THE OLD MAN
OF THE MOUNTAIN'S
EDITION
I never believed it would come to all this. You can read some of The Old Man’s more intemperate remarks from last year here and in The Old Man's Archives. We were having fun.
For some reason, the release of the Starr Report resulted in an abrupt change in The Old Man’s attitude about all this. For all the mud slung at the messenger, the message stank much more. The Old Man shrank from this. Suddenly the lying sex addict who is our President was not funny anymore. As for the Congressional Republicans, The Old Man had mistaken their indecision for discretion. With the Starr Report finally in hand, they could contain themselves no longer, and they charged blindly into a hail of accusations of partisanship that ring true.
What a disgrace our political leadership is. First, the President for his arrogance in riding the privileges of leadership and political power with such utter disregard for the responsibilities he had to all of us, never mind his family and followers; but also for his complete abdication of his political instincts in favor of a heavy-handed, legalistic strategy that was stupid and leaves a bad taste even in this lawyer’s mouth. The office deserved so much more. Secondly, the Republicans who have been pathetically impotent in capitalizing upon their control of Congress. Unable to achieve anything with their unfamiliar majority status, they gave up the high ground that would have served both the nation’s and their party’s interests better. We deserved more. They look like back-benchers and should not be surprised to find themselves consigned there once again.
Now the tawdry mess will end up before the Senate. The spectacle goes on. Many of us have stopped watching. The Old Man has largely turned away over the last two months or so, contented with a headline or two now and then, but will avidly watch the Senate proceedings in much the same way as he took in the O.J. trial or Hale Bopp; it is a once in a lifetime event, and I wouldn’t want to miss it.
From a lawyer’s standpoint, it will be a curiosity: a trial with 100 Senators sitting mutely as a jury of sorts. They will be presided over, not by a trial judge, but by the Chief Justice of the nation’s highest appellate court acting more as a chief parliamentarian, subject to being overruled by his jury which will get to make up the law as it goes along.
Many of us still mistakenly think the impeachment is tantamount to removal from office. Of course, impeachment is said to be more akin to an indictment, a formal accusation. But the analogies fail us here. The House is not a grand jury; some of its members will act as prosecutors before the Senate. The Senate will be a far cry from “twelve men, tried and true.” They are themselves as political as both the accuser and the accused, and certainly are not impartial jurors to whom the two parties may make their case. Ultimately impeachment is a political process, not a legal one.
Two-thirds of the senators must vote for conviction to remove President Clinton from office. They can not do this without some Democrats abandoning their President and siding with the Republicans. The Senate can end the proceedings by majority vote, but this would require Republican defections and their admission that the nation has been absorbed in this surreal process for a year now to no end. There is a third alternative: the President himself, who can not bring himself to say “I lied” which we all know he did, could say “I resign” which we all know he can not.
So, the nation may well end up in a stalemate, both sides suffering like two boys wrestling in the playground, each with some acutely painful hold on the other, each waiting for the other (if not the American public) to scream, “Enough is Enough! UNCLE!!!”
One more thing: The Old Man is a bit impatient with those who would dramatically refer to this whole process as a coup d’état or an attempt to “reverse” the last two Presidential elections. The 1992 election of course is beyond reversal, but reversing the 1996 election would mean installing Bob Dole as president, certainly an unlikely outcome. And palace plotters down through history, not to mention contemporary Republicans, must be offended at the notion that an effective coup would replace Bill Clinton with Al Gore in the Oval Office.
And that brings me to The Old Man’s final note of incredulity: what on Earth can the Republicans be thinking of? Robert Livingston's stunning resignation from the House and declination of the Speakership, in the wake of the embarrassing revelations of his own sexual peccadilloes, was uncommonly selfless in this political era. His act demands our admiration, but it is naive to expect that the President could rise to match his courage or accept his challenge to do the same. In fact, almost immediately the Presidential spokesman sought to cloak President Clinton in some common cloth with the self-effacing ex-Speaker-elect by sharing with him the martyrdom of “the politics of destruction,” and Democratic partisans in the House who at the beginning of Livingston's resignation speech shouted at him to resign were moments later criticizing him for a lack of courage in giving in to the mud-slingers.
How twisted and adaptable are the standards of our elected representatives!
For the Republicans, the worst resolution of this whole thing from a political standpoint would be the removal of President Clinton from office and his replacement with the relatively clean, if wooden, figure of Vice President Gore. Rather than having their sport with the neutered Clinton for two more years, they would instead endow their likely opponent in the 2000 election with the power and prestige of the office, an escape from the ignominy of the second-highest office in a corrupt administration, an opportunity to establish a positive track record, and a honeymoon period during which he would be granted all sorts of sympathy from the public and perhaps even some Republicans. Instead the House Republicans have chosen a low political reflex over a dignified bipartisan rebuke of this flawed man that would have better served us all. It is hard to say who has more misused, if not abused, its power, these Congressional Republicans or the President.
It is all enough to make you sick. I don’t even know who to root for anymore.
Over the past several months the White House has repeatedly attacked Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for spending $40 million during his four-year investigation of President Clinton. Now Starr has estimated that his office spent just $4.4 million over the past eight months investigating the Lewinsky affair and alleged cover-up.
Lighten up everyone! NBC reportedly offered Jerry Seinfeld $5 million per episode to renew for a tenth season and he turned them down!! The way I look at it, this has been pretty cheap entertainment. Very cheap.
The morning of Monday, October 12th, The New York Times' William Safire recited one argument against the impeachment and conviction of President Clinton:
With Asia and Russia in economic turmoil, refugees about to freeze in Kosovo and Saddam building weapons while thumbing his nose at the U.N., we cannot afford the distraction of firing our reckless leader.
then dismissed that argument:
A superpower should be able to walk and chew up a President at the same time. Turn the myth on its head: Mr. Clinton, who studiously avoided dealing with these crises before the impeachment inquiry, may finally have an incentive to address them -- if only to look Presidential. Advocates of his ouster will support him -- if only to appear nonpartisan.
Turning things on their heads is nothing new in Washington, and I do not suspect we will be saved this time by either the President's sense of irony or the ingenuousness of Congressional Republicans.
For all that, for reasons he finds it difficult to explain, The Old Man does not want this President to be impeached or to resign. I think the pathetic records of both Administration and Congress over the last 4-6 years have done as much to compromise these institutions as have the various scandals, and yet - global economic chaos, Kosovo and Saddam notwithstanding - the fact that, all things considered, we are nonetheless doing so well makes me wonder just how important these institutions and the people who populate them really are, other than in their own estimation.
For some of The Old Man's more sober thoughts on all this and politics in general, click here.
For a collection of The Old Man's less reverent observations on The President's scandal, read on...
Reuters headline Friday [September 3rd] morning:
Clinton turns to prayer as Starr report looms
Guess who is down on his knees now?
"SEXUAL relationship? Haw, yer honor...
"I thought you said saxual relationship. Shucks!"
Now Congress has uploaded the report. It is available on-line now. If that link doesn't work, try this one or this one or this one.
For the President's rebuttal, click here or here. These sites will not necessarily include any apologies or statements of contrition. For the latest Presidential apologies, please stay tuned to your local station. If you have fallen behind, click here for MSNBC's multimedia gallery of Presidential Apologies.
Even after the White House defense team got the jump and issued a preemptive rebuttal slightly in advance of the release of the Starr Report, Starr was initially ahead of Clinton, 455 pages to 73. But then later Friday the President's lawyers released a second rebuttal. On top of that there are supposedly about 2,000 pages of "sensitive background information," plus tape recordings, that will be released only to the members of the House Judiciary Committee. If these materials are sensitive, and include multimedia materials, maybe they should count for more; but they are not being released into the public arena, so perhaps they should not count at all. The Old Man is getting confused. I am not sure how to keep score anymore.
Ironically, as the Reuters report points out, "a parade of computer experts, constitutional scholars and even a psychiatrist were scheduled to testify Friday before a House Commerce subcommittee on how to protect children from obscene material on the Internet."
Funny though, the Library of Congress Thomas system - designed to gain you and me “direct access” to the inner workings of Congress, still does not enable us to search the complete voting record of a member of Congress. The reason for this is purely political, not technological. Our congressmen and women simply do not want their votes easily accessible to us. Gary Ruskin, director of the Congressional Accountability Project, calls Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s efforts to get congressional documents online “pathetic,” and adds,
“The Speaker is quick to put documents on the Internet that serve his political ends and he is loath to put on the Internet the working documents of our Congress, probably because he is afraid of the political implications of the public finding all those enormous favors his committee chairs do for corporate and wealthy special interests.”But never you mind. We will worry about that later. Now let us crank up our global search utilities and see how many times we can find “fellatio” and “cigar” and “penis” and "Titanic" in the Starr Report. Come back when you are done. The Old Man will be here.
Tuesday's [September 22nd] specter of one of this century's moral icons on the same dais with our very own rascal was discouraging enough, even without Mandela's proclamations of support for President Clinton from leaders around the world.
Many are wringing their hands over the prospect of highly partisan impeachment proceedings. One can understand an aggressive approach by some House Republicans, after months and months of stone-walling, dissembling and outright lying by the President and His Men. Confronted with all that, it would be normal to fire up the artillery and take aim at this President. After all President Clinton has been dragged kicking and screaming to the admissions he has now made.
But get
a load of the likes of Georgia Congressman Robert Barr (picture left) and Florida Representative Bill
McCullom (picture right), both Republicans who transparently try to seem objective and public-spirited
as they exalt this national embarrassment into some epic governmental crisis. Their
motives are highly partisan. They smell blood in the water and are swarming.
I have no respect for President Clinton. I never did. I disagree with those who think this entire spectacle is private, should never have seen the light of day. The Old Man has had his fun with the scandal, see below, but there is a serious purpose lying behind all of this. We should know our leaders. We are better for the knowledge we have obtained of this man’s serious flaws. Rather than turning away in embarrassment as he drops his trousers in the Oval Office, we should confront what we have learned about him and look all the harder. We need to keep an eye on him for the next two years, and then - when he leaves office - breathe a sigh of relief that his flaws were just those of sexual addiction and habitual lying.
He is not the first man to occupy that office who was flawed. But it is high time we knew our leaders better. The real test will be to see if we can do any better the next time. As The Old Man surveys the field of candidates pawing the ground, eager to get started in the next race, he is not encouraged.
For some of the Old Man’s more sober political observations, click here.
The latest commotion is over the Congressional Republicans’ decision to release portions of Clinton’s videotaped August 17th grand jury deposition. Monday [September 21st] you could watch the President dissemble on your TV set for better than four hours via CNN, MSNBC, and the Fox News Channel which planned to run it as soon as they get their hands on it. The major networks, out of concern for good taste and decorum, no doubt, were waiting to decide how much of it to show and when to do so after they had had a chance to view it themselves.
As cynical as I am, or at least may seem in these pages, I am taken aback by the speed with which the worm has turned for President Clinton. The super-confident stonewalling of only a few days ago has all but crumbled, and his Democratic colleagues - for once apparently anticipating the polls instead of blindly following them - have abandoned him like our medieval ancestors fleeing the plague.
I am surprised with the abruptness of it all. I am reminded of years ago, just before Christmas, when a good friend of mine who owns a poultry farm nearby invited me and my children out to see a just-arrived shipment of 10,000 day-old chicks. They were in a special barn with a large heater in the middle, and the legion of infant hens were furiously racing in a clockwise direction around the heater. Every so often, for no discernible reason, they would all change direction and race with the same wild abandon in a counter-clockwise direction. Racing round and round, this way and that, and getting nowhere.
The image seems apt. If there are any politicians reading this page, they might do well to ponder the day-olds' destiny: somewhat less than a year laying eggs in the close confines of a cage, followed by a less than graceful exit on their way to become broilers.
In an editorial Wednesday morning, September 8th, The New York Times said:
Mr. Clinton and his lieutenants want to believe that the President's job performance ratings make him impervious to criticism in Washington.The President, who has "gotten lucky" in more ways than one, may be surprised to find that the fortunate confluence of his shenanigans and the incredible performance of our economy and stock market with little interference from him and politicians of all persuasions, may now suffer a divergence to his detriment.
The plain fact is that this president has done virtually nothing to merit any sort of job performance rating. His stats are purely the product of good times, and - to a lesser extent - utter abdication by the loyal opposition. This of course places him at risk should those times, or even the perception of them, wane. Last week's stock market gyrations under the influence of faraway events which are ultimately of little real consequence to us stateside, provided an example of this which was apparently not lost upon his fellow party members as - under the cover provided by their colleague Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, below - they began sniffing around for ways to distance themselves from their ostensible leader.
The President's trip to Russia was ill-fated from the start, of course; one wounded leader of the world's only superpower visiting the beseiged leader of the world's only former superpower. Two men, one a lying philanderer, the other an ailing alcoholic, each a buffoon in his own way - neither carrying any moral authority - meeting to what end?
President Clinton must have fully realized this. His tired performances were almost moving. Could it be that the time for joking is over?
This man is in trouble. For the first time I seriously wonder whether in fact he might leave office. [See, The Old Man's Archive]
There is a lack of proportion here. Presidents should not leave office over things as trivial as this. How did we screw up? We shouldn't elect Presidents of such frail character. The Old Man is troubled now.
Joe Lieberman, Democratic senator from Connecticut and a friend of Bill Clinton’s, made a touching statement Thursday, September 3, when he rebuked the President for behavior which he pointed out was not simply “inappropriate,” but was “immoral.” This was not hyperbole from a partisan; Lieberman has the moral authority to make this statement.
As the first one to break out of the pack, he stands to become the Democrats’ answer to Republican Senator Howard Baker who, nearly a quarter of a century ago, stood up for what was right and spoke honestly against the leader of his own party. We will watch now to see if this crack in the dam of party solidarity becomes a full-fledged breach, as (to mix the metaphor) the politicians hop on the bandwagon. In fact, the metaphors themselves flood through the breach, as I think of sharks in bloody waters and animals turning on a wounded member of the pack. If we have been treated to unpleasant spectacles of independent prosecutors swarming over their political adversaries, and partisans on both sides running amuck with hysterical overstatements, this may be nothing compared to a herd of self-righteous Democrats, angry with a wounded President they never felt very comfortable with in the first place who suckered them out on the limb with him for the last eight months.
Speaking of those partisans, what about Republican Congressman Dan Burton (who, in a rhetorical flourish as disgusting for its utter lack of imagination, as much as for its baseness, publicly referred to the President in April as “a scumbag”) and the recent revelation that years ago the congressman himself fathered an illegitimate child, the product of an extramarital affair of his own. Just good political sense, if not good taste, might dictate to most of us not to stand up in the foxhole with that kind of gaping hole in your armor. On the other hand, regarding scumbags, let us remember the time-honored maxim, “It takes one to know one.”
Maybe this sort of stupidity runs with the territory. Burton is from Indiana. Recall the most prominent recent Republican named Dan from the Hoosier state. I am speaking of former Vice President Quayle, of course. Good Lord! The man seems to be running for the presidency again! Please, we are not ready for that. I have no doubt his linen is far cleaner than the President’s, or even Congressman Burton’s. But the man is simply stupid. He might have gotten the morals right on Murphy Brown and her child-out-of-wedlock, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. If you don’t remember how absurd this man is, go here.
