Could have been, but weren’t. The President can only pardon people for federal crimes.
As for the OP: I usually like Arlen Spector, but he has apparently gone absolutely insane. Then again, he was talking on Fox News, so maybe he was just pandering to the dittoheads. (Motto: “We brownnose. You decide.”)Anyway, Article I section 2 of the Constitution:
So is it just me, or does that seem to indicate that to be impeached, you actually have to be in Office?
Of these items, only the first and last seem to be supportable; the rest are either (a) normal conduct of business in Washington, or (b) a way of avoiding same.
Pardons: there’s no indication that Clinton sold a pardon. However, like almost all officeholders in our tainted system, he was undoubtedly more kindly disposed toward his contributors. Is this such a surprise? If we assumed that every Congressperson who voted for (against) a piece of legislation that one of his/her contributors supported (opposed), we’d have to assume that just about all of Congress was on the take. The only difference is that here, we’re talking pardons instead of votes. BFD.
The Lincoln Bedroom: I’ll go to hell before I’ll be upset at this. Clinton figured out a way to raise money from fat cats without becoming beholden to them on legislation. Smells like a rose to me. I only wish he could’ve done enough of it so he didn’t need to take a dime from fat cats who didn’t sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Payoffs from foreign businessmen for favors: that’s bribery if what you say is true, so back it up. I expect you’re referring to campaign contributions from foreign businessmen. I’m not crazy about this either, but then I’m not crazy about campaign contributions from domestic businessmen, either. And everybody’s involved in that racket, the businesses in question undoubtedly benefit from (a) the additional access to officeholders they receive, and (b) concern on the politician’s party that s/he needs to do enough for the businesses to keep on getting those checks in future campaigns.
It’s a simple equation, really: politicians only have 24 hours in their days, just like us; they need so much money to run campaigns that they spend much of their time just raising the money; those who give large money expect face time with the candidate in return; we all tend to try to please those we spend our time with; politicians have to spend most of their time with people who give them big bucks, which leaves little time for the rest of us; legislation favors those with money.
It stinks all the way around. But to say what the Clintons did somehow stinks worse seems indefensible to me: they’re all swimming in this same sea of slime.
Lying to Congress: name one President who hasn’t.
Like all other politicians, they wound up indebted far more than they would have liked to the moneymen. But they did manage to push through a number of pieces of legislation that aided the less well-off, most notably increases in the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
It’s been said that a saint is a sinner who kept on trying. The Clintons indeed have no sense of shame, and are certainly 'way further from sainthood than most human beings. They cut some major (and disturbing) compromises along the way. But in a number of ways, they never did give up trying to aid the working poor, the environment, and so forth.
I find much of their conduct indefensible. But now we’ve got a President who, from the word go, is putting the interests of the wealthy ahead of those of average citizens - while claiming he’s doing it all to help the latter. He doesn’t need to make any compromises; he’s already completely in the corner of those who would otherwise need to buy a piece of his soul.
You ask me who is better? IMO, it’s no contest. I’d take another four years of the sleazeball in a heartbeat.
What about this?
Regarding the John huang-Lippo Group-Indonesia connection, can I show Clinton stuffing his pocket with cash envelopes? No, but he did grant uinprecedented access to Huang and his former employers, the Riady family, to Administration policy meetings.
Saying that “well, everybody else does it” didn’t work for Nixon and it doesn’t work for Bill.
We all know that Bush has been bought and paid for, but I expected better from Bill.
goboy, could you try again on that link? It goes inside the Washington Post website, but doesn’t access a particular page there.
“Unprecedented access”? On a par with simply inviting corporate lobbyists in to draft legislation?
In the case of Nixon, as far as we know, nobody else did it, which is why “everybody else does it” really didn’t work.
Watergate - the overall scheme, not just the burglary - was, among many other things, a unique (and apparently successful) attempt, not just to win an election, but to sabotage the other party’s nomination process to maximize one’s chances of winning.
If you want to argue Watergate, feel free to start a thread - 30 years later (the 30th anniv. of the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office is this fall!), I’ve still got all my facts handy. Watergate’s in a class by itself.
Sorry about the messed-up link. I’m having a hell of a time accessing the Post’s archives, so I’ll cede the point for now.
I have no intention of arguing Watergate, but I brought it up because I remember at the time people were justifying the break-in by saying, “everybody does it, Nixon just got caught.”
I think what upsets people most about what the Clintons are doing is that they are out for personal gain. Lots of other presidents have lied, but it’s hard to find one that blatantly tried to use the office to line his own pocket. Reagan lied about the Contras, but he wasn’t trying to steal cash for himself, he was fighting for a cause he believed in. That doesn’t make it right, and in some ways makes it worse (there’s nothing more dangerous than a politician who is willing to step outside the law when he thinks the cause is just). However, what the Clintons did hits people in a very personal way. When you elect a president, you are giving that person your trust. To see that trust violated not for gigantic policy reasons, but to get a blowjob and a nice chair is insulting and offensive.
There’s also the hypocrisy aspect. This is a guy who says that government is for the people, and who repeatedly played the ‘Man from Hope’ angle to make people believe he was just an average guy. But now he thinks he’s entitled to an $800,000/yr office. During the Whitewater hearings, we kept hearing about how poor the Clintons were, and they had to set up a legal defense fund because they were flat broke. But now they own an 8 million dollar mansion, and Clinton was recently spotted viewing a 15 million dollar batchelor pad in Manhatten. Where did all this money come from? Hillary’s book deal certainly, but it’s becoming clear that the ‘poor us’ routine was just populist rhetoric.
The Clintons are rich people that hang out with the elite, and they love it. And talk about greed - Hillary just got an 8 million dollar book deal (the day before the gift ban applied to her - another fine line walked), and yet they still feel the need to steal some furniture from the White House.
Taking the furniture was not a mistake. They were told not to take it by the White House staff. The Curator personally informed them that those things were not their property. They took them anyway, no doubt relying on Presidential deference to cover for them.
Clinton’s speech when he admitted lying to Congress is very telling. He basically said, “I tried to skirt the line between truthfulness and perjury, and perhaps I wasn’t totally successful”.
This is a telling comment, because it is a capsule view of how the Clinton’s operate. They walk a fine line between illegality, propriety, and getting what they want. Hey, presidents get an office! Read the fine print, it doesn’t say how much they can spend, so let’s get the most expensive office space in the bloody U.S! Hey, the president gets to keep personal gifts! Let’s set up a gift registry and really rake it in! Hey, the president gets unlimited pardon powers! Let’s use that to pick up a few extra contributions for the Library and Hillary’s campaign!
When deciding whether to do these things, I’m sure the overriding principle they applied was, “Can we get away with this?”, and not, “Is this the right thing to do?”
The Clintons honestly believe that laws are just obstacles for clever people to work around when they can see something they want. And this is why they were hounded for so long. Ken Starr knew they were crooked, but they were just a bit too clever for him. Witnesses refused to testify, documents vanished, fine lines were walked. But in the end, nothing really illegal stuck to them.
But in light of their current behaviour, I hope some of Clinton’s defenders will look back at Whitewater, Travelgate, Hillary’s investment deals, etc., and admit that perhaps the people going after them might have had a point, however poorly handled.
Yep, so poorly handled that this intensive investigation couldn’t come up with any significant fact to support those allegations. That’s the definition of a smear campaign. Sam, maybe the principles of justice work differently where you come from, but we do believe in facts down here, and we can spot political vendettas from long experience with them.
Intellectual integrity requires starting with facts, applying consistent standards to judge them, identically for those you like and dislike, and reaching the inevitable conclusions. It does not involve applying adjectives first, looking for facts to support them, and ignoring their absence. Failure to do so speaks more about your own sense of morality than of others’.
The consequences are generally several orders of magnitude smaller when they violate our trust for a blowjob and a nice chair. I’d rather they not violate our trust at all, but if they’re gonna, then please, please do it over the little things, OK, future chief execs?
I’m not crazy about the expensive office. But he apparently does remember what it’s like not to have money, and that - as I’ve pointed out above - made a difference in his policies. The current WH occupant has no such recollections, and no resulting understanding of the difference between his life as it now is, and the lives of working-class people.
Funny, this is how pretty much every large corporation views the law. And the GOP moralists say nothing. (Well, OK, they applaud, and cash their dividend checks.) Guess it all depends on who (or what) you are.
I guess you missed the paragraph where I said that Reagan’s lying over Iran-Contra was worse than what Clinton did.
I’m just pointing out that we tend to be harder on people who abuse the office for personal gain. We’ll tolerate a politician who lies to us, we’ll tolerate an incompetant who accidentally allows people to be killed because he can’t fathom an issue, et. But if we had hard evidence that the President accepted a personal bribe in order to pass some trivial legislation, he’d be ejected from office in a heartbeat.
That’s what’s got people so riled about the Clintons now. Bill Clinton’s exit from office was basically a slap in the face to the American people, or at the very least a soiling of the office of President.
If he had pardoned a fugitive because of some political principle, the American people would look the other way, even if they didn’t agree. Hell, he pardoned his brother, and the only comment I heard from a pundit was, “Hey, if you can’t help your family, who can you help?”
But the Rich pardon is different, because it looks like it was bought. And that’s intolerable. The power to pardon is absolute, but that means it also carries a responsibility. There are customs and procedures in place that are meant to act as a bit of a control over that absolute power, lest it corrupt absolutely. Clinton ignored them.
Man, stuff like this just makes me wanna puke. How do you know what the Clintons honestly believe? I bet you don’t even know what 99% of your relatives and 100% of your friends and the people living next door to you “honestly believe”, but you know about the Clintons? Did they say it somewhere? You’ve never “worked around the law”?
maybe they were just a bit too innocent (not in the moral sense) for him. people don’t go to jail because someone thinks they’re crooked. Seems like you’re admitting it was a fishing expedition after all.
I’ll admit that they THOUGHT they had a point and that it was poorly handled. If there was something “there” in the above cases, then Starr would have found it, given all the effort he put into it.
The pardon was at the explicit request of the Isreali Gov’t- not to mention other gov’t. Isreal is one of our few loyal allies- they wanted the guy pardoned (they claim he is an Isreali hero)- so why not? It is not like the guy was a serial killer or anything. But the facts sometimes get int the way of a really good Clinton hate, i know.