[Tuesday] on MSNBC, Chris Hayes, repeating a talking point I’ve heard dozens of times during impeachment theater, argued that the “striking” difference between the Clinton and Trump impeachments was not only the willingness of Clinton to “show contrition,” but the willingness of his supporters to acknowledge that the president had done something wrong.
Boy, it must be nice to live in an alternative reality where your allies are always selfless and chaste and your opponents are perpetually plagued by narrow-mindedness and reactionary partisanship.
In the real world, of course, Bill Clinton, with help from the entire Democratic party, kept earnestly lying to anyone who would listen — the media, the American people, a grand jury — until physical evidence compelled him to admit what he had done. His subsequent “contrition,” as impeachment picked up steam, was a matter of political survival. The notion that Trump engaged in “bribery” is debatable. The notion that Clinton perjured himself is not.
If it hadn’t been for the Drudge Report bypassing the institutional media, in fact, Newsweek, still an influential magazine in 1998, would likely have sat on the Lewinsky story until after the Clinton presidency had ended. This was probably the first time that online alternative media exposed corrupt coverage, and it certainly wasn’t the last.
Then again, even after Drudge reported on Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained blue dress, Clinton still lied about his affair to the country, famously saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” His wife, Hillary, who almost surely knew the truth, told Matt Lauer that a “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president” was responsible for the charges. Sounds familiar.
If it hadn’t been for Linda Tripp recording her calls, Lewinsky would doubtlessly have been smeared by the Clinton Janissaries like so many other women before her. These were the virtuous days before Donald Trump hit Washington, when the White House was running a “nuts or sluts” operation to protect the president, led by James Carville, who said that Clinton accuser Paula Jones was the kind of person you found “if you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park.”
Talk about projection.
It wasn’t until Tripp had handed Lewinsky’s blue dress to investigator Ken Starr, who then concluded that the president had lied during sworn testimony, that Clinton finally admitted to the affair. And really, what else was Clinton going to do? Argue that it was acceptable to lie under oath and carry on sexual relationships with 23-year-old interns in the White House — sometimes while your wife and daughter and world leaders mingled in the other rooms?
More significantly, what liberals such as Hayes ignore is that Clinton’s Starr-induced penitence was largely beside the point. Clinton wasn’t impeached for acting like a dog; he was impeached for perjuring himself and obstructing justice — on eleven very specific criminal actions — in a sexual-harassment case.
And any perfunctory willingness by his allies to admit wrongdoing was quickly overwhelmed by a Democratic party rallying around the notion that Clinton had actually been the victim of “Sexual McCarthyism,” a vacuous term that would be repeated endlessly on television by his supporters. Alan Dershowitz, then a Clinton defender, wrote an entire book titled “Sexual McCarthyism.”
Worse, the entire country was soon plunged into an insufferably stupid debate over whether being fellated by an intern in the Oval Office should even be considered a sexual encounter. John Conyers’s testimony defending Clinton’s perjury on these grounds on the House floor makes some of today’s defenses of Trump sound like the Catiline Orations.
Then again, Democrats largely offered the same arguments then that the GOP does today. “The Republican right wing in this country doesn’t like it when we say coup d’état,” said Representative José E. Serrano (D., N.Y.). “So I’ll make it easier for them. Golpe de estado. That’s Spanish for overthrowing a government.”
“Not all coups are accompanied by the sound of marching boots and rolling tanks,” said Representative Nita M. Lowey (D., N.Y.).
“I rise in strong opposition to this attempt at a bloodless coup d’état, this attempt to overturn two national elections,” explained Representative Eliot L. Engel (D., N.Y.).
“This partisan coup d’état will go down in infamy in the history of this nation,” Representative Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) said. And on and on it went in the House.
In the end, there would not be a single patriotic Democratic senator who was brave enough stand up for the American justice system, for women, or for decency. Every single one of them chose partisan interests over their country and the cult of Bill Clinton over the Constitution. (That’s how it’s done, right?)
Now, just as it’s debatable whether Trump’s Ukrainian call rises to the level of an impeachable offense, it was debatable whether Clinton’s actions warranted it (I tend to think not). There’s no debate, however, that Clinton had an affair with a subordinate in the White House and then lied about that affair under oath. His partisan allies did whatever they needed to save him, because the notion that rank partisanship was discovered in 2016 is nothing but revisionism.
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No comments on Impeachments then and now
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Today in 1964, a group of would-be DJs launched the pirate radio station Radio London from a former U.S. minesweeper anchored 3½ miles off Frinton-on-the-Sea, England.
It’s probably unrelated, but on the same day Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys had a nervous breakdown on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston. Wilson left the band to focus on writing and producing, with Glen Campbell replacing him for concerts.
The pernicious influence of unions reared its ugly head today in 1966, when Britain’s ITV broadcast its final “Ready, Steady, Go!” because of a British musicians’ union’s ban on miming. The final show featured Mick Jagger, The Who, Eric Burdon, the Spencer Davis Group, Donovan and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.
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Christianity Today, a leading evangelical publication, has come out to say President Trump needs to go. The magazine argues that not only are the facts against him “unambiguous,” but also that the pattern of immorality that has defined his presidency makes them all the more damaging.
The backlash was swift and brutal. Trump took to Twitter, as he so often does, and trashed the magazine as a “far-left” publication that “knows nothing about reading a perfect transcript of a routine phone call and would rather have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President.”
Franklin Graham, a prominent evangelical leader and son of the publication’s founder, Billy Graham, distanced himself from its editorial board and declared that in 2016, his father gladly cast his vote for Trump. Similarly, Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, claimed Christianity Today’s editorial revealed “that they are apart of the same 17% or so of liberal evangelicals who have preached social gospel for decades!”
The response to the editorial was expected, and perhaps even understandable. Evangelical Christians have made it quite clear since 2016 that they do not like being told who they can vote for or who in good conscience they can support. But many have used the impossible choice in 2016 as an excuse to toss moral accountability aside. (Many of the same leaders, such as Franklin Graham and Falwell Jr., who have defended Trump’s faults called for Bill Clinton’s impeachment based on his immorality.) If anything, Christianity Today’s editorial was a breath of fresh air and a reminder that morality still matters in the White House, and Christians have an obligation to say so.
Much of Christianity Today’s editorial focuses on the immorality of Donald Trump, the man. But that has little, if anything at all, to do with the substance of the House Democrats’ articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, the president.The House has accused Trump of abusing his power and obstructing Congress. The first allegation is undeniably true, as Christianity Today rightly stated. Trump withheld foreign aid from Ukraine, and the clear implication is that he did so to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden, his political rival. Even many Republicans have given up trying to defend his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as anything but a quid pro quo.
But presidents abuse their power constantly, and the answer is rarely impeachment. If the standard for removal from office were simply an overreach of power, or a prioritization of personal interests, then every former president would at one point have had articles of impeachment drawn up against them.
The second allegation, that Trump obstructed Congress, is ridiculous. Denying the House its witnesses and refusing subpoenas could be an overstep, but that is for courts to decide, not the House. And it certainly does not meet the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard set by the U.S. Constitution.
Trump’s habitual immorality aside, there is simply not enough evidence to support the vague, undefined case the Democrats have made against the president. The Constitution, not the Bible, defines the standards for impeachment, and we must deal with them as such.
I applaud Christianity Today for speaking the truth. Trump is no moral exemplar, and it’s time evangelical Christians stopped treating him as such. But the case that Christianity Today makes is very different from the case the Democrats have made, and that distinction is important.
Christians live in two kingdoms. It is often difficult to traverse man’s kingdom and obey the commandments of God’s kingdom. We live directly under the laws man has written, and we hope that they reflect the natural law instituted by God. But there are certain issues where the line between politics and morality is blurred, and the Christian’s responsibility is obscure. Impeachment is one, voting is another.
Evangelicals will have the opportunity to vote their consciences at the ballot box next year, since the Senate will almost certainly acquit Trump. The choice will likely be just as difficult as it was in 2016. But for now, we, as Christians, should be willing to obey the law as it is written and let God do the rest.
That’s one view. Another comes from Michael Smith:
I was going to write a commentary on the Christianity Today article but I realized that I wrote a pre-rebuttal on March 19th of this year.
It was as follows:
I get this all the time – “You claim to be a Christian, how can you support someone like Donald Trump?”
Well, it’s like this – we conservatives and Christians know what the Democrats would do to us if given the chance. We know that with them, we’re always one wedding cake away from sensitivity training and reeducation camps. We’ve lost so much cultural and political influence that we can’t always fight for ourselves because the fights aren’t fair any more, they are always stacked against us from the outset. The media, the institutions and usually government (especially the judiciary) always gang up on us.
So we did what every weaker army has done in history.
We hired a mercenary.
Sure, Trump doesn’t necessarily believe what we believe and he isn’t our idea of a conservative – and he has an interesting past – but he came to us and offered to be our champion, someone who could and would put together an army to fight to the death to preserve our beliefs and to defend conservativism.
He would go to war under our flag.
Trump is our Sir John Hawkwood.
Besides having the coolest name straight out of a sword and sorcery novel, Hawkwood was an Englishman and a knight who served in the English army during the Hundred Years’ War and commanded the White Company, the most elite mercenary army in all of 14th century Italy.
That’s how we can support Trump.
He is not of us but he is for us.
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Proving that there is no accounting for taste, I present the number one song today in 1958:
The number one single today in 1962 was by a group whose name was sort of a non sequitur given that the group came from a country that lacks the meteorological phenomenon of the group’s title:
The number one single today in 1963 was probably played on the radio …
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The number one album today in 1968:
Today in 1969, the Supremes made their last TV appearance together on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew, with a somewhat ironic selection:
Today in 1970, Army veteran Elvis Presley volunteered himself as a soldier in the war on drugs, delivering a letter to the White House. Earlier that day, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had declined Presley’s request to volunteer, saying that only the president could overrule him.
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The number one British album today in 1969 was the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed”:
The number one British single today in 1980 came 12 days after its singer’s death:
The number one song today in 1986:
The number one album today in 1975 for the second consecutive week was “Chicago IX,” which was actually “Chicago’s Greatest Hits”:
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Donald Trump has almost certainly engaged in impeachable acts. Without getting into the wilder charges against the president, such as accusations of “treason,” his dealings with the Ukrainian government demonstrate him misusing the powers of his office to get a foreign government to act against (also corrupt) political opponents.
But is yet another round of posturing for the television cameras with little hope of convicting and removing the president worth widening the yawning partisan chasm that divides Americans and turns the dysfunctional government into a weapon over which factions fight for control?
The answer to that question isn’t clear.
As to impeachability, many legal experts agree that President Trump has overstepped the bounds of acceptable conduct.
“Impeachment has always been, first and foremost, a constitutional defense against executive misuse of power,” writes University of Missouri Law Professor Frank O. Bowman III, author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump. “Mr. Trump’s behavior is a classic example of abuse of presidential power for personal or political gain, and is therefore properly impeachable,” he adds about the president’s Ukraine dealings.
“An impeachable abuse of power can be based on a corrupt scheme that misuses powers that the President had been given to faithfully exercise,” agrees the Berkeley School of Law’s Orin S. Kerr, writing for the Volokh Conspiracy. “What Trump did strikes me as pretty much the scenario you would have described if someone had asked you, before the Trump presidency, what kind of Presidential acts are impeachable.”
And that’s exactly what the first of two articles of impeachment passed last week by the House Judiciary Committee specifies (the second cites obstruction of Congress):
Using the powers of his high office, President Trump solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 United States Presidential election. He did so through a scheme or course of conduct that included soliciting the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage.
Officeholders aren’t supposed to abuse the power of their office for personal gain, or to benefit themselves politically, or to punish their enemies.
If you’re about to point out that abusing power is business as usual for government officials… well, you’re right. Even if we just confine ourselves to abuses intended to benefit friends and punish enemies, we can point to the long-established role of the IRS as a political hit squad at the very least. We could also point to the FBI’s long and unsavory history of meddling in politics on behalf of the powers-that-be.
Presidents generally get away with such abuses because they can—they have the political cover to turn the power of the state to their own ends. Repeated without consequences, corrupt conduct becomes normalized and contributes to the metastasizing power of the presidency at the hands of both Republicans and Democrats.
Some of my colleagues hope that Trump’s vulnerability allows an opening to not just punish a misbehaving official, but to rein-in the presidency itself. By finally imposing a penalty for abusing the powers of the office, Congress might reassert some of its own surrendered authority and put clearer boundaries around the behavior of chief executives to come, they suggest.
That’s an attractive argument in many ways, since it recognizes that getting rid of one politician doesn’t solve the problems inherent in the office he holds. We just might be able to impose some limits on government as a whole by impeaching Trump and (although this is unlikely to happen) removing him from office. Or, we just may fan the flames of political warfare in a country that has turned elections and policy choices into a vindictive grudge match that’s escalating toward an uncertain but nasty outcome.
A general perception of impeachment as mere inter-party brawling seems highly likely given the partisan divide over the issue. The general public is evenly divided with 45 percent favoring impeachment and 47 percent opposed in the latest CNN poll—but support for the effort coming from 77 percent of Democrats and only 5 percent of Republicans.
The process is almost certain to stop short of removal from office, since Republicans control the Senate and show little interest in deposing the head of their own party, no matter his flaws.
Impeachment, then, seems fated to exacerbate political tensions without resolving anything.
Does that mean abusive presidents should get free passes if their followers are sufficiently angry and the political climate is tense? That seems unjust and unwise—especially since the most dangerous politicians are often those with the most fanatical base. But lots of presidents have enjoyed free passes simply because their followers dominated the government. Larger considerations beyond the specific misdeeds of officials are inherent to efforts to remove them from office outside regularly scheduled elections.
“The impeachment of presidents is a political act, performed with one eye on history, but ultimately constrained only by the political norms, popular expectations, and factional alignments of the era in which a particular impeachment is attempted,” Bowman noted in his book.
America’s political culture, less than a year before a national election, is a hot mess. Its government is broken and a danger to the people. The country is presided over by a chief executive who not only abuses his power but flaunts his conduct. In doing so, he enjoys the support of a faction of the public equal in size to the one that despises him—and those factions hate each other. The impeachment process is one more reason for them to fight.
Reining-in not just this president, but the presidency itself, is a worthy and necessary goal. But it’s not obvious that impeachment is the best way to solve the country’s serious political ills.
The whole impeachment circus is utterly predictable. The House, controlled by Democrats, voted to impeach. The Senate, controlled by Republicans, will not convict.
Maybe the public has figured this out, given that, based on polls, Trump’s popularity is increasing while the number of people who oppose impeachment is growing as well.
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The biggest thing that happened today wasn’t in music, it was in movies, today in 1968:
The number one British single today in 1958:
Today in 1961, Elvis Presley got a dubious Christmas gift in the mail — his draft notice:
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We begin with an entry from Great Business Decisions in Rock Music History: Today in 1961, EMI Records decided it wasn’t interested in signing the Beatles to a contract.
The number one single over here today in 1961:
Today in 1966, a friend of Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, Tara Browne, was killed when his Lotus Elan crashed into a parked truck. John Lennon used Browne’s death as motivation for “A Day in the Life”:
The number one album today in 1971 was Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Going On”:
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Today in 1963, Carroll James of WWDC radio in Washington broadcast a Beatles song:
James, whose station played the song once an hour, got the 45 from his girlfriend, a flight attendant. Capitol Records considered going to court, but chose to release the 45 early instead.
(This blog has reported for years that James was the first U.S. DJ to play a Beatles song. It turns out that’s not correct — WLS radio in Chicago played “Please Please Me” in February 1963.)
Today in 1969, 50 million people watched NBC-TV’s “Tonight” because of a wedding:
The number one British single today in 1973:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 