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To have a bunch of Republicans with sex scandals of their own impeach a president over a hum job...the evidence for which had been gathered through an illegal phone tap, and which was not a crime.
Newt said the Republicans would pick up 30 or 40 seats in the midterm elections and that they were a "referendum on impeachment"...he ended up losing seats (Clinton was the first sitting president to pick up seats in his midterm in almost 100 years)...
So they went ahead and impeached Clinton over the humjob anyway...but Newt had to resign when it came out that his marriage was breaking up because he was getting humjobs from a girl in HIS capitol office...
So Newt was replaced by Bob Livingston, who had to resign almost immediately when it turned out he spent his leisure hours getting beaten by a dominatrix....
So Livingston was replaced by Dennis Hastert, a completely empty suit most Americans had never heard of....
The Judiciary Committee refused to have hearings, refused to call witnesses on the charges against Clinton, and demanded an immediate vote, which their lame duck majority rammed through.
Clinton was impeached on three counts, all voted along party lines...they were tampering with a witness, obstructing justice and lying to the grand jury. The fourth count, having to do with the bogus Paula Jones trial (which had fallen apart when Paula's testimony contradicted the actual stated grounds for the suit) was voted down. The only witnesses ever called by the House majority were a number of people who had been convicted of perjury for lying about sex...and the televised hearing where they testified about their cases left pretty much everyone in the country convinced that those folks had gotten railroaded and had gotten a raw deal.
The House managers who prosecuted the trial all turned out to have sex scandals of their own. During the Senate trial, the evidence for tampering with a witness turned out to be that Clinton had spoken to Betty Currie...who was not a witness. The evidence that there had been obstruction of justice turned out to be that Monica had been given a Annie Lennox CD and a box of candy. And the evidence that Clinton lied to a grand jury....well, that never did turn up at all.
The GOP still tried to drag in the Paula Jones case anyway...one numbnutz actually compared the bogus lawsuit to the civil rights struggle out loud, during Black History Month, no less. After they closed their case and it was obviously a shambles, they began to demand to call MORE witnesses. And who will ever forget this wonderful exchange on National TV: Republican Pinhead: "Monica, why didn't you tell anybody" Monica: "Because it was nobody's business."
At the end, Trent Lott announced he wanted to introduce "secret evidence" that the Senate would consider behind closed doors but that the Clinton legal team would not be able to see or respond to.
And then after all that fuss and all those claims that it was the most serious crime in presidential history, the GOP refused to censure Clinton in a fit of childish pique.
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