SCRAPBOOK
Scrapbook WITH LAWYERS LIKE THESE . . . Some defense of the president that was! For most of the summer and fall, Bill Clinton’s apologists have argued that the case against him boils down to a...
...America has just celebrated Thanksgiving...
...And he shouldn’t be impeached, because he may be prosecuted...
...If the president had had a high state purpose, lying might have been excusable, even praiseworthy...
...But sordidness is no defense...
...Mansfield dashes off is sounder than what the president’s defense team had months to prepare...
...Nothing like an accurate representation of American reality abroad...
...This year, Americans gave thanks that they had been saved from the Puritans...
...Lader then tried to tell a joke...
...There you have it: a perfect synthesis of the Craig and Ruff “defense...
...And things got curiouser before the defense rested, culminating in the admission by Charles F. C. Ruff, the White House counsel, that “reasonable people” might conclude Bill Clinton was a perjurer...
...So of course he has to lie...
...LONDON CALLING Phil Lader, the U.S...
...Though Democrats may ‘win’ in the short term by succumbing to popular wishes, in the long term we will be in a moral desert, searching for the oasis of our soul...
...Watching this spectacle, Harvard’s Harvey C. Mansfield, an occasional and distinguished contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, dashed off a letter to Henry Hyde last week, and he emphasizes to THE SCRAPBOOK that “it’s not a considered opinion...
...The story continued: “Gates . . . blamed the Government today for what has been widely perceived as his uncooperative attitude during a videotaped deposition...
...An excerpt: “Some say that [the president’s] conduct does not reach the level of impeachability because a low, sordid act like his does not qualify as a high crime and misdemeanor...
...For most of the summer and fall, Bill Clinton’s apologists have argued that the case against him boils down to a cultural offensive by the sex-hating Christian Right in league with a censorious hymn-humming prosecutor...
...It is our job to clean our own wounds, and our job to lead when one of our own has erred...
...Scrapbook WITH LAWYERS LIKE THESE . . . Some defense of the president that was...
...During his brief remarks, he said that we have to find a way to govern multiethnic societies such as America’s, “in which African-Americans make up one third of the population...
...Oddly enough, though, this was the considered opinion not of any of the president’s Republican foes but of his defense attorney, Greg Craig...
...It is clearly a minority position in our party, but we are a party which has always fought for minority viewpoints, for inclusion, and for a diversity of ideas...
...When the holiday first started, the Puritans gave thanks that they had been saved from the Indians...
...But lying to defend a deed of exploitation, done not in the bedroom but in the Oval Office that deserves the highest respect, is a kind of desecration...
...It is also an act of recklessness, totally gratuitous and even frivolous, that opened the President to blackmail and has deeply hurt the reputation of his country...
...CLINTONISM OF THEWEEK The headline over the December 8 story in the New York Times business section captured perfectly Microsoft CEO Bill Gates’s brilliant, even Clintonian defense against the government’s anti-trust case: “Gates Criticizes government’s Lawyers for Tone of His Deposition...
...THE TEN-PERCENTERS In an amazing feat of intellectual jujitsu, the White House and influential segments of the media have managed to construe the perjury and impeachment of a Democratic president—and the eerie lock-step support of that president by Democrats in Congress—as an hour of peril for, yes, the Republican party...
...THE SQUISH FACTOR THE SCRAPBOOK might be tempted to predict the impeachment of the president, except for the wise words of the Baltimore pundit H.L...
...The anti-Starr campaign has reached London, it seems...
...THE SCRAPBOOK, however, is of the view that what Prof...
...Presumably from the right...
...ambassador to the Court of St...
...Let me speak as a Democrat,” Jones wrote, “one of 10 percent of Democrats (according to reliable polling) who believe that our president should be impeached...
...Mencken, who was about to do so...
...Since impeachment is both legal and political, the standard for impeachment ought likewise to be both one and the other...
...And a censure resolution that calls for punitive action of some sort would be a case of the legislative branch acting as a judicial branch in dealing with the executive...
...Almost alone in sensing danger for the Democratic party is former Democratic congressman Ben Jones of Georgia, who addressed his former colleagues in an eloquent letter last week that deserves a wider audience...
...I had expected [government lead attorney] Boies to ask me about competition in the software industry, . . . but no, he didn’t do that...
...James, gave a talk recently in London at the annual Christmas lunch (about 600 people) of the American Chamber of Commerce...
...CLINTONISM OF THE MILLENNIUM According to White House counsel Charles F. C. Ruff, Bill Clinton could not have perjured himself because “in his mind—and that’s the heart and soul of perjury— he thought and he believed that what he was doing was being evasive but truthful...
...I find the standard to be met in the combination of illegality in the President’s perjury and of disgrace in his sordid conduct...
...This would be a gross violation of the balance of powers and is clearly unconstitutional...
...In other words, if your view of reality is sufficiently distorted by self-interest, as Clinton’s no doubt is, then you simply can’t commit perjury...
...But there before the House Judiciary Committee was the lead witness, chastising the president as if he were a wretch at a tent revival: “What he did was sinful...
...It is, on the contrary, almost an aggravation to the offense...
...If you are sufficiently solipsistic, you are immune to prosecution for lying under oath...
...I believe that our party is being corrupted by its support of a man who is not deserving of that support...
...THE SCRAPBOOK chalked this up to the politics of division and rhetorical excess, probably originating in a foul-up in James Carville’s Ritalin prescription...
...Maybe what the Democrats need most is a big tent...
...There was an intimation, subsequently fleshed out in the House Democrats’ censure resolution (“the President remains subject to criminal and civil penalties”) that one of these days Bill Clinton may be put on trial for perjury...
...So it was the government’s questions that were responsible for the fact that Gates didn’t have a clue what any of his own e-mails meant...
...A ‘censure’ vote is simply a way for members to pretend they have acted forcefully when in fact they have ducked the tough question, yea or nay...
...That’s fueled talk Souder will face a challenge in the Republican primary in 2000...
...But how to outflank the John Birch society...
Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 14
