I totally agree, perjury is perjury...My point with that statement was that I don't feel that his infidelities, warranted tax dollars to be spent on an impeachment trial
True, but...it only happened because he lied in the first place. Well.....what peeled the scab off of that wound was the press NOT doing it's job investigating Whitewater while he was a candidate. It was known once Jerry Brown brought it up in the NY primary debate in 1992. The NY Times took his word because they wanted him to win. Pardon my cynicism but they would have turned hell inside out to thoroughly investigate a Republican. Two other things messed with Clinton: 1) the Democrats had a public sham investigation in 1994 that caught the public's attention just enough; 2) the Republicans won both houses of Congress after the independent counsel statute had been extended another ten years (I believe that's how long it was).
Should it have been investigated? Well, there WAS a crime in Whitewater because the sitting governor of Arkansas who succeeded Clinton (Jim Guy Tucker) went to the slammer over it. I don't think the press should automatically take ANY candidate's word, either. But that was an outcome of circumstance. I recall one (unsourced) Republican being asked about the IC law and basically saying that as an American it was a terrible law and a sick joke - but that as a partisan Republican that the Democrats who had sent IC after IC on wild goose chase after wild goose chase during the Reagan years, they were going to give the Dems a dose of their own medicine, too.
So in short, I actually agree that it shouldn't have been investigated. But knowing the IC was waiting to come down on him like a cat on a mouse, he should have been cleaner, too.
(And Paula Jones had an agenda of her own i'm sure)
All she asked for to start with was an apology - and that only because David Brock (then a right-wing liar and now a left-wing liar) had left her first name in "The American Spectator" report on Clinton's peccadilloes in Arky.
That was it. And when Carville retored that if you dragged dollars bills through a trailer park you'd get all kinds of trash coming out saying things - well, she had a choice: a) back down like a little mouse and have everyone think she was lying; b) sue his behind.
She did the latter. Part of me can feel a bit of empathy for her because she got dragged into the whole thing first by Brock (and the right) and then got blasted by the left.
I am far from a Clinton apologist, as I am far from a Trump apologist, if substantive evidence is given to bring to trial wrongdoing by the POTUS then by all means go to proceedings....but all the innuendo circulating, without backing, now....makes me SMH at all these folks spreading doom and gloom based on mostly opinion...
Well just remember.....switch the uniforms and all of a sudden the rhetoric switches.
I sat and watched the Clinton apologists argue that even if Clinton HAD committed crimes before he was President, it was wrong to try and right - that 'he could not be prosecuted for things he did before he became President' was a mantra. Of course, that gets dropped now because Trump has an R next to his name. Besides, Spiro Agnew resigned the VP over a kickback scandal when he was - wait for it - GOVERNOR of Maryland. Apparently, those rules don't work in the other direction.
To be fair, I thought that unless they had evidence of murder (
which several Vince Foster investigations and one Ron Brown investigation showed the Clinton Killer Corps), just about anything else should have to wait until he's no longer President. It's too easy for someone to trump up a charge protected by immunity in the Senate (a la Joe McCarthy or Arlen Specter) and use it to stall a President you don't like.
Impeachment has become a political tool to disrupt the winner of the election, and I don't think that's right or was the intent.