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Jewish World Review /Jan. 14, 1999 /25 Teves, 5759
Tony Snow
Must a pol be ‘baaaad’ in order to get elected?
(JWR) --- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com)
SENATORS MAY NOT HAVE FIGURED IT OUT, but they are the real
subject of the looming impeachment trial.
The president has reduced himself to the status of curiosity. He is the
Candy Man, and there is nothing he can do about it.
Congress, in handling his case, will bring judgment on itself -- which is
why members of both parties have come down with extreme cases of the
jitters.
Democrats find themselves in the unlovely position of defending a man many
of them loathe. They cannot quite figure out how to accomplish the feat.
They have argued for, against, for, and now against having witnesses testify
about L'Affaire Lewinsky and the associated allegations of perjury and
obstruction of justice.
They say he deserves time in the poky for his misdeeds but shouldn't be
removed from office. Some say he should stay because the Constitution
requires only judges to demonstrate "good behavior."
But these debaters ignore
the fact that 27 sitting senators rejected the argument just 13 years ago,
when Judge Harry Claiborne asserted that Congress must establish separate
impeachment standards for jurisprudes and presidents.
Republicans have an even tougher challenge. They maintain that this
inquisition homes in not on the president's sexual peculiarities, but on
graver things, such as the Rule of Law.
So far, nobody's buying the argument. Most Americans consider this much ado
about a kinky baby boomer's hankering for Lolita. They can't look at the
president without wincing at his comical inability to control himself, or
the depths to which he will plunge in order to maintain his political
viability. But despite their glancing revulsion of the man, they have
difficulty envisioning the trial as anything more than an inquest into the
pitiful particulars of the president's orgiastic inclinations.
They think not about the sanctity of statutes, but of betrayal: Linda Tripp
gives Kenneth Starr some tapes. She meets on the qt with Paula Jones'
lawyers as well. The Jones team plays gotcha with Clinton and gets him to
fib under oath about Mizz Lewinsky. Seven long months pass and the president
lies again to Ken Starr's grand jury.
The public also seems to have bought the presidential view that the English
language got Bill Clinton into this mess. The president insists that our
mother tongue, if you'll pardon the expression, abounds in words of such
subtlety and striation that one can never say anything with perfect clarity.
He believes words serve an oracular role. They direct us in the general
direction of truth and certitude, but their exact meanings are as changeable
and evanescent as the swirling clouds.
So when we encounter utterances, the theory goes, we must dust away the
layers of connotation and denotation -- engage in linguistic archaeology --
so we might divine the contextual significance of such slippery terms as the
intransitive verb, "to be."
Clinton has a similar view of morality. He dares his accusers to prove that
their views on morality are superior to his, as if he and his counselors
comprised an American Sanhedrin.
After all, isn't he the compassionate one?
Isn't he the friend of the poor? The meek? The of-color? The forgotten and
lovelorn?
Shouldn't his heart trump all other considerations?
The man is an infinite regress of excuses, mitigations and spiritual
references, all of which enable him and his defenders constantly to shift
the focus of the debate and thereby avoid discussing the facts. The strategy
also lets Team Clinton brush aside the conventions normally observed in
polite society.
When Michael Jordan decided he no longer could function at
peak efficiency, he retired from basketball. When Bob Livingston confronted
his own sordid misdeeds, he resigned. But here's the president, disgraced
and cornered, refusing to budge.
He epitomizes an era in which politicians complain that they must be bad
people in order to get elected (this is the guiding principal of campaign
finance reform) -- but that in office, no malfeasance short of murder can
dislodge them.
Senators want to cloak themselves in decorum. But if they hope to produce a
dignified result, they must hose away the slime and dreck, and clarify the
issues for us all.
To that end, they ought to hold all sessions in the open,
ask probing questions when they get the chance and conduct their final
deliberations -- in which each senator may speak for up to 15 minutes -- in
full view of the public.
That's the only way to answer the question that
stalks involved in this scandal: Why did they do
01/12/99: Jumpin’ Jack (Kemp)
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