Ha! Finally a blog title that will sell some papers! This case study also made for very interesting reading. I think I need to describe why I feel Clinton, and the other members of Congress, did not deserve to have their extra marital affairs made public. Unlike Thomas who's confirmation to the Supreme Court was self-framed entirely on moral character, Clinton and the other Congresspeople had there private lives impeded on for no other reasons than a partisan battle. Ken Starr seemed to probe into Clinton's private immoral conduct just because he was specifically looking to find some kind of dirt on the President. Clinton, more or less, seemed to dodged perjuring himself by legally complicating his responses, which is unethical and cheap, but it doesn't warrant his removal from office nor did his actions need to be made into a media circus. His infidelity has not affected his job nor did it changed how his administration treated women's rights and sexual harassment legislation and more importantly the acts were consensual. There did not appear to be any substantial evidence that Lewinsky was asked to purposely lie about the affair either. So by Thompson's standards the attention this scandal got was a waste of time. I also think that the House of Representatives was extremely incorrect about releasing the initial records Starr gave them without seeing most of them because it wasn't really necessary. Starr wasted tax payer money by creating a scandal out of the personal affairs of Clinton and the political agenda of the Republicans made the situation worse.
Once again I seem to be attacking the Republican party because they put the interests of their party over the nation. I feel as if Lewinsky scandal was a means used by mostly Republicans to try to gain seats in Congress and possibly get rid of Clinton in order to taint the Democratic party in the next election. So much of the voting was almost always a complete party vote and that bothered me. If Clinton had actually done something worthy of impeachment I would hope and agree that the discussion needs to be open and thorough but in this case I don't think the Republican party was interested in finding anything that might shift power in their favor. This was the era of Newt Gingrich and things were hyper partisan. More than anything else this is what bothered me the most especially because the American people were on Clinton's side. I liked how the Iran-Contra scandal was brought up because it showed how far worse scandals were swept under the rug and defended by some of the same people who wanted to take down Clinton.
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I couldn't believe they voted to release those documents without having read them first! That just horrified me. In spite of our amazing freedom of the press, we're so good at censoring things ordinarily...something just went wrong here, I guess.
ReplyDeleteAnd as far as Starr spending the tax payers' money goes...I don't know, I kind of felt that the comment about his having spent $4o million was a little biased (welcome to the two-party system, right?), not because he was all in the right or all in the wrong, but because, had he actually brought something to light (after all was said and done), few people would have been questioning his methods--including his spending. It just seems to be an unfair point against him, and there are so many good ones.
I guess I feel as if Starr was fishing for any kind of dirty to bring against the President. He had gotten pretty far away from the mark on the original intentions of his investigation. He probably was responsible for many of the leaks and his own ethics adviser resigned because of Starr's recommendations to Congress. I guess I feel as if Starr had a blank check to undermine democracy and the amount could have been higher or lower but the fact remains that very little monitoring was going into what he was doing.
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