by Christopher Fulkerson
In the United States there are occasionally such great failures of verisimilitude between law and reality that competent persons of normal awareness are astonished at them. These are two such cases, both of which involve unscrupulous actions by the Republicans. I know of no actions of similar enormity taken by the Democrats.
The Attempted Impeachment of President Clinton
As everybody knows, an impeachment attempt was made against President Clinton on the basis of his having lied about having had some sort of sexual intimacy with a White House intern.
Clinton's lie was not a violation of any law. In this country, perjury is not prosecuted when committed as part of a testimony that is not pertinent to the proceedings at hand. For example, if you are testifying about where you were during a murder trial in which you are not the accused and it has nothing to do with the proceedings, you are not supposed to be prosecuted for lying. When anybody else does this sort of thing, they are not prosecuted for it. Because the Republicans wanted to prosecute Clinton, they acted as if his action, if there ever was such an action, was illegal to lie about. It was not. Clinton's sex life was never at any time any of their business. As a peccadillo that is none of our business, it is something between him and his wife, and they seem to have resolved it.
It is important to observe that the only accusation the Republicans could make against Clinton was of "high crimes and misdemeanors." This expression does not even have meaning in American law. That was the accusation made against Charles I of England in the Seventeenth Century, during the English Civil War. Even if you don't know that a so-called "high crime" is not a category of legal offense, everybody who speaks English is supposed to have a clue that no President gets impeached for a misdemeanor! What place does any misdemeanor have in a Presidential impeachment? None, of course. The use of the expression "high crimes and misdemeanors" is pure boilerplate. The American people were so stupid they could not figure out that the Republicans were only using legal templates. The impeachment documents prepared against George W. Bush contain actual crimes, but the legal process was stalled. The loss of both houses of Congress, and the success of initial impeachment proceedings against Dick Cheney caused Bush to play a lower-key game from about 2006 on. Bush should have been prosecuted, not Clinton.
People from all over the world that I spoke with at the time, and have spoken with since, were and continue to be amazed at Americans for getting so worked up over unimportant matters. As a nation, Americans just don't behave like adults.
Only a population so ignorant could have allowed the fiasco. In my view, all persons involved with law and the media who did not speak out against the very idea of such a prosecution are culpable in the sustaining of the igorance of the population, and for all events that have occurred wrongly since. President Clinton ought also to have something, but he did not. There seems to me to be something wrong with a man who will not defend himself in the most obvious and simple way possible. Why did he not offer the simple rejoinder that such prosecutions are simply not done?
The "Election" of George W. Bush to the Presidency
Millions of people have marvelled at the capture of the White House by George W. Bush in 2000. It was completely illegal.
The Constitution states clearly that in the event of the very controversy we faced in 2000, a disagreement between the popular vote and that of the Electoral College, the deciding body is to be the Congress. Nevertheless, the decision was made by the Supreme Court.
Since the Supreme Court made the decision they knew perfectly well was to have been made by the Congress, their action was illegal. The Supreme Court should have refused to hear the case, and referred it to the Congress.
Since the decision was made by the wrong body, it was illegal, as was, therefore, the entire Presidency of George Walker Bush. Did I mention that the Bush presidency was illegal?
Again, the enormity of the violation of law is astonishing. That an entire nation would not notice it, puts the intelligence and the most basic powers of observation of that entire nation in question. The violation was so simple that many persons must have been aware it was completely out of order. Yet very few of them said or did anything to even register on the national consciousness that a gross violation of law had occurred. Where were all the professors of Constitutional Law? Where were the statements from the Congressmen? In particular, I am sorely disappointed with Albert Gore for having failed to win the case by stating the simple facts that needed to be said to correct the problem that faced him, and by extension the rest of the world.
Since the Democrats historically get along better with the Muslim world than the Republicans do, it seems to me that most of the suffering caused by the conflicts in the Near East might well have been avoided if Bush had not been allowed to assume the White House.
Where are we, really? Who are these people who call themselves Americans? Perhaps John Kennedy O'Toole is right: America is a Confederacy of Dunces!
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Posted 1/26/2010. Updated 2/1/2010.