The New Republican Hypocrisy

The BBQ Pit
101

I don’t think it’s relativism, per se… I think people can recognize the difference between little white lies, and lies that end up causing war and death.

In other words, it’s not a question about purjury, it’s a question about what was being hidden by that perjury.

I think it’s more like saying that if there there’s a moral difference between two situations. Let’s say there’s one guy who is charged with DUI because he had his car parked in his driveway, got in, and rolled forward into his own garrage… while the second guy was charged with DUI and in the course of a drunken joyride mutilated and mangled a dozen people.

But not the same as far as the moral dimension.

This is the problem with taking abstract concepts as absolutes.
I’ve seen folks on the left angry because Clinton’s perjury charge was over something that didn’t matter. I’ve also seen those same leftists angry because Team Bush’s perjury charge gets to lying about war, harming our own intel gathering capabilities, and attempting to silence the truth by outing Plame in revenge for Wilson’s fact finding.

I’ll have some cites for you tomorrow, I’m about to go to bed, but no, she was not just a desk jocky. The prime matter, as far as I see it, is that Brewster Jennings & Associates can no longer be used as a CIA front, and anybody who did any ammount of bussiness with them is now suspect. Added to that, it’s now harder for us to get human intel because informants are (rightly) afraid that if they work with us, they’ll be exposed by another American politician whose agenda trumps national security.
(Party before country.)

I’ll have those cites for you tomorrow. G’night to all, and to all a g’night.

102

I sort of thought it was Paula Jones business, being that she filed sexual harassment charges against Clinton, and THAT was when Monica came up. If you want to argue that Clinton’s sexual activity with federal employees (interns, at least) while President is unrelated to him sexually harassing state employees while Governor, knock yourself out.

I’d also like to hear the non-lying explaination of how Clinton had “no specific recollection” of being alone with ML in any room of the White House. Considering that he got blowjobs and other sexual favors from ML, I’d love to hear it. Did they not occur in the WH? Did he have an audience, therefore was not alone?

103

Perhaps he doesn’t remember specific women any more than Wilt Chamberlain would have.

104

Really?

Wanna bet?

105

Short of a Vulcan Mind-meld, how could you legally prove that the sworn witness does not recall? I would imagine the mountain of evidence required to secure such a conviction would be too large to be worth pursuing.

106

(Re DeLay) It’s been since 1994, and still no action from the House.

107

You’re not doing apples and oranges here, duffer. Consensual oral sex is not by nature a crime except in certain benighted states that have cast sodomy statutes with such a wide net that they entangle heterosexuals, too. Outing a covert CIA agent IS a crime, and a greivous one at that. So, the whole DUI analogy fails, when you look at the basis for the Clinton and (if indicted) Cheney/Libby/Rove perjury charges. It’s one thing to go after someone for perjury for covering up a greivous crime, and another to go after someone for perjury for covering up an affair. One is responsible law enforcement. The other is out-of-control persecution. Can you guess which one is which?

This ground has been covered before in other threads. Why would the CIA ask for an investigation about the Plame outing, if she had not been a covert agent?

108

Yes, but in most districts, you’re not going to go to prison for a long time if the consequences of your DUI didn’t include someone’s death. If you drive drunk and kill someone–if the consequences of your crime are more severe–you get punished more severely.

I don’t deny that Clinton was very dishonest about his sex life. I am not qualified to judge whether he perjured himself. I do believe that, morally speaking, the questions were inappropriate. I do believe that the consequences of his lie were negligible, and would have remained negligible had not a hostile Congress decided to parlay them into a mountain.

The consequences of Scooters or Rove’s perjury (if it exists, mind you!) are similarly negligible. HOWEVER, what they may have perjured themselves about is NOT negligible.

I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t post from a legal perspective. I post from what I believe to be an ethical perspective. And from an ethical perspective, Clinton’s actions in the lewinsky case are nowhere near comparable to the Administration’s actions in the Wilson case.

Daniel

109

Why do you suppose any witness goes to prison for refusing to testify? Why couldn’t the witness simply take the stand and say, “I don’t recall,” secure in the safety of that response?

Hint: they can’t.

All you need to do to convict someone for lying under oath is convince the finder of fact - the jury - that the statement was a lie. (and that it was material, and that it was under oath, etc). If the record reflects circumstances such that the jury can conclude that “I don’t recall” is a lie beyond a reasonable doubt, that’s all that’s needed.

In this case, if the matter were submitted to a jury, there is sufficient evidence on the record for a jury to conclude that the President perjured himself.

110

Question: If Rove, Libby, whoever perjured themselves, they must have lied about revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative to individuals without clearance, which is a felonious act. So, in this case, if the crime of perjury was committed, how could the other crime not have been committed?

If they lied about something not really germain to the Plame-outing issue (like they claim they never met with a reporter on such-and-such an occasion, even if records show they did, whilst the subject of that meeting’s discussion cannot be established or isn’t really relevant), I, quite frankly, would consider it something of a cheap legal shot to press charges. Yeah, it’s a letter-of-the-law crime, but I always figured the spirit of that law was to keep people from lying about material matters to a case, not about any old thing that might come up whilst testifying before a grand jury.

111

I don’t agree. If you believe the matter is immaterial, then refuse to answer the question. Force a hearing; get a judge to determine if the question is improper. But you have no privilege to decide for yourself what is and is not material to the investigation. If they lied, on purpose, about meeting with Reporter X on Tuesday, under oath, then they should be subject to prosecution. No ifs, ands, or buts.

112

I thought cocksucking was central to this argument. Be consistent, damn you!

No shit, Dick Tracy. Of course his acquittal matters legally. I’m talking about my opinion of the case. I didn’t say he was convicted, I said he lied in court. Guess what? I also think OJ killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. I’m allowed to think that even though he was acquitted. I think Sacco and Vanzetti probably didn’t commit murder even though they were convicted and executed for it. I’m not a court of law. Are you capable of understanding any kind of context?

Probably, but I hope I’m not asking you to admit too much by saying that a Presidential impeachment is not exactly a normal trial. In most trials, the jury isn’t asked to vote to convict or acquit a member of their political party, someone they help to get to the Presidency and work with.

He was asked about “sexual relations” and said they didn’t have them. He later admitted they did. You tell me what that is.
I’ll tell you what, I’ll make this easy, since replying to your idiocy made me read so much of this pointless testmony. READ PAGE 78. He’s asked if he had an “extramarital sexual affair” with her, and says no. We know that’s not true. He’s then asked the question specifically in accordance with the court’s definition of sexual relations, and says “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I never had an affair with her.”
I’m pretty sure the definition of sexual relations included what they did. There are three definitions of sexual relations listed. Having not read the Starr Report, I don’t know if he can be accused of #1. If my deliberately vague understanding of the cigar thing is true, I think that qualifies under #2. And the third definition was “contact between the genitals or anus of the person [whom I understand to be Clinton] and any part of another person’s body.” The mouth is, at last inspection, a body part.
Of course, you’ll probably now use my attempt to cite something as more proof that I’m obsessed, because that’s just the kind of brilliant mind you’ve got. I guess you’ve got me licked on this cocksucking thing.

You’re apparently too fucking dumb to comprehend the words I’m typing at you, nevermind the context they came in. I’m just discussing the issue. I think he lied. I’m not “obsessed” with this bullshit. Your cursing and capslocking makes me think you’re much more obsessed with it than I am.

So, in conclusion: shut the fuck up about my non-existent obsession with this case. You’ve been here for a couple of weeks, tops, and have assumed a lot of bullshit based on a couple of posts that you don’t seem to have understood. Either show me how Clinton’s statements were, in fact, not false, or admit that it’s a difference of opinion and get on with your life. I’ve devoted more energy to reading about this case in the last couple of hours than I did in the previous eight years, and it’s thanks to your stupidity.

113

snort

114

But don’t we eventually slide into a climate where Special Prosecutors can just go trolling and keep at it until they nail somebody with something, anything? I could easily see a situation where politician X, who is being investigated for some policy-related conflict of interest having to do with lobbyists, for instance, futzes a question about his whereabouts on such-and-such a night because he’s having an illicit affair with someone completely unrelated to politics. He claims he was in his office when in fact he was in a hotel room getting busy. Someone else with a political agenda digs around, finds he knows different, rats on X, and boom, X is a perjurer. Plus, you get a nice juicy sex scandal besides. Politics of personal destruction, and it could happen to anybody. I bet stuff like that would happen a lot unless people with other priorities agreed to look the other way on occasion.

115

This is why grand jury testimony is secret. If testimony ranges into an area which is not relevant to the inquiry, then Mr. X has some choices. As I said, he can refuse to answer, and force the prosecutor to explain to a judge what the relevance of the inquiry is. He may refuse to answer by invoking a privilege against self-incrimination, under the theory that adultery is illegal, and force the prosecutor to immunize him for this irrelevant line of questioning. Or he can answer the question, protected by the grand jury’s secrecy laws.

What he can’t do is decide, on his own, that the question is irrelevant and lie. If Rove or Libby or anyone else has done that, then they need to be prosecuted.

The system breaks down when people lie under oath. Punishing people that choose to lie under oath is a very valid exercise of police power.

116

I have only read through the first page of responses so forgive me if this point has been brought up before, but imagine this hypothetical:

I possess the identities of every single CIA, FBI, black ops (etc) agent in the government. I choose to reveal them all. Every single covert agent has now been revealed.

Have I aided the enemy? Would I even if one could not point to a specific enemy or a specific group of enemies and say “Ender has aided them in this way.”?

If your answer is “yes,” if you believe that revealing the list of all our covert operatives is tantamount to aiding the enemy, then why would only revealing one agent not be?

117

Well, but Clinton did not commit perjury. Not only did the jury refuse to convict him, but they never asked him if he got a blow job from Monica and insist on an answer. Had they done that and he said no, then it would have been perjury.

Clinton did say in response to a reporter’s question “I did not have sex with that woman.” It wasn’t under oath. He didn’t have sex with her as he understood his use of the word. But I will concede that was a deception and reasonable called a lie, because if I got a BJ from a cute fat chick, I would consider it sex. But not everyone does.

And frankly, whether the President cheats on his wife, like Bush I did with Jennifer Fitzgerald, is only gossipy interesting, it’s really none of my business, or the public’s, unless the President has been on a big moral high horse about how un-sinning he is, which Clinton wasn’t.

118

We seem to know a hell of a lot about this investigation, via leaks.

119

What the hell are you talking about?

Are you familiar with Mr. Clinton’s testimony before the grand jury? Or are you just typing the first thoughts that enter your head?

Do have the slightest understanding of how the events unfolded?

The President was sued by Paula Jones. During the course of that lawsuit, he was required to provide answers to questions under oath. One set of questions in that process involved asking him if he had sexual relations with anyone else in his employ. This was claimed relevant to Ms. Jones’ lawsuit: she said that, as an employee of his, she was sexually propositioned by Clinton; she wanted to show that Mr. Clinton had a habit of doing the same to other women in his employ.

Mr. Clinton lied in response to those questions. As a result, a grand jury was convened to investigate the lying under oath during the Jones deposition. Mr. Clinton appeared in front of that grand jury and lied again. Then the prosecutor revealed that he had physical evidence that contradicted Clinton’s sworn testimony - the blue dress.

This has nothing to do with Mr. Clinton’s answers to a reporter and everything to do with his answers under oath during the Jones deposition and the grand jury inquiry.

120

They presumably seemed relevant to Clinton when he signed the law that allowed them to be introduced into evidence in federal cases.