Ever feel like you were living in The Twilight Zone?
I do, and it's not just flashbacks from my college days.
I saw a news clip this morning (from Meet the Press) in which Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R - TX) suggested that the hefty cost of indicting key White House officials had better be justified by charges more serious than perjury.
White House... perjury... hmm... does that remind you of anything?
So I dug back a little bit, and read Sen. Hutchinson's position on the Clinton impeachment. From that statement:
However inappropriate the behavior of the President was, the legal issues in the impeachment trial do not deal with this relationship. All accusations against the President here relate instead to alleged attempts to prevent the disclosure of this relationship in a pending civil rights lawsuit against the President in an Arkansas Federal court and to the public. That is the critical factor that has brought us to this extraordinary moment in our Nation's history when we are considering whether or not to remove from office the President of the United States.
Now here's the funny thing: I think her position has some merit. Not sure if I agree that the gravity of the charges justified the cost and disruptive nature of the impeachment proceedings, but she raises some entirely valid points. I guess cost wasn't as big a concern back in 1999, when we had a balanced budget and before we'd poured over $200 billion dollars into a quagmire called Iraqi Freedom.
Unfortunately, Sen. Hutchinson also seems to have a very short memory regarding her own position -- that the perjury charges against Clinton were simply the tip of the iceberg. Here's the thing: the expected perjury charges are based on the White House retribution for a former public servant's refusal to help fabricate evidence to justify an illegal war that's killed and maimed thousands of US troops and tens of thousands of civilians.
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