Best President???
Franklin Roosevelt
Without him there would be no National Park Service
It is my memory of the situation that the original “perjury” was in fact nothing of the kind. In the original lawsuit the opposing lawyers produced a list of words and what they considered them to mean. On the list was the phrase “sexual relations” which was given the definition “coitus” and nothing else. So when asked if he had had “sexual relations” with the then unidentified Ms L. he answered no.
The place where the trouble actually started was when the Independent Council stopped investigating a failed housing project where the President and his wife lost money and started a muck raking campaign trying to justify it’s continuance. This office investigated hundreds of issues that they hoped would lead to a crime. None of them ever did. Once it became clear that after several years and tens of millions of dollars they had bupkis they set about creating a scandal.
They took the presidents statements from the original trial and made them part of the record of the grand jury. Then they asked Clinton questions about his earlier testimony in such a way as to almost guarantee that he perjured himself. I don’t fully understand all of the legalese but I understand that this is a lawyer trick known in the trade as a perjury trap.
And you can come back and say that well if he had told the truth he wouldn’t have had to face the consequences. Well you are wrong. If his answer had been yes he could have faced the same inquiry and have been at least as guilty of perjury as he was anyway. There was no way to answer the questions and not appear to be perjuring himself.
That has always been my understanding of the course of events as reported by the news media. But by the end that defense wouldn’t fly because the republican attack dogs took the case into these muddy legal waters and then lambasted Clinton for being overly technical in his replies.
If I had been through the legal acrobatics that the “independent” council put Bill Clinton through I would have insisted on knowing what the oppositions definition of “is” was myself.
I have never seen this description of events refuted in any media.
Degrance:
Totally untrue. The definition of “sexual relations” in the case was given, in the court, as any contact between one person’s body and the other person’s genitals for the purpose of sexual gratification. At no time was the definition ever limited to coitus.
Also not true. The Independent Counsel (not Council) never stopped investigating Whitewater. The Whitewater investigation did lead to a number of criminal convictions, including those of the McDougals and Clinton’s successor as governor of Arkansas, Jim Guy Tucker. Clearly, crimes were committed in that deal.
The question, of course, is whether or not Bill or Hillary Clinton had committed any crimes in that regard. One person who might very well have the answer to that question is Webb Hubbell. It was in trying to get Whitewater-related information from him that Vernon Jordan’s name came up, and through that, Monica’s.
Except to have answered the original set of questions truthfully. A perjury trap can only be effective on someone who had actually perjured himself.
Obviously, since from those media you also parrot ridiculous lines like:
When in fact, Kenneth Starr’s office was indeed independent…of the Justice Department. This was the intended independence when the Independent Counsel law was passed following Nixon’s constant tampering with Justice Department investigations into Whitewater.
But did you ever see that in the media? Or did you just snicker in cleverness at the sneering voice that the Clinton P.R. flacks used when they said the word “independent”?
It doesn’t take too much searching to find the accurate version of events in the media. It just involves reading the news articles and not just the columnists, reading the entire article rather than the first few paragraphs (and certainly reading over getting the info from TV), and finding the answers to questions you don’t independently know rather than just assuming that if the quip sounds clever, it must be accurate.
Chaim Mattis Keller
And I’m sure you’re comfortable that that particular subject was some of your damn business.
A common self-vindication by Clinton-haters. The office was created to look into THEIR involvement into the matter. The convictions of the Arkansans are side issues. The observation that nothing the Fiske/Starr/Ray office found led to even a filing of charges against the Clintons is accurate. So is the statement that NO member of the Clinton administration was convicted for an act involving ANY official actions. By comparison, the Reagan total (this is a Reagan thread, after all, remember?) was up to about 140, by one list I’ve seen but can’t find, and would have been even higher without the GHW Bush pardons. If you’d like to go on thinking that Reagan was a saint and Clinton was the devil, go on, but realize that that judgment is not supported by fact.
Really? I thought the story was that Vince Foster knew everything, and that’s why Hillary had him killed.
[quote]
When in fact, Kenneth Starr’s office was indeed independent…of the Justice Department. …But did you ever see that in the media? Or did you just snicker in cleverness at the sneering voice that the Clinton P.R. flacks used when they said the word “independent”?
[quote]
The “snickering” over the term “independent” referred to Starr’s connections with Klayman (via the Jones attorneys) and with Scaife, and to the lack of objectivity and balance Starr applied to his work.
Really? Whitewater’s roots go deeper than anyone suspected! We ave to get another investigation going right now!
Sauce for the goose, my friend.
The quotes around independent were my own device in relation to the rest of my post. I NEVER read or listen to the commentators be they Republican or Democrat. I am neither. The issue I stated was reported repeatedly at the time in print and in the broadcast media. It was presented as plain fact several times. I seem to remember quotes from either side reacting to these facts but I have never seen anyone claiming that it didn’t happen, until now. I know what I read and I read it several times over several months in news reports as neutral as you are likely to find now a days. You simply denying that is what happened has no impact what so ever. If you have any information that would tend to deny this version of events, from a reliable source of course, no “columnists”, I would be interested in seeing them.
I don’t particularly like Clinton. But I hate to see anyone hounded like he has been. Personally I don’t think anyone, including you or I, could come out of the investigation that he suffered as clean as he did.
But if he had answered yes to the original question he would have been lying. The question put to him despite your denial was, did coitus occur? He answered no, for which he has been vilified. If he had answered yes it would have been perjury.
This issue was in the news as recently as last December when the decision was made to drop all proceedings if Clinton apologized. He did saying that he misled the court. The accompanying report, in a real live printed newspaper, talked again about this tangled legal chain of events where it was hard to show perjury or innocence.
ElvisL1ves:
But it was the Jones lawyers’ damn business, and once he perjured himself, it became the country’s damn business.
Hardly. Those Arkansans were Clinton associates who could very likely have been protected by the Clinton Justice Dept. if the investigators looking into it weren’t doing so under the Independent Counsel law.
And anyway, just because it’s the Clinton’s alleged involvement that got the matter handed over to an Independent Counsel, that doesn’t mean that if, when digging up the truth, others were found to have committed the crime, that the investigation ended up with “bupkis” (to quote Degrance’s original message).
I remember…does Degrance, the poster I had been responding to?
And if you’d like to go on thinking that I believe that, neither is that judgement supported by fact. I have been carefully arguing specific points, not broad generalities such as the one you’re accusing me of.
Well, as I said earlier, it’s based on a wrong assumption. The “Independent” in “Independent Counsel” refers to independence from the Justice Department, not independence from political leanings.
Degrance:
Well, then, you’re at fault yourself for not knowing what an Independent Counsel is supposed to be Independent of.
No, the question put to him was not “Did coitus occur?” The question put to him was “Did he have sexual relations with her?” and, in court, the term “sexual relations” was assigned a clear meaning, which unquestionably includes oral sex. Hence, it was the “No” he gave that was perjury.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Okay, Chaim, then let me ask you this: what IS your view of Iran Contra? What is your view of the president of the United States supporting a group with TAXPAYERS’s MONEY that Congress had decided against? What is your view of a president who circumvents the Constitution and the laws of the US?
I was not saying Gorbachev was a saint, I said that he was, by Soviet standards, not the evil dictator some said he was. And that’s important-you cannot ignore the cultural aspects of what he was-he came from Russia. He was a Russian. Russian culture will indeed affect him. And frankly, he tried to bring about reform.
How is a freeze wrong? The Vatican SUPPORTED a freeze. The Pope was yes, Anti-communist, but he’s also a pacifist, who did not believe in war. There is no evidence that the Vatican was supporting him. Yet Reagan said there was.
Okay, I goofed on the FDR thing, but frankly, the idea the New Deal was fascist-as if the contras weren’t?
Hmmmm…something to think about.
Guinastasia:
Fair enough question. My view of it is that those who provably broke the law should be (or should have been) duly punished for it.
Bolding mine
Just a nitpick here: is there a difference? And if there is, in what way did the perpetrators of Iran-Contra break the “Contitution” by breaking that law against funding the Contras?
I’m not disagreeing with that. However, just because he was a relatively good Soviet dictator doesn’t mean that his peace proposals weren’t skewed toward a Soviet advantage, something that Reagan understood quite well.
Well, yes, the Vatican disagreed with the US on the freeze issue; I thought that the thing Reagan said the Vatican agreed with him on were economic sanctions.
I really don’t know the context in which that statement about the New Deal was made. He could have said that merely to make a point, not to compare it, in a blanket manner, to unrelated issues such as Central American policy.
Were the Contras fascist? Truth is, I don’t know that I’d say they were. They were a bunch of mean, vicious revolutionaries, but I was under the impression that fascism is a politico-social structure that places an inordinate amount of control in a central authority. Does this describe them? Their organizational power structure?
Chaim Mattis Keller
By going against the Constitution, I mean supporting a group of thugs who represented something that our country has always stood against-terrorism, and killing of innocents.
Guinastasia:
Well, by that definition, FDR was going against the Constitution when he allied himself with Stalin during World War II.
Of course, he formed that alliance in order to defeat Hitler, who he saw as a greater evil.
By the same token, Reagan felt that having the Contras in charge of Nicaragua was preferable, in terms of US interests, to having the Sandanistas in charge. While I will not defend the violation of law that financial support of them involved, choosing as ones allies a foreign group who are, quite frankly, not the sort of people we normally like does not “go against the Constitution.”
Chaim Mattis Keller
Not just supporting them-we had our people going in to TRAIN the Contras. What do you think the School of the Americas was about?