The Plaid Adder's CRITIQUE OF THE WEEK

Here's a joke I just made up. What's the difference between Nixon and Clinton?

Answer: With Nixon the question was "What did the President know and when did he know it?" With Clinton the question is "What did Monica blow and when did she blow it?"

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But Plaidder, shouldn't you be critiquing Clinton? I mean, come on…not only does he cheat on Hillary, but he has to do it in the most sordid, sleazy, pathetic way imaginable. And let's not even talk about the harrassment angle--sure, she flirted with him, but given that he's President and she's an intern, does Monica's 'consent' really count for much here? And if he was going to hit on some poor intern, couldn't he have gone down on her a couple times, just to be neighborly?" Yes, all that's true. I'm way past the point where I want to try to claim that Clinton is not a sleazebag. However. It is one thing to be a sleazebag. It is another to undermine constitutional government in an attempt to put your party back into power, and that's what Nixon did. And that is also what Starr is doing, and that's why he gets the hot seat this week. Don't worry; I'm sure next week it'll be Bill. In the next couple of months, there's gonna be plenty of critique to go around.

In my first Lewinsky scandal rant, I advanced the theory (which I then hoped was a crackpot one) that from now until the revolution, all presidents in power for more than one term will eventually be impeached. I'm even more sure of this now. What Starr has proven to us is that if you can just get a special prosecutor appointed, he can eventually bring down a sitting president, whether or not he's committed a crime. Here's all you have to do:

• Find something in the President's past that is so embarrassing (for whatever reason) that he is not willing to admit to it in public for fear of harming his political career irreparably.
• Use all the machinery of justice at your disposal to try to drag this thing into the light. The President, who does not want it there, will then naturally mobilize the machinery of executive power at his disposal to withhold documents, evidence, etc. for as long as possible. Now he is obstructing justice and abusing his office.
• Force him to testify about said thing. He will naturally try to avoid admitting to it. Now he's perjured himself.
• Systematically leak information to the press while the hearings are going on. Thus, you can mobilize public outrage and public pressure long before the grand jury has to make a decision about whether they're going to indict, so that by the time that day comes they will more or less have to do it.

And voila! Instant impeachment hearing. What you can see is that there what you are investigating does not actually have to be illegal. In fact, it doesn't matter what the original "crime" was. Could be he posed nude for Playgirl to pay his way through college. Could be he had an affair with his biology teacher. Could be he used to be the short-order cook for a lesbian separatist colony that advocated mass castration and deportation of all straight white men. The important thing is that the investigation itself creates the impeachable offense. Clinton could have been getting regularly serviced by carloads of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders with perfect impunity, and never have a care in the world about being impeached--as long as you're not paying for it, extramarital sex (or extramarital nooky, which is really what we're looking at here) is not in itself a crime, unless you have the misfortune to live in North Carolina. Even lying about it is not a crime until you do it under oath. It's once you have a full-scale investigation going on that private failings become high crimes and misdemeanors.

Now, admittedly, the President does have to fall into the trap--i.e., he has to decide to lie rather than admit the truth immediately. But let's face it--people who get this high up in our political system don't get there by being honest. And even if they were, who is there on the face of the planet who doesn't have one thing in their past they'd rather die than admit to? No, this system is almost 100% guaranteed to be effective, in the long run.

To those who would argue that Starr and his Republican backers simply have the good of the country at heart, I offer the following food for thought:

• The present media circus used to be called "The Whitewater Investigation." That was back when they thought they were going to find something there that was actually illegal. After that avenue was exhausted, did the independent counsel close up shop? No, my brother. Following a chain of connection so tenuous as to be in some ways nonexistent, he gets us from a real estate deal that nobody ever understood anyhow to blow jobs in the Oval Office, which is something everyone can at least understand even if they can't quite comprehend.
• This was possible because every time they went to the Attorney General to ask "So can we investigate this thing that has aboslutely nothing at all to do with what we're supposed to be investigating?" they threatened to hold her in contempt of Congress untill she said "Sure." More proof that once you get the counsel appointed, as long as you have congressional support, you can investigate any damn thing you want. If the attorney general tries to stop you, all you do is accuse her of favoring the President because he's her boss, and she pretty much has to let you run all over her. Because if anyone was going to not let an independent counsel walk all over her, it would be Janet Reno. A fortiori, then, future attorneys general will have no luck containing the spread of the disease.
• Having gotten his way an been allowed to pursue the Monica thing, Starr then systematically proceeded to abuse his power as independent counsel in almost every way imaginable. All of the "leaks" whereby we have all been informed of exactly what's going on at every step of the way have been illegal; grand jury testimony is supposed to be a secret. Nobody has pretended that these leaks are not coming directly from Ken Starr's office. The leaks have been instrumental in allowing Starr to heap public humiliation on Clinton's head--for instance, Clinton almost certainly would not have made that confession to the nation if Starr's office hadn't leaked the results of both Monica's testimony and Clinton's. Starr has also been instrumental in making sure that both Monica and Clinton had to testify at length and in great detail about the nitty-gritty specifics of their sexual activities--a move that serves no purpose other than further public humiliation. Then, he creates a media frenzy first with his surprise delivery of the report to Congress (in duplicate so that it would look much more voluminous than it is) and second by getting his buddies in the Republican party to authorize posting it on the web. Now, incredibly, he is trying to get the videotape of Clinton's testimony released to the news networks. This goes against every accepted standard of conduct for a grand jury hearing, and if Starr were anyone else he would have been held in contempt just for suggesting it. But because the Republicans on the hill are complicit in this whole project, this flagrantly illegal violation of the judicial process is going to happen anyhow.

The evidence is clear: this is a deliberate, concerted, and in many ways illegal attempt on the part of the opposition party to drive a sitting President from office. The fact that Clinton is weak, faithless, and sleazy does not alter the equally obvious fact that what we are looking at is a coup in progress. So while everyone else is reading about Monica's tits and Clinton's dick, spare a thought for what's happening to our government. If this thing succeeds, we can expect this to happen every time we have a sitting President from one party and a congressional majority from the other. And if this does become a trend, I submit that historians will look back at all this and conclude that Clinton was not the only one getting screwed.

BLEAGH,

The Plaid Adder

Wanna see last week's critique? Go here.