, please. And the judge won’t help; she didn’t either. Note, too, that the statement you’re quoting came well after the impeachment farce, when the meme you’ve swallowed had already made its rounds.
You’re kidding, right? I know it must be tough for someone of your obvious intellect to, oh, I don’t know, READ THE ENTIRE OPINION, that Lib so kindly presented you. Using that index finger to click your mouse on the link, then to scroll down were probably too much for you. Add to that the problem of actually reading the provided information and, even tougher for you, actually understanding those words, and it was probably too much for you. I understand, it’s tough wanting to wallow in your ignorance.
Just to make it even easier on you, the Judge laid out the following:
The Court went on to say:
As Lib showed, you can lead Elvis to information, but you can’t make him comprehend.
But did you include the definition he was required to use (and not the “most ordinary Americans” standard presented here), as I already challenged? You did not. The “tortured definitions and interpretations” referred to here are the plaintiff’s. Go back and look, sonny.
With the possible exception of Aldebaran and Milum, you could be the best example of a poster who not only remains ignorant, but wallows in it, who wears it as a batch of pride, takes it to dinner, and makes sweet love to it every night.
ELVIS, you are deeply confused. The “tortured definitions” in question were Clinton’s.
Surely you can see that it would not be in a plaintiff’s interest to introduce alternate definitions for plain-English terms like “sex” and “sexual relations.” That would lead to a transcript that appears to say one thing – “I did not have sex with her” – but really doesn’t, because “sex” is defined as involving, say, two cans of whipped cream and a miniature pony, and because it wasn’t that, it wasn’t “sex.”
It is the defendant who will always want to say that words and phrases don’t really mean what God, the universe, and everyone thinks they mean, because then he (or she) can contend they didn’t say what they appear to have said. Clinton took this tactic to such an extreme that it led to the now-famous exchange in which he asked to have the term “is” defined for him, contending that, eh, “is” could mean “is,” or, apparently, it could mean something else.
He denied having sexual relations with her under oath. He admitted having sexual relations with her on national TV. More to the point, he has never since ever denied that he had sexual relations with her. His explanation is that, gee, he didn’t know at the time of the deposition that “sex” and “sexual relations” would include the “inappropriate intimate contact” (i.e., a blowjob) he admitted to the grand jury.
The court correctly found that this explanation was not credible from a man of his stature (the president), intelligence (a Rhodes scholar, for God’s sake), and profession (a lawyer).
I don’t give a shit about what he did to whom. He’s out of office now and largely irrelevant. But willfully sticking your head up your ass on the issue of whether he in fact lied does not make you look very smart.
Did he lie under oath? Yes he did. I’m sorry, but there it is. He just did. You can certainly still consider him to be a good person and the greatest leader in the history of civilization if you choose, and you can even excuse the lie(s) as minor missteps (“mistakes were made”) but the uncontestable fact of it is something you really need to choke down. Seriously, man; get over it.
A-fucking-men, brother!
I’d hate to be tried in such a courtroom.
PROSECUTOR: Do you deny that you killed that man?
PSYCHO PIRATE: I refuse to answer that question.
PROSECUTOR: Aha! But you don’t deny that you killed that man?
PSYCHO PIRATE: No, I neither confirm nor deny your accusation. Do you have any proof?
PROSECUTOR: I need no proof in this court. Your refusal to answer is your confession.
PSYCHO PIRATE: Wha? Ever heard of the 5th amendment?
PROSECUTOR [foaming at the mouth]: GUILTY! TAKE HIM AWAY!
[Patrons assembled in their powdered Elvis wigs and decayed sequined suits]: BULLY! BULLY!
:rolleyes: