Nothing Is Enough For Republicans

Enough with the apologies. So Bill Clinton messed up. Most presidents have done a lot worse, but he should stop begging forgiveness and get on with running the country. If the Republicans reject the compromise of censure and insist on impeachment and dragging this country through a full-scale trial in the Senate, so be it. History will not absolve them.

I am so tired of the president of the United States being forced to grovel over a matter that any polite society would have chosen to ignore. How much humiliation will the Republicans demand before they get off this destructive course? The incessant smearing of our president over a matter of personal indiscretion that would not even raise eyebrows in most of the world is of incalculable cost.

This is the theater of the absurd, wherein the personal and all too human failings of a leader are repeatedly played out on a world stage simply to satiate the savage appetites of enemies consumed by a lust for power and revenge. No matter how often the president stumbles on stage to beg forgiveness from their wrath, it will just leave the maddened rotten-fruit-throwing claque demanding more.

We all know that this is payback for Watergate. But the reason that the criticism of Richard Nixon deserved bipartisan support is that his behavior as chief executive seriously threatened the functioning of a free society. It is a high crime to use the IRS, the CIA and the FBI to destroy your opponents. It is also unconscionable to compare any of the charges against Clinton to the well-documented complicity of Nixon in the payment of hush money to burglars who broke into the opposition party’s office.

How historically disproportionate is the punishment demanded of Clinton to the crime! How many people died because of his purported lies? None. But the lies of Lyndon Johnson--never even seriously examined let alone punished by Congress--killed 58,000 Americans and several million Vietnamese and Cambodians. How dare any Congress get so worked up over office sex when through three administrations they condoned the nightmare of Vietnam.

What an affront to focus on Clinton’s deceit after having ignored the deadly lies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, which tore apart Central America while bolstering the maniacs who rule Iran. What Reagan and Bush did, they did with the full knowledge that it violated the explicit restrictions that Congress had a constitutional right to impose. If impeachment was designed for any purpose, it was to prevent a president so out of control that he would threaten the very separation of powers.

But with this impeachment process, it is Congress that threatens the division of government, not the executive branch. No one with a straight face can make the claim that Clinton’s exercise of executive power has weakened the rights and obligations of the legislative and judicial branches.

On the contrary, the Supreme Court, in an act of unprecedented stupidity, allowed a civil trial to proceed on the grounds that it would not interfere with the workings of the presidency. Never has the highest court acted with such total contempt for reality and lack of respect for the prerogatives of the presidency. What would happen to our system of government if we allowed the private lives of those very same Supreme Court justices to become part of the tabloidization of the judicial system?

By the same token, do we really want to open up the personal matters, the full panorama of charges past and present, real and imagined, of the members of Congress as a matter of never-ending investigation?

How dare the members of those other branches of government now so arrogantly debase the voters’ right to select the chief executive and have him conduct the people’s business. How insolent of the House Republican leadership to continue to act as if the popular will has no bearing in this matter.

It is truly amazing that President Clinton has been able to continue effective leadership despite constant mortification at the hands of critics who have no comparable record of accomplishment. What a continuing outrage to our nation’s dignity that as the president attempts to deal with the Mideast crisis, so basic to our future economic well-being and leadership in the world, he is once again hobbled by the political pygmies bent on his destruction.