That I can certainly agree with. Dean of Pepperdine’s Law School is more a position that you’d expect to go to a friend of Richard Melon Scaife, given that he’s the one who provided the money for it. Cite. Cite .
To the OP:
I was not a Clinton-hater, but the only way Clinton could have won, and what I think he should have done, was to resign. As it is he goes down as the president who doinked the secretary. If he resigns, he gives a “I love America too much to put her through this crap” speech, and he goes down as “the president who put the country above himself.”
An odd kind of friend, I guess, considering that they’ve apparently never met or spoken. (From your 2nd cite)
(And from your 1st cite)
As far as I knew, Clinton’s legacy was a period of peace, prosperity and progress. This whole Lewinski thing isn’t even deserving of a footnote, pissant crap that it was.
No way. He would have gone down as the other President who resigned in disgrace.
No way, he’d have gone down as the president who permanently weakened the office by making it vulnerable to personally-motivated attacks, and especially by making it essentially subordinate to Congress - even when, and even especially when, Congress is controlled by the opposition party.
The endless demands for special prosecutors that the GOP made continually throughout the Clinton administration (though they’ve remained suspiciously silent since, go figure) were a damned-if-you-do situation politically. If Clinton or Reno rejected any such demand, they knew it would look like a guilty plea. Accepting them, they found too late, wasn’t a way to take whatever the hell it was out of politics, but merely gave the get-him-for-something crowd another means of attack. Starr’s eagerness to get out of the money-losing Arkansas real estate deal and into the juicy stuff undermined public confidence in the judicial system as well, and ultimately led to the end of the special prosecutor law itself.
AQA, your first cite for Starr’s integrity is Starr himself. That is hardly persuasive. Your second in no way undermines the appearance that Starr was being offered a gift in exchange for services rendered. BTW, Pepperdine is a surfing school, not the Harvard of the West you seem to think. Re your indignation at the “pervert” statement, just read his remarkably-timed referral to Congress (an entirely political body, not a judicial one, despite the odd idea some hold that impeachment is a legal process), then consider how much of that prurient detail had any legal content. Only a sad little pervert could have written that. It isn’t even good porn.
manhattan, how often do you hear a hater *admit * being one? Your remarks speak for themselves.
Now that Starr’s taken the job at Pepperdine, do we still have to believe the things Starr said when he denied he was going to take the job at Pepperdine?
As for those people who think Clinton should have publically admitted his guilt within 48 hours, I don’t think that’s going far enough. He should have fired Al Gore, named George Bush as his new Vice President, admitted his guilt, and resigned from office. Granted there may have been a few who would still think his final act in office should have been to order his own arrest and sign his own death warrant. But I think most reasonable people would agree he satisfied honor with the lesser actions.
Considering how averse our current President is to acknowledging any hint of error or sense of apology, it’s hypocritical to say that the other side should publically plead guilty to all mistakes.
Blech. To paraphrase the Austrian Emperor, too many commas.
Commas. Madness. To each his own.
To you, to me, and to later historians, yes. But I think that his resignation would have given an undeserved credence to his opponenents that would have lasted for most of my lifetime.
I’ve always thought he should have said something like, “There are three other people for whom this matter has any relevance. To them I both offer an apology, and make a commitment to make things right. The rest of you can fuck off.”
Okay, that last part is something he shouldn’t have said aloud, but it’s the truth.
That, of course, was always the most appropriate response. It’s a political non-starter, but certainly affords the slanderers and the voyeurs the commensurate level of respect.
Really, though, when you consider how successfully the present administration has applied the STFU rule to any accusation or insinuation of wrongdoing, one wonders if any form of apology offered by an elected official for “ancillary” concerns is the slightest bit constructive to their own future success. Effectively, it appears that if you admit you did something wrong, you’re wrong; and if you don’t, you’re not. The facts one way or the other are seemingly irrelevant in the court of public oppinion; what matters is how guilty you appear. If Clinton had never publically acknowledged in any way that he’d ever transgressed, but simply brushed off questions on the subject, ignored all accusations in the public discourse, and steamrolled ahead, isn’t it possible he might have earned more respect than he ever could have for his final, forced, and patently insincere act of contrition?
Peace? Tell that to Yugoslavia, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Colombia. If I’m doing the math correctly, Bill Clinton attacked more countries than George W. Bush did. If you’re going to support someone, fine, but don’t do it blindly.
I know Bill Clinton did some good things when he was in office. But you have to be willing to look at the big picture. This isn’t about his sex life. It’s about workplace ethics. Doing some good stuff in office doesn’t mean that he should have been allowed to remain in office after having sexual relations with a subordinate. This wasn’t a random woman he met in a bar somewhere. It was someone who worked for him! That’s a firing offense virtually anywhere in the U.S. And any other lawyer would have been fired (and disbarred) immediately for committing perjury before a grand jury. And we won’t even get into Clinton selling Marc Rich a Presidential pardon.
Many Democrats dismissed this as a Republican witch hunt. As I watched from the outside (not belonging to either party), I thought the Democrats should have been more outraged than the Republicans over Clinton’s actions. He gave the party’s reputation a major black eye.
Ever since the impeachment, I’ve been wondering if the Senate Democrats shot the party in the foot by not removing Clinton from office. If Gore had run as an incumbent President, wouldn’t that have added the tiny bit of advantage he would have needed to win the election?