One of the Articles of Impeachment introduced against President Clinton concerned a set of 81 questions submitted by the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde to President Clinton on the Monica Lewinsky affair. The fourth Article of Impeachment read, in part: "Clinton, refused and failed to respond to certain written requests for admission and willfully made perjurious, false and misleading sworn statements in response to certain written requests for admission propounded to him as part of the impeachment inquiry authorized by the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States."
For those of you who have forgotten (and I pray that you have), question #41 was:
41. As to each, do you admit or deny that you gave the following gifts to Monica Lewinsky at any time in the past?
a. A lithograph
b. A hatpin
c. A large "Black Dog" canvas bag
d. A large "Rockettes" blanket
e. A pin of the New York skyline
f. A box of cherry chocolates
g. A pair of novelty sunglasses
h. A stuffed animal from the "Black Dog"
i. A marble bear's head
j. A London pin
k. A shamrock pin
l. An Annie Lennox compact disc
m. Davidoff cigars
Five years ago, a President was impeached. The House of Representatives was debating -- and, as you can see, I'm not making this up -- shamrock pins and novelty sunglasses. Moving to the present, we are talking about whether a President took the country to war on, in part, misleading and factually incorrect evidence.
Who thinks the current CIA/White House scandal will get one one-hundredth of the press Monicagate received? It's a shame, too.
Comments (3)
Yawn... because nobody cares. The US didn't go to war because of documents indicating that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Africa. It was 16 words in an hour-long speech. Congress (including the Democrats who are trying to make a non-issue an issue) had authorized Bush to use force months before the State of the Union Address.
Do you doubt Iraq was indeed trying to acquire materials needed for nuclear weapons? Whether or not WMD are found is immaterial. The Hussein regime was pursuing them, and that was the reason the US went to war.
Posted by JD | July 12, 2003 10:24 PM
Posted on July 12, 2003 22:24
> Do you doubt Iraq was indeed trying to
> acquire materials needed for nuclear
> weapons? Whether or not WMD are
> found is immaterial. The Hussein regime
> was pursuing them, and that was the
> reason the US went to war.
A fair question is, of course: how do you know? How do you know that Iraq was persuing obtaining these material? Not in 1998 or 1991, but in 2003 when the war began.
Can you provide any affirmative evidence?
Posted by Partha Mazumdar | July 13, 2003 1:02 PM
Posted on July 13, 2003 13:02
The uranium bit is, of course, the convenient, illustrative lie that represents the entire Bush pre-war strategy. Perhaps we didn't go to war just over uranium purchases from Niger. But we did go to war because, as the Bush administration asserted repeatedly, Iraq posed a threat to Americans, and we didn't want the "smoking gun" of Iraqi non-compliance to be a "mushroom cloud."
Well, now uranium ranks up there with drones and cooperation with al-Qaeda and aluminum tubes as intentional misrepresentations of the nature of Saddam's threat. And the uranium issue is proving the easiest one to prove as an intentional lie. Hence, the appropriate focus.
Posted by Amitava Mazumdar | July 14, 2003 10:02 AM
Posted on July 14, 2003 10:02