President Kettle Criticizes Clinton, Then Sells the Lincoln Bedroom

Great Debates
21

Fear Itself:

Perhaps because Lincoln Bedroom quid pro quo campaign contributions were completely unconnected and could not reasonably be linked to Whitewater?

Ken Starr did not, as Clinton-defenders love to claim, have a “blank check” to investigate anything that struck his fancy. He had a mandate, and the investigation was expandable only insofar as it could be tied in to that mandate, with the consent of a panel of three judges.

(yes, I know some claim the panel was stacked toward the right wing. Even if that’s true, the point remains that there was no way even they or Starr could consider it relevant to Whitewater. And thus, Starr’s not indicting anyone on Lincoln Bedroom-related criminal charges are irrelevant to whether or not they were true. It was not his mandate to investigate it.)

22

And Monica and Paula Jones (the situation most directly connected to his impeachment) were connected to Whitewater how? I seem to remember quite a bit of the Starr report focusing on exactly what Clinton did with Monica, in prurient detail. I had no idea that real estate speculation was so…exciting!

23

Dammit, luce! You can just scrub my cranium out with SOS and bleach now…

24

Especially because Starr was investigating the Clinton-Lewinsky liaision for, what, most of a year before there was even an alleged crime involved? Kinda funny when the crime follows the investigation, rather than the other way around.

And why does the Washington Post always call it “the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal” as if scandals, as well as people, had middle initials?

25

It’s to distinguish it from the Monica J. Lewinsky scandal that rocked the Harding administration.
[sub]Heh-heh. Taft, you old dog.[/sub]

26

:rolleyes: Here we go again. Funny how people love to forget things selectively. A brief summary:

Webb Hubbell, a potentially damaging witness in Whitewater, says nothing to implicate the Clintons.

Strangely enough, he somehow manages to get a job in which he’s paid a lot of money for little-to-no work. And this was arranged through one Vernon Jordan, a good friend of the Clintons.

Then it comes to light that one Monica Lewinsky, a potentially damaging witness in the Paula Jones case, says nothing that implicates President Clinton…and lands a job through arrangements made by Vernon Jordan.

Suddenly, it seems like there is a pattern of buying off witnesses.

Where did the prurient stuff come in? Well, to prove a witness’s testimony has been bought off, you sort of have to prove that it wasn’t true. If the testimony relates to denial of a sexual relationship, then proving it wasn’t true involves prurient stuff.

As if you didn’t already know all this…

Chaim Mattis Keller

27

In 1997, the Republicans charged the Clinton campaign with “selling” overnight stays in the Whitehouse on a quid pro quo basis. The specific charge was that President Clinton signed off on having people who donated large sums of money rewarded with various perquisites, including stays at the White House. The President responded there was no actual quid pro quo, that he simply wanted to let those who supported him in 1996 feel more connected to him, rather than feeling shut out after being milked for money.

Now, we are told large contributors to the current President stay at the White House.

In 1997 there was arguable evidence that the people who stayed at the White House were indeed being “rewarded” for their contributions. Is anyone asserting such evidence exists regarding President Bush’s guest list? If not, it isn’t hypocrisy.

Which doesn’t mean that isn’t exactly what does happen, just that no one has any proof.

Jeez, both parties ought to put a muzzle on. How about debating truly important issues, rather than muckraking and slinging mud as fast as each side can draw a new breath?

28

Are you saying the Clinton/Gore campaign of 1996 was innocent? Because the Federal Election Commission doesn’t agree.

$719,000 in fines imposed for campaign illegalities for Clinton/Gore 1996.

29

OK, I’ll bite: could you remind us of how Monica was a witness of any sort in the Paula Jones case?

Well, no, actually. Even at the time, the linkages didn’t make a lot of sense.

Perhaps it was because the newspaper in the small town I then lived in was doing a lousy job of explaining them, or maybe it was because they didn’t make much sense to begin with. I honestly don’t know.

30

Uh, read your cite again Moto, thouse were civil fines, not criminal. I stand by my statement.

31

And in 2000, Bush seemed to be saying in the first Presidential debate that opening the Lincoln bedroom to the high rollers was unseemly and wrong. Rolling tape:

And he certainly used the donors’ White House sleepovers as support for his claim that we needed to restore honor and dignity to the White House.

Sure it is. Unless you’re saying that Bush was making a much finer point to the American people in 2000 than he clearly was. If he was telling the American people that it was fine for big donors to stay in the Lincoln bedroom, just so long as there was no demonstrable quid pro quo, the subtlety of that point was lost on me. As I’m sure it was on the vast majority of Americans.

At any rate, there were ~270 of these overnighters at the Bush White House, and another ~270 at Camp David. That’s about one every other night. Bush may be a very social guy with a lot of well-heeled friends, but it boggles the mind to suggest that nobody was on the guest list on account of their fund-raising prowess. There may not be a decent court case on any individual guest, but in aggregate, it flunks the smell test, big time.

What’s left to debate? Bush is a serial liar, on the economy, jobs, terror, Iraq, the environment, education, and who knows what else.

The deal here is that the American people are behind some of us on the curve of awareness of the complete and total dishonesty of President Bush. I think it’s only reasonable for the Dems to bring them up to speed. The biggest single election issue is that the words coming out of Bush’s mouth have no value. (Unless he’s promising tax cuts for the rich, or reduced corporate regulation, of course.) This sort of thing is part and parcel of that issue. And I expect the Dems to keep hammering away at this, until the entire country ‘gets it’ on this.

32

These were civil fines imposed by a federal agency charged with enforcing election law. They were imposed because said election laws were broken.

Just because it’s a “civil” penalty doesn’t mean no lawbreaking was involved.

Stand by your statement if you choose. But it’s a hard position to defend.

33

RTFirefly:

Because Paula Jones was alleging quid pro quo sexual harassment in the workplace, and Monica was (allegedly, based on Linda Tripp’s talking) an example of Clinton rewarding employees for sexual favors. (and by extension, this would have proven that Paula was denied such because she did not submit to his advances).

Really, that much, at least, you must have already known. What exactly are you trying to get at by playing dumb here?

Chaim Mattis Keller

34

Except, of course, by this time it had been established that Ms. Jones, the Heidi of the Ozarks, had, in fact, got perfectly ordinary promotions and rewards as warranted by her work. So, if in fact she was harassed, she suffered no perceptible retaliation.

There is oodles and scads of evidence to indicate to a reasonable eye that the Starr team pursued the testimony as a legal ambush. Being lawyers, they pretty much had to know there was no real purpose to the testimony as regards Paula Jones, as confirmed by the presiding judge’s ruling as to its relevence.

“…Really, that much, at least, you must have already known. What exactly are you trying to get at by playing dumb here?..”

Quite.

35

elucidator:

That much I agree with. However, that doesn’t negate the fact that a pattern of rewarding employee sexual submission with job perks is still relevant to a charge of workplace sexual harassment.

Even if that’s true, it does not mean that Starr had carte blanche to investigate anything he felt like as long as it contained the name “Clinton” on it. Which was my original point in re-hashing these facts, in response to Fear Itself suggesting that if there were evidence of campaign finance law violations then Starr should have unearthed it.

THE JUDGE DID NOT SAY THAT! Good heavens, it’s like an echo, first the “how was this connected to Whitewater” question, now this old mis-spin. We go through this every time the issue gets raised. Judge Wright’s ruling specifically stated that she did not say the Jones testimony was either irrlevant or immaterial, but merely that it did not address the CORE of the charge. It was very much still relevant.

Do you need me to hunt up that old judgement in .pdf format? It’s probably still on line. I should probably have bookmarked it by now.

Chaim Mattis Keller

36

Campaign finance violations are typically looked into by the FEC, as noted above, and by Congress, as a coequal branch.

Starr had no mandate to look into such matters.

The reason he has mandate to look into the Lewinsky matter is because he was asked to do so by the Justice Department when the matter came up. That is a matter of fact and public record.

37

In theory, perhaps. Nothing to do with this case, though. The Scaife-funded Klayman suit alleged job discrimination. The fact that no actual facts constituting any such discrimination were supplied at any time to support that means nothing to you, apparently. Nor, I suspect, does the effort by Starr to suborn Lewinsky into claiming that her blowjob wasn’t consensual.

How can anyone be so disingenuous as to claim that? Every time he suggested to the Helms-protege judges that there might be something else to go after, they agreed. After a few years he didn’t even have to ask, remember?

There *being * no “core of the charge”, as she ruled when dismissing the case before trial, what could be “relevant” to it?

We deal in facts here.

38

Huh. What I’d thought (but for apparently good reason had been less than sure of) was that the Starrship Troopers, seeking to demonstrate a pattern of sexual harassment as support for Paula’s case, had been fishing for potential victims of Clinton’s rampage when they came across Monica’s name.

Now, about that Vernon Jordan angle you brought up earlier: uncharacteristically for me, I was watching a lot of tube the weekend Lewinsky became a household word. It’s been six years now, but my dim recollection was that Mr. Fixit had only just gotten Monica that job at Revlon or wherever, and she hadn’t even started working there yet. (Didn’t they take advantage of that to nix the job when the story broke?) But Linda Tripp had brought Monica’s salacious tales to them the previous fall, if I’m not mistaken. My point being the absence of any pattern involving Vernon to investigate until after they were getting all hot and bothered over Tripp’s Monica tapes, not to mention the absence of any rewards for sexual favors.

Or do I have the timeline wrong?

39

ElvisL1ves:

(sigh) Apparently we DO have to re-hash the whole argument every time it’s touched upon tangentially.

Not true; at that point of the case, “in theory” was enough to make it relevant.

It means plenty to me as far as whether or not I’d actually believe Clinton guilty of job discrimination - which I don’t, and I agreed with elucidator about that. It means nothing as far as limiting the avenues of inquiry that the plaintiff’s atorneys can follow prior to a judge ruling on that fact.

Cite? As far as I understood, the fact of an employer-employee relationship rendered claimed consensuality irrelevant.

Well, maybe he didn’t ask unless there was actually a reasonable legal pretext? Even if I’d grant it’s true that the judges were so right-wing that they’d grasp at the thinnest thread to link stuff to the Whitewater mandate, that thread still had to be there. In the case of Lincoln bedroom campaign finance stuff, it wasn’t.

No, I don’t. Cite, please, of Starr expanding his mandate without getting a go-ahead from the panel, biased though you think they might be?

Gee, if the dismissal was that clearly correct, then Clinton need not have settled for almost a million dollars while the dismissal was under appeal, eh? Clearly SOMEONE thought there was something more to the case.

I guess I do have to dig up the ruling again. I can’t link directly to the old .pdf file of the ruling anymore…it seems you need some sort of registration to look at old case data. However, I have used this board’s handy search function for past instances of this old argument and here’s the relevant quote from the ruling, Arkansas Eastern Circuit Court, case # 4:94-cv-290, document # 479, page 7, footnote # 7 (emphasis mine in this quote):

“In so ruling [that Lewinsky evidence would be inadmissable in the Jones case], and contrary to numerous assertions, this Court did not rule that evidence of the Lewinsky matter was irrelevant or immaterial to the issues in plaintiff’s case. Indeed the court specifically acknowledged that such evidence might have been relevant to plaintiff’s case…”

The footnote goes on to explain the reasoning behind the referenced ruling. It does later say (emphasis in original):

“The court noted that evidence of the Lewinsky matter, even assuming it to be very favorable to plaintiffs, was not essential to the core issues in this case of whether plaintiff herself was the victim of quid pro quo sexual harassment, hostile work environment harassment or intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

The case might have eventually been thrown out, but that does not mean that questions and evidence-gathering related to peripheral issues were not relevant and/or appropriate.

Clearly some of us do.

Chaim Mattis Keller