from:
alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (D. Deming) wrote:
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] (David
Goldman) wrote:
Has Bob Dole joined the Slime Club?
High Crimes and Misdemeanours
What are high crimes and misdemeanours? Is it too much to assume that
rational people would rise up in protest if the President defendant had
indeed committed high crimes and misdemeaners? Does anybody who is
reasonable and seeks to uphold the rule of law, actually believe that the
public would tolerate a President who is in fact guilty of perjury, of
obstruction of justice and of abuse of power? The standards of the vast
majority are clearly too high to dismiss the sort of abuse that is alleged.
Moreover, most of the charges have proved to be so utterly preposterous
that they collapsed on their own transparent frivolity. The only thing that
remains is the McCarthyite charge that crimes were committed but details
cannot be exposed. It's the old, perpetual, pending investigation gimmick
-keep the target under investigation, claim phony secrecy privileges and he
or she is always a suspect. And that is the sort of suspended animation
that produced the desperate charge that President Clinton committed perjury
-but who says?
That is the question and it not entirely facetious because it goes to the
heart of "specific intent". In particular, perjury is a specific intent
crime that relies upon the mindset of the defendant. When, for example,
Monica Lewinsky said that she hadn't had a sexual relationship with Bill
Clinton, she was telling the truth because Monica Lewinsky made a clear
distinction between what she called "fooling around" and sexual
intercourse. It is Linda Tripp who ultimately insists that Monica committed
perjury because she is the one who persistently quarrelled with Monica, in
effort to plant in her mind, the necessary elements that are required by
law, to expose a target to the charge of perjury. It all sounds absurd and
difficult to imagine but it's all on tape and the charge cannot simply be
dismissed. Blinded by the mentality that the end justifies the means,
criminal perpetrators do not appreciate the scope of self-incrimination. On
tape, Linda Tripp is heard clearly insisting that Lewinsky and Clinton had
sex, and she aggressively disputes the "fooling around" characterization
that Lewinsky firmly believed. Indeed, she pushed and pushed and pushed to
the point where Linda Tripp claimed that if you have an orgasm, it's sex.
Can you imagine a grown woman, any grown woman, arguing with a young girl,
any young girl, about the definition of sex? Can you imagine a grown woman,
any grown woman, insisting that orgasm equals sex? Is masturbation also
sex? If they are willing to re-write the dictionary to expose the President
of the United States to the charge that he committed perjury, is there
anything that they are not willing to do?
Like Linda Tripp, attorneys for Paula Jones were preoccupied by the bizarre
obsession to define sex. In the end, the tortured definition they produced
provided Bill Clinton a cover to deny a sexual relationship -and the trap
was sprung. But it was a trap with an illusory bite. Perjury is not the
failure or the reluctance to expose a sexual play by play. It was a nice
try, but it was a trap that lacked substance and demanded the sort of zeal
that reasonable prosecutors reject. Moreover, if collusion between Linda
Tripp, the Jones camp and the Office of the Independent Council is
responsible for the parsimonious definition about sex, the astounding scope
of the behind-the-scenes set-up reflects unethical, clever lawyering, to
say the very least. Having deliberately limited their questions to
encourage Clinton to mislead, it certainly takes extraordinary contempt for
the law to turn around and call that perjury. There is indeed no limit to
the stretch of reason that Clinton's accusers claim. They even have the
unbridled arrogance to call Jones versus Clinton a Federal civil rights
action. Frivolous on merit, bogus on substance, Jones versus Clinton was
about abusing the court system to procure a perjury charge about a
non-criminal matter. Lawyers for Paula Jones essentially betrayed the fact
that they were more anti-Clinton crusaders than advocates for Paula Jones
when they claimed that Clinton was guilty of perjury, obstruction of
justice and abuse of power. Having oblitherated the distinction between the
Jones camp and Starr's Office, it is essentially naive to deny the evident
collusion. Indeed, the assault was essentially treasonous, because Monica
Lewinsky and the Jones case were used in a manner which was tantamount to
manufacturing justification to criminally indict the President of the
United States.
And when the Jones case was thrown out of court, even the inconsistent Dick
Morris, the very man whose
