Obviously Scooter Libby’s perjury conviction is bad karma for Clinton haters. After all, Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury while all the Republicans in Washington cheered wildly.
Now the Republicans are getting a taste of their own medicine. What goes around comes around.
And Clinton and Libby were both convicted of perjury. That makes the two cases virtual carbon copies, right?
Well, sort of.
Libby was convicted of revealing something legal to several people, then lying about the chronological order of those conversations a year later. Libby says he simply remembered wrong, but the jury thought otherwise.
Clinton was impeached after a sordid chain of events that started with his assault then slander of a young working-class woman, Paula Jones.
Let me recap. Clinton pulled down his pants and propositioned Jones shortly after they were introduced. Jones was traumatized and bolted. Then later her name popped up in an unflattering light in a national magazine. Apparently a Clinton aide assumed Jones had served Clinton one of his random quickies that afternoon and mentioned it anecdotally to a reporter.
That’s when things got touchy. Jones had the gall to request an apology from Clinton and was promptly disciplined for her effrontery with a full-blast onslaught of the famous Clinton retaliation machine.
It didn’t work. Jones sued Clinton for sexual harassment
Clinton’s contempt for women was never more apparent than his behavior during the trial. In Clinton-think Jones did not merit fair, perjury-free testimony. But this is America. We don’t have a king, and even a young blue-collar woman doesn’t have to take crap off of the president of the United States.
Hence Clinton was impeached for perjury, and Republicans have been paying for it ever since.
Everybody says Clinton oozes charisma. I never could see it. His embarrassingly over-sentimental mannerisms always reminded me of Dopey in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I was amazed by the saccharin photo-op after the Lewinsky scandal blew wide open. You remember the one – with the faithful, devoted family at his side, standing on the church steps lugging a Bible as big as a sofa cushion. It was an insult to the public’s intelligence, so I thought anyway.
I was wrong. It made people feel warm and cozy all over America.
But then I never did get the Clinton thing. My boys learned that they shouldn’t pull down their pants in front of strangers before they were two. But the majority of Americans were fine with their president doing it.
Clinton is a fascinating character study. I don’t think his assaults on women stem from a mental disorder, a compulsion or even an addiction. I am absolutely convinced that each episode is simply a manifestation of his immense conceit.
He truly feels that he alone is entitled to behavior that is off limits to everyone else alive. I am convinced that the famous Clintonian outrage and retaliation against anyone who fails to understand that – even his victims – is completely genuine.
Is that equal to Scooter Libby who after a year incorrectly identified the first person who told him Joe’s Wilson’s wife sent him to Niger?
"Malicious, nefarious lies!" the jury pronounced, although each and every one probably couldn’t tell you what they had for dinner last Wednesday.
Interestingly, that group of supposedly nonpartial, apolitical people secured their spots on the jury by swearing they had no opinion about the case, yet somehow managed to catch on to the popular notion that Libby is a pathetic semi-evil dupe for the truly evil Bush, Rove, and Cheney. Maybe it was by telepathy.
Libby was just trying to set the record straight. After all, Wilson wasn’t going to do it. He wanted everyone to think the Bush administration was stupid enough to send him to Niger.
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