This week's target: The Monica Lewinsky Scandal.
I have a theory. My theory is that from now until the revolution, every president who is in office for more than one term will eventually be impeached.
For the benefit of our international members, here's a summar of Clinton's most recent sex scandal. A former White House aide (she was transferred to the Pentagon after dissing the White House and its occupants while testifying about Vincent Foster's death) named Linda Hunt has been secretly taping conversations with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, with whom Clinton allegedly had an affair lasting about a year and a half. In these conversations, Lewinsky reportedly not only discusses the affair, but mentions that she was told by Clinton's laywer buddy Vernon Jordan to lie about having had the affair when being deposed as part of the Paula Jones lawsuit. (Again, for those of you who have other things to do with your time besides keep up with Clinton's extramarital shenanigans, Paula Jones is suing Clinton for having sexually harrassed her while he was governor of Arkansas. The suit is finally going forward after Clinton tried and failed to have it delayed until after he was out of office.) This is a problem for many reasons:
1) Lewinsky was 21 at the time of the alleged affair, which means that not only is Clinton still cheating on Hillary, he's also robbing the cradle.
2) Lewinsky testified during her deposition that she never had an affair with Clinton. This means that if it turned out she did, she perjured herself. Which means that if they can prove she was advised to deny the affair by Clinton or his lackeys, then Clinton is guilty of suborning perjury, which is the kind of thing that almost got Nixon impeached in 1972.
3) Clinton has now said in public (although not, so far, under oath) that he never had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. (He tried to get around doing this by saying he never had an "improper relationship" with her, but eventually the press gave him so much shit about that he had to get more specific.) Which means, again, that if the tapes contradict this, he's definitively "lying to the American people."
So he's done enough, if these allegations are all true, to get himself impeached. Now, if he really did have an affair with her--and basically, from what I've been watching, it seems to me like he did and his whole staff knows it--I'm not about to say that this isn't scurrilous behavior; nor do I believe that Paula Jones is just making shit up when she charges that he propositioned her. Clearly Clinton has a major problem with keeping Mr. Happy out of trouble. However, this is a trait he shares with many other presidents and men in power, including for instance the entire Kennedy family living and dead, and our friend Clarence Thomas. It would not by itself be enough to impeach him on, even if the suit was decided in Paula Jones's favor, since sexual harrassment is a civil and not a criminal violation.
But--and here's where the theory comes in--the reason Clinton would have needed to strongarm Lewinsky into lying, if indeed that's what happened, is that her testimony would have made Jones's claims seem more credible (if he's hitting on 21-year-old interns when he's President, Lord-all knows what he was doing in the Governor's mansion). Why does he need to worry about that? Because Jones is suing him. Why is she suing him now, instead of twelve years ago when all this happened? Because twelve years ago he wasn't president, and the Republicans didn't have as much of an interest in bringing him down.
Similarly, the only reason we know about any of this is because Linda Tripp made those tapes. Why did she make them? Because she told this story to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who has spent the last 3 years and $30 million of our money on a fruitless quest to turn up something related to the Whitewater affair that would be worthy of at least an indictment, and he outfitted her with a microphone and tape recorder and told her to go get some more evidence. Why is Starr willing to go to all this trouble? Because otherwise he would eventually have to admit that the only reason he was still investigating Clinton was because the Republicans wanted him to.
Why would Clinton, who's a lawyer and should know better, do something as stupid as outright telling someone to lie under oath (the one thing a lawyer is not allowed to tell a client to do, even during his own trial)? Because after years of being hounded by Starr, he finally screwed up. And now he's toast.
Of course, he wouldn't be toast if it hadn't been for his unfortunate penchant for sleeping with women he has power over. But if it hadn't been that, it would have been something else. Our system being the way it is, anyone who gets himself elected to that office has done all kinds of shady underhanded things and scratched all kinds of backs, and probably also has all kinds of personality problems. Dig long enough, and you will ultimately strike paydirt. So if you're the party that's out of power, and you have enough of a grudge against the one that's in, all you have to do is get an independent counsel appointed and eventually you can wear the bastard down until he lets something slip about one of these unsavory things and then you've got him.
Additionally, as we saw with the whole campaign financing brouhaha, if you are a sitting President it's almost guaranteed that if you get involved with fund-raising for your reelection campaign you will eventually do something that's technically illegal. Which means that if this offending president gets reelected, you then have a doubly good shot at bringing him down by investigating the fund-raising process. And, if it's a two-term president, you have 8 years to work on him instead of just four.
Given the state that American politics is in, we can't expect people to ignore such a devastatingly successful tactic just because it seems to interfere with the process of getting stuff done. Thus, we can expect both parties to do this, one after the other, depending on who's in the White House. Hence the theory.
The whole thing is unspeakably depressing--that Clinton is stupid and low enough to be hitting on interns in the first place, that he's gotten himself and all of his cronies into this mess by trying to cover it up, and that now we have to sit here while the Republicans gloat about how they were right to think he was a sleazeball. But more depressing than that, really, is to see what's happened with this whole impeachment thing. Nixon got impeached for, essentially, rigging an election, and violating whatever constitutional provisions he had to violate in order to do that. Clinton, if it happens to him, will get impeached for having tried to pressure some 21-year-old into lying under oath about having sex with him. A tool that once saved American democracy from the forces of evil now becomes the newest dirty trick of partisan politics. The next guy, no doubt, will be impeached for having failed to get his car inspected on time and then lying about it on his insurance application. And so on and so forth, until we fall like the Roman empire, bloated with our own crapulence. Oppositional politics. Sux no matter how you spell it.
Off to hell in a handbasket,
The Plaid Adder
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