Then why did he need a pardon?
According to the articles of impeachment and the history of that period, Nixon faced certain bi-partisan impeachment for:
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Trying to block the investigation of the Watergate break-in at Democratic headquarters.
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Trying to coverup and protect the criminals responsible for the break-in. (Aiding and abetting?)
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Covering up other unlawful secret activities.
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Abuse of power
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Violating the Presidential Oath of Office
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Violating the Constitutional rights of American citizens
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Violating the laws of government agencies under the control of the Executive Branch.
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Interfering with the justice system.
Not only do I recall one lie after the other told to the American public, but I remember one night when there was an uneasiness that martial law might be declared. I don’t remember all of the details now. But Nixon wanted the Special Prosecutor fired. (He was doing his job too well.) The cabinet member who was ordered to fire him refused, and he too was fired. I can’t believe I’ve forgotten his name. Was it Ruckleshaus? I just remember the date – October 20, 1973.
President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for good reason. There was no longer any presumption of innocence. We knew what had been said in the tapes that had been made in the Oval Office (thanks to a question asked in the Watergate hearings by counsel Fred Thompson, furture Republican Senator.
Tell me again how this compares with the Monica Lewinsky – Linda Tripp tapes, Clinton lie about not having an affair with “that woman” and lying under oath about a blowjob?
Was the country put at risk by the BJ or by the investigation?
Was he removed from office? Was he forced to resign? Did he have to be pardoned to avoid prison time? Did he violate his Oath of Office?
You’re thinking of Elliott Richardson, although after he resigned Ruckleshaus followed his lead. It was Robert Bork – yes, THAT Robert Bork – who did the dirty deed. I remember it well.
For those of you too young to have lived through those days of high drama,here’s a summary.
Bonus points – Who said:
“What did the President know, and when did he know it?”
“I’m just a country lawyer.”
“I am not a potted plant!”
“There’s a cancer on the Presidency.”
“[Expletive deleted.]”
Nixon was impeached as a consequence of events taking place before any inquiry into his conduct.
Clinton was impeached as a consequence of his conduct during the investigation.
In summary form:
Nixon: 1. Conduct 2. Investigation.
Clinton 1. Investigation 2. Conduct.
See the difference? In one of these cases there is no parallel with any sort of legal process. And with good reason. Instead it was a hunt for a particular witch.
I myself find it difficult to condemn a man for evasive answers to questions concerning his private life. Others plainly differ but I wonder if they are equally harsh everyday.
Did Mr. Clinton lie under oath to the grand jury?
I said he (Nixon) didn’t commit any crimes in response to Polycarp’s proposed standard: he wasn’t convicted.
Of course Nixon committed crimes - serious crimes.
Any by comparsion, Mr. Clinton’s crimes were far less serious. But he did lie under oath. That’s a crime if the lie is material. The question of materialty is one of fact for a jury to decide. On the record, a jury could find that the fact was material to the grand jury investigation.
There’s something scary about a whole series of politics-related posts in which I agree with Bricker, but once again he said precisely what I think here. (BTW, I chose not to delve into the history of Watergate to see what exactly was proven about Nixon’s involvement, but it appears several people filled the gap; I appreciate your first cut on what potential crimes could be alleged, and the help of others in supplementing it.)
Congress said no.
Remember, Clinton was not charged with lying to the grand jury about the blow job (he admitted that to the GJ) but with lying about whether or not he sucked Miss Lewinsky’s nipples. She said he did, he told the GJ he did not. Did he lie? How should I know. How does one prove that he did not suck a nipple? Is that an important question to you? Assuming he did lie to the grand jury about sucking those nipples, is that a high crime or misdemeanor worthy of impeachment?
By the way, if Miss Lewinsky’s testimony is to be relied upon as the sole piece of evidence that the President lied under oath about sucking her nipples, then should we also believe her testimony that the president did not have anything to do with the creation of her so-called “talking points” (thus negating the Obstruction charge) or should we only believe her when she says bad things about him?
The blow job lie came as part of the deposition in the Paula Jones civil suit, not as part of any grand jury investigation. The question was not material to the PJ suit. A subsequent act of consensual sex has no probative value as to whether he harrassed a woman in a hotel room years before (Yes, a theoretical jury could theoretically find that it was material but let’s be real).
Once more, in the grand jury testimony, Clinton admitted the blow job. The blow job was not part of his articles of impeachment.
My good fellow, are you *still * under the impression that the impeachment process is part of the legal system? Or that it takes an actual legal crime with beyond-reasonable-doubt evidence to perform it? After all these years on this board, one might think you’d have accepted that impeachment is a political process only, performed to protect the Republic against grave danger from a lifetime-appointed judge or an elected official with too long a way to go until the next election.
Or are you seriously suggesting that Clinton’s continued presence in office was an intolerable threat to the nation while Nixon’s wasn’t? Or that there was a public consensus of any kind in that direction in Clinton’s case comparable to Nixon’s? Kindly reconsider what they did and are alleged to have done under those light, if you can both step out of your bubble of jurisprudence and deactivate your partisan filter long enough.
Mr. Moto, kindly sate for us these baleful, malevolent “major wrongdoings” in your own words - and cite for us the ones not purely related to his reactions to the investigation itself. You’re not doing well at dispelling the impression of being a slanderous shitbag yourself so far.
Is your concept of fairness that warped? YOU have to show evidence that he DID, get it? Oddly, though, he was never charged with that, even in Starr’s $40M porn novel, and he’s still subject to prosecution for it. Got any idea why it ain’t happening?
The RW search for sefl-excusing tu quoque’s continues, as desperately as ever.
Elvis, the comment Bricker made that “Nixon didn’t commit any crimes” was in direct response to my comment that W.J. Clinton did not in fact commit the crime of perjury, since he was never arrested, indicted, tried, or convicted for it. As to whether he “committed perjury” in a more metaphysical sense, well, it all depends on what your definition… 
Rick has been at pains to state that, yeah, Nixon committed criminal acts, and more heinous and outrageous ones, than did Clinton. For once, we seem to be in seeming agreement on something political; please don’t try to find offense where it is not offered.
As for the “pressure regarding testimony” issue, I believe that it can easily be assigned to the “we can agree to disagree about this” category – unless someone has absolute, concrete proof on the matter.
I’m trying to keep the discussion from being diverted into irrelevant directions, Poly. Impeachment is a *solely * political process, not a criminal one. That point seems to be obscured here, and to some degree on your part as well as Rick’s.
The point of the OP was the use of impeachment as a weapon of political (and personal) spite being sincerely compared to its use as a necessary tool of statecraft in emergency situations. It is also about comparing a target’s conduct in response to an endless series of investigations into areas where allegations of criminal conduct has no credible basis in fact to a different target’s conduct that required its own investigation to be initiated.
My comments stand, and I’ll add one about my disappointment at seeing someone with your standards slipping back into “we can disagree” mealiness. That ain’t how the ignorance-fighting game works.
Move them “again”?! Honeychile, they just been settin here all along. Any impression of movement is caused by your dizzying spin.
The goalposts, as stated from the beginning, are that you show one example “of people in situations relevantly similar to Clinton’s who did jailtime.” This followed Dio’s post, which explained to you that:
Since you were twisting and shouting immediately following my post, I helped you along with a clarification of what we were looking for, the sort of A+B that any trained monkey could accomplish: you were supposed to show me someone who “lied, in a civil deposition, about a fact that didn’t bear materially on the civil deposition, and went to prison for perjury for doing so.” That’s just a combo of my request and Dio’s explanation.
Not too complicated.
So why do you respond with someone who lies about a fact that DID bear materially on the civil deposition? Either you started off thinking I’m stupid, or I’m gonna conclude that about you, unless you’ve got an awful compelling explanation here.
“Moved goalposts.” Shah. Quit backin away from them, and they ain’t gonna move.
Daniel
To think that someone who had his finger on the button and in the highest position of power in the US claims that he didn’t know that a blowjob was sex. I wonder what he thought it was? A potato? “Yes, Mr. Starr. We had a potato, not sex”.
Not that I’m a real Bush fan, but this has to be the comeback anytime someone claims he is an idiot. “Yeah, well at least he knows a blowjob is sex, nyahh” 
Look, there was a point to Clinton’s answer, one shared by some ‘technical virgins’ back when I was in high school (though unfortunately none of them ever dated me! :() “Sex” by one standard means only and precisely penile-vaginal intercourse, and nothing else. By another standard, it includes oral and anal but not manual sexual acts. And so on.
And in the eyes of many, this was a witch hunt to discredit on the part of Republicans to discredit a popular Democratic President. (Do not jump in here to explain to me how it was not a witch hunt, and Mr. Clinton was clearly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, etc. That statement addressed the perception of a large portion of the populace, not a factual assertion about Congressional Republicans’ motives.)
But given that, it was Mr. Clinton’s privilege to resort to legal sophistry. Penal laws are construed strictly for a good reason; otherwise they can be used for vicious purposes by the unscrupulous in positions of power. If “sex” means intercourse and nothing else, and Mr. Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky did not have sexual intercourse, then he legitimately did not “have sex” with her, no matter what orgasm-inducing games they may have played.
And I’m relatively certain that at least Mr. Clinton and his attorneys saw the Starr investigation and the impeachment effort as precisely that: a witch hunt looking for anything that it could find to condemn Mr. Clinton. (A game people have continued to play ever since, I might add.)
It is absurd to think that a man of his age doesn’t know that someone fondling your penis for your pleasure isn’t considered ‘sex’. So, he either didn’t know, at which point see my previous point, or he was deliberately lying to misdirect the investigation. I’m sure quite a few people who do things they don’t want found out would do the same thing in a similar situation. Neither type I’d wish to see in control of the most powerful nation on Earth.
So you’re sitting alone in your bedroom masturbating, and in come the police and arrest you for rape! And of course, you’ll plead guilty, since you were engaged in “having sex,” right? :rolleyes:
My point is that, while any of us would regard his behavior with Ms. Lewinsky as undoubtedly sexual, when faced with a formal quasi-judicial investigation, which may well have been driven by nefarious partisan motives, he was entitled to take refuge in technicalities. Which he did.
Now, of the following series of hypothetical situations, please rank them in descending order of nefariousness, according to your personal standards:
A. Engaging in a conspiracy to subvert a general election for purely partisan and hold-onto-power motives.
B. Firing a cabinet member.
C. Publicly lying about the capacity and motives of a foreign nation in order to foment war fever against that nation
D. Engaging in consensual adulterous sexual activity, and being casuistic when faced with questioning about it
Yes, I would. But then if I do something I’ll admit to it. And only ‘actual’ ignorance will prevent me. Not that I’m going to stand in the middle of town and pronounce my indiscretions because, frankly, most people don’t want to hear them and it benefits no one by the action. Nor, would I expect it of Clinton, either. But if you are questioned under oath, you can either a) be a stand up guy and tell the truth as you know it, or b) try to weasel out of your actions.
Sure, cover yourself with a blanket and hide in the corner if you think it helps. Politicians have nefarious partisan motives? Surely you jest!
As to the rest of what you wrote: some are obviously worse than others. I don’t know what context you put firing a cabinet member because if you hired them I assume you can fire them. The reason might matter. Although, it might not.
But then I wasn’t commenting on the infractions of others or the relative scope of those infractions. It just struck me as odd that someone in that position could say something as ludicrous as he did.
My point was not that I thought Clinton really believed that oral sex was not sex (I don’t know what he really thought but it’s a common enough belief in my experience that I think it’s possible it was his real opinion) but that it would have been impossible to prove in court.
Your protestations about what Clinton “should have known” basically miss the point that this is a matter of opinion, not objective fact.
You also miss the point that Clinton was under no obligation to volunteer information which he was not asked about in his deposition and that the most intelligent thing for him to do was answer questions in the most parsimonious and technical manner possible. Now take a look at the definition of sex which was initially given to Clinton at the deposition:
Because points 2 and 3 were deemed to be too broad, Judge Wright eliminated them and Clinton was only ordered to answer about the first definition. If you read it closely you’ll see that it only asks about touching the other person and not about whether that person touched you. This gave Clinton a technical loophole which he was intelligent enough to recognize and leap through. You may complain that he was being disingenuous or sophist or glib or that he should have interpreted the question as going both ways, but it was not Bill Clinton’s job to help Paula Jones’ lawyers ask more comprehensive questions or to volunteer personal information that they neglected to grill him about. He was a defendant in a civil lawsuit and he was not going give them any more information than he was technically required to.
I would argue that he was given a flawed definition of sex, that his answer was technically truthful and that it would have been all but impossible to prove that it was his intention to answer the question dishonestly.
Clinton’s blanket statement that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” did not come under oath, so it may have been dishonest but it was not a crime and presidents have lied about much worse things much more recently without resulting in impeachment proceedings.
Ultimately, whatever Bill and Monica did was consentual, so none of it was the Republican’s beeswax.
Not that such a piddly detail would have stopped them, I’m sure…
Ask Dr. Barbara Battalino about that and get back to me.
And the idea that the Republic was in such grave danger from it that it required the overturning of two elections is as silly now as it was then. There is no real hope for the history books to vindicate them, either. The concept being brought in as yet another tu quoque from the usual sources, that the Nixon investigation impeachment was equally a matter of personal/partisan spite, is not borne out by history, being derived from simple ignorance of the facts - perhaps willful ignorance in too many cases. That includes the ignorance of the very reason for the process to exist, if it is not simply cloaking it in the respectable garb of an extraordinary court proceeding for defendants who happen to be officeholders. It seems not to dawn on these people that that bit of self-deception is necessary in order to uphold the view that what they did and supported was either necessary or honorable - but the realization that one has been fooled does come with some degree of difficulty.
But those supporting the effort anyway have decided to slink away rather than either defend or recant that proposition. Ah, well, that’s just more of the same gutlessness, partisanism, and uncomprehension of the meaning of democracy that drove the Get Clinton For Something campaign in the first place.