On the other hand, “President Pence” has a nice ring to it, that is if there’s not a full-blown Civil War…

If I want bias, I can look in a mirror for that. It’s free after all.

Clinton should have been impeached because of his visits to Epstein’s sex trafficking business. But we all see District of COlumbia looks out for their own. Just giving William Clinton a brush over for constitutional appearances, was enough respect and face.

Perhaps I can provide some insight into the election of 1992. At that time I was a political independent and social liberal with as it turned out deeply buried conservative/libertarian leanings.

I reluctantly voted for Perot. Initially enthusiastic about him, his later vacillations greatly lessened my enthusiasm for him.

As for Bush, despite his WWII heroics, I had never really warmed up to him but I had no active feelings of dislike for him. More relevantly, a “faked news” report of his expressing surprise at grocery scanners, left me with the impression that he was completely out of touch and thus unlikely to be able to effect an economic recovery.

Early on I had sensed that Clinton was a conman and never considered voting for him. To my chagrin, years later I learned that Clinton’s ‘miraculous’ economic turn around was actually Bush’s. Clinton’s economic advisers convinced Clinton to leave in place the corrections that Bush had started.

At that time, I was a liberal low info voter and easily manipulated by the mass media that I trusted. A year after Clinton was elected, I started to occasionally listen to Rush Limbaugh and he was the catalyst for the beginning of my political change.

PS: Initially, I was frequently outraged at Limbaugh’s assertions and put off by his bombastic self-promotion. I could only listen so long before switching the station. Gradually, over many months he cracked my political illusions. I came to see that what he was saying far surpassed in importance his abrasive style of delivery.

Can anyone make sense of the 1992 election? IIRC, post-hoc survey research indicated that Ross Perot drew about equally off the other candidates, who his candidacy does not explain George Bush’s loss. We’d had a mild recession which had lasted about 8 months, a decisive (if incomplete and somewhat demoralizing) victory in a small war, didn’t have severely out of kilter macroecnomic indicators (the federal deficit aside), and had had a reminder of how the Democrats had handled law enforcement in the form of the Los Angeles riots. Yet, the public opted for a draft dodger and known adulterer over a combat veteran and echt family man. It made no sense.

The Whitewater investigation started out satisfactorily (gaining convictions of the McDougals and Gov. Tucker in May 1996, among others) but went off the rails after the spring of 1997. James McDougal died before he could give evidence he’d agreed to, Susan McDougal was amazingly stubborn in her efforts to protect the Clintons (serving 18 months on a criminal contempt charge rather than testify with a grant of immunity), and they never got the goods on the people who were madly passing cash to Webster Hubbell (in the form of ‘consulting fees’) during the interval between his conviction and disbarment and when he reported for federal prison.

The root problem is what Conrad Black has called ‘the federal prosecutocracy’ and our process-is-the-punishment court system. It is this which needs to be addressed.

When one can lose a job because of donations to a political cause it is a sign of a culture in decline.

While I remain, as ever, an optimist with regards to humanity in general, the future of our particular culture does not seem bright.

For example:

Bill Ayres was an advisor to a former President of the United States. He advocated ‘re-education’ and mass murder of millions of his countrymen who did not see fit to share his politics. Yet he is considered an honored member of today’s academy. This is a bad thing. Yet the political left revels and delights in such horrible thoughts. They simply aren’t astute enough to realize that almost always after a ‘revolution’ the intellectuals are murdered and the thugs take control.

Cambodia anyone?

That is true and I remember Sam Donaldson speculating on when he would resign when the “blue Dress” story came out. Still, I thought impeachment was a mistake because the Senate would never get 2/3 to convict.

I also agree about Gingrich who was completely outmaneuvered by Clinton.

Politically, it was stupid because the moral fiber to hold him accountable was utterly lacking not just in Congress but in the public as well. Which simply proves my point. It is indicative of a society that fails to hold itself to a basic standard of morality and thus elects Presidents so commonly lacking in basic honesty that the expectation of common decency is an “utterly absurd standard”.

Nor can I agree that a President engaging in sex acts in the oval office is merely a personal “idea” of disrespecting the office. As SCOTUS famously ruled about pornography, you don’t have to define it to recognize it.

Clinton obscenely disrespected all that is contained in the Founding Father’s pledge ; “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor” that led to the creation of that office.

So yes, I do think that the chain of misdemeanors Clinton engaged in required impeachment and removal from the Presidency.

I too can think of other acts but that came to mind as undeniably disrespectful… even for liberal apologetics.

You and I agree that there wasn’t a remote chance of successfully removing Clinton fré²m office. That the offenses easily justified that removal is where we may disagree.

I’m also in agreement that technically Clinton did not commit perjury. That he evaded the truth after swearing an oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth… is another matter. Far more than any legal consideration is his behavior having established his unfitness for the Presidency.

Those Americans in denial of that self-evident truth have lost their moral compass.

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?’

The whole speech is great. And its rightly best remembered for her “fascism with a human face” formulation. But the “Reader’s Digest” quip was a wonderfully cruel twist of the knife.