I have been extremely busy lately and today I am trying to get caught up on some things, one of those things is news hence my previousl South Park post which is probably old news to many of you.
Something else I had no idea was going on is this. It is talks about possibly trying to censure or impeach Bush for his actions the last few years.
I guess it makes sense but is overall in my eyes bad press for the US and doesn’t make us look very good or together across the world. However, it reminds me of a South Park on this exact topic from Season 7 where Cartman “goes back in time” to find out about how this country was setup and works and found out that it was purposely set up to have a warring faction and an anti-war faction so that the country could do whatever it wants to do whenever it wants and have plausible deniability – ok no, that isn’t the right term, I am not sure at the moment what is the right term but basically we get an excuse to do whatever it is we want as a country and can say it is the will of the people because mostly it is the will of one group or another. I love South Park.
So anyway, this mud slinging contest sort of started, IMO, when the Republicans started going for the impeachment of Clinton because people said he screwed a girl and insisted he didn’t. Now it has escalated to the Democrats going for impeachment because people say Bush screwed the nation and insists he didn’t. In both cases we have appararent lies, one says he didn’t have sex with a girl, the other says that Iraq has WoMD. In either case, the words “Monica”, “Blue Dress”, and “Weapons of Mass Destruction” have all become punch lines in and of themselves.
Do I think Clinton was bad for having some relationship with Monica, nope, don’t care. He did a decent job running the country and if it took a truckload of young women being shipped into the White House for his pleasure weekly I still wouldn’t care as long as the girls were up for it and he worked hard at doing one of the hardest jobs in the world. Anyone who thinks that was the only lie he uttered or that he is the only President who has lied is insane and anyone who thinks the President should always speak the truth is flippin insane. I would prefer they speak the truth but you know what, there are some things that we can’t be told about for security reasons such as foreign policy secrets, etc, and there are some things that just aren’t our business, the President’s sex life is one of those latter items. In the general scheme of things, I am too busy to worry about what girls (or men) the President may or may not have had sex with.
On the flip side do I think Bush is bad for saying Iraq had WoMD and we can’t apparently find any? If he knew they didn’t have them, yes. If he knew they did from hard evidence, then no. I think the problem here is that the problem is so big, we can’t possibly know for sure. It isn’t like you can put Bush with the entire intelligence committee and the country of Iraq on the stand and come up with a comprehensive utterly truthful response like you can when you only have two people involved. Unless we can find some piece of tape where Bush is being told outright that the levees probably wouldn’t hold, err I mean that he was told there were no WoMD but he wanted to attack anyway I doubt we will ever really know for sure if this was a war to protect the country from a known hard threat or it was Bush trying to clean up something his daddy left behind to prove that he had accomplished as much as or more as his dad. Unfortunately, something like this is so big and has so much impact on our lives especially if we want to travel around the world or even go to say a Superbowl here within the confines of our “safe” country that we have to care about it. We need to understand why the rest of the world tends to pretty much hate us and things like this is part of it.
I think the world is probably a better place with Saddam not killing folks off, I am not sure entirely convinced that we should consider ourselves the final arbiters of who should and shouldn’t be removed from power though. That just makes us disliked by even more countries and rightly so, how come our judgement is so good on who should and shouldn’t be in power versus say Japan’s? I am fully behind the troops and hope they do well and come on home. I do however question some of the pretext of why we are where we are, what we are doing, and why. Questioning our actions as a country does not constitute attacking or not supporting our troops. I kind of laugh when people try to imply that.
Interesting post, Joe. However, people (and you, it seems) don’t understand that the reason why Clinton was impeached is not because he had sexual relations with that woman but because he lied about it under oath. If you lie about something, especially about cheating on your wife–something very understandable as a married man myself– it mostly doesn’t matter to anyone but your wife who’ll probably clean your clock. When it does matter to the general public (ie. society) is when you lie about it under oath. As the president is the chief law enforcement officer of the nation, are we to let him go simply because he’s the president and is “doing a good job”?
Reading the rest of your post, your attempt at an equanimous, balanced approach to both Bush and Clinton is shown up by your obvious dislike of Bush. If you want an example of why I think this, reread your post or contact me. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, but I’d respect your position a bit more if you stated your bias outright then proceeded from there.
Hiya Fred,
Oh definitely, I think Bush is at best a mere shadow of his father. I wasn’t trying to hide that at all.
One of my previous posts said:
“I would like to find out authoritatively that George Bush is actually a muppet. I hate to think that someone that daft could actually be our best candidate to run our country but instead all that voted for him were fooled because no one can resist a cute muppet.”
As for the whole lying thing. I stand by the comment that it wasn’t any of our business in the first place and the right to know doesn’t extend to that place. The best anyone would have gotten out of me was a few choice cuss words and a gesture or two. More than likely any questions to me would have simply been met with silence. Unfortunately, he wasn’t given the option to say piss off or ignore it. How many people do you know that get hauled into a legal setting and forced to talk about their sex life because of their job when it has nothing to do with their job? I expect it is in the vast minority or you live in an odd place.
Hey Joe:
Well, and this is the principle thing, Clinton was a very accomplished lawyer. Everyone leaving High School today knows you cannot be compelled to bear witness against yourself (aka the fifth amendment to the constitution) and he could have used that at any point. So to say he wasn’t given the option is not quite true. He may have chosen not to use the fifth because he was playing politics but that was a choice, HIS choice.
As for his getting hauled into a legal setting, well that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Look at the history of his legal problems (that’s right, I said his legal problems. They didn’t just manifest out of thin air). The reason he was hauled in was because he had been sued by a private citizen (Paula Jones) and he was appearing in that legal setting AS a private citizen who also HAPPENED to be a sitting president. In fact, Clinton had challenged his case based on the fact he was a sitting president and the Supreme Court ruled that sitting president or not, he was not immune from being sued. In essence, no one was above the law. It was when he appeared as ordered that he laid the big fat lie about never having had sexual relations “with that woman” and the reason THAT question was asked was because the plaintiffs were trying to establish a particular conduct. This wasn’t some kangaroo court trial wherein an innocent man was dragged before a hanging judge, this man did indeed do what was being sued for and when he lied, it just so happens that because he was a sitting president and the statements he was making were done under oath, that just happened to have broken the law.
In fact, that same law would have been broken by you or me if we’d lied under oath. The only difference is, because neither you nor I hold public office, we wouldn’t be impeachable.
Thanks Fred.
:o)
In the court of public opinion, using the 5th amendment is pretty much equal to saying I am guilty. That is the court that the people involved were depending on here.
If someone says, you did this, and then you say, I plead the fifth, the first thing in most everyone’s minds right or wrong is, you did it. So truly, that wasn’t an option as it would have the same fallout in the end.
take care