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Gerald Ford once said that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives says it is.
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Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
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Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think 'first woman president.' We think—for example—'first ex-co-president' or 'first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent' or 'first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap.
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Christopher Hitchens
“
On page 603 it is stated that at first Blumenthal could not remember the lunch with me and my wife at which he had loudly impugned two female witnesses against Clinton. This makes it distinctly odd that he should have such have a vivid and detailed but mistaken recollection of the same lunch on page 607.
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Christopher Hitchens
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The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal's champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published by Verso, which is the publishing arm of the New Left Review. However, if a near-majority of leftists and liberals choose to think that Clinton was the target of a witch-hunt and the victim of 'sexual McCarthyism', an Arkansan Alger Hiss in other words, you become weary of debating on their terms and leave them to make the best of it.
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Christopher Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left)
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What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It's often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That's not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter 'Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?' in the paperback version of my book No One Left To Lie To. This essay, I may modestly say, has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton 'rapid response' team.) Yet one constantly reads that both Clintons, including the female who helped intensify the slanders against her mistreated sisters, are excellent on women's 'issues.
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Christopher Hitchens
“
During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
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At the time thousands of Africans were dying over control of diamonds sold in shopping malls around the world, U.S president Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury, NATO began bombing Yugoslavia, and everyone else was preparing for digital disaster from Y2K
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Greg Campbell (Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones)
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President Clinton, weakened by impeachment proceedings and boxed in by a hostile Republican majority in Congress, proved unwilling or unable to force the astonishingly passive Pentagon to pursue military options.
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Steve Coll (Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan & Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001)
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What the [Clinton/Lewinsky scandal] showed was that a matter of personal behavior could crowd out of the public's attention far more serious matters, indeed matters of life and death. The House of Representatives would impeach the president on matters of sexual behavior, but it would not impeach him for endangering the lives of children by welfare reform, or for violating international law in bombing other countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan), or for allowing hundreds of thousands of children to die as a result of economic sanctions (Iraq).
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Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
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The story of how this postwar consensus broke down—starting with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his prediction that it would lead to the South’s wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party—has been told many times before. The realignment Johnson foresaw ended up taking longer than he had expected. But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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By the 1950s, most Republicans had accommodated themselves to New Deal–era health and safety regulations, and the Northeast and the Midwest produced scores of Republicans who were on the liberal end of the spectrum when it came to issues like conservation and civil rights. Southerners, meanwhile, constituted one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful blocs, combining a deep-rooted cultural conservatism with an adamant refusal to recognize the rights of African Americans, who made up a big share of their constituency. With America’s global economic dominance unchallenged, its foreign policy defined by the unifying threat of communism, and its social policy marked by a bipartisan confidence that women and people of color knew their place, both Democrats and Republicans felt free to cross party lines when required to get a bill passed. They observed customary courtesies when it came time to offer amendments or bring nominations to a vote and kept partisan attacks and hardball tactics within tolerable bounds. The story of how this postwar consensus broke down—starting with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his prediction that it would lead to the South’s wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party—has been told many times before. The realignment Johnson foresaw ended up taking longer than he had expected. But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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A nation not of men but of laws, intoned John Adams as he, among other lawyers, launched what has easily become the most demented society ever consciously devised by intelligent men. We are now enslaves by laws. We are governed by lawyers. We create little but litigate much. Our monuments are the ever-expanding prisons, where millions languish for having committed victimless crimes or for simply not playing the game of plausible deniability (aka lying) with a sufficiently good legal team. What began as a sort of Restoration comedy, The Impeachment of a President, on a frivolous, irrelevant matter, is suddenly turning very black indeed, and all our political arrangements are at risk as superstitious Christian fundamentalists and their corporate manipulators seem intent on overthrowing two presidential elections in a Senate trial. This is no longer comedy. This is usurpation.
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Gore Vidal (The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000)
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This brings us to the crux moment in the supposed 'Show Trial' melodrama. Employing the confusing and confused testimony of Jude Wanniski (who he also describes as a political nut-case, if not a nut-case flat-out, and to whom he introduced me in the first place) Blumenthal suggests that I concerted my testimony in advance with the House Republicans, notably James Rogan and Lindsey Graham. Feebly bridging the gap between sheer conjecture and outright conspiracy, Rogan is quoted as saying: 'Hitchens may well have called Lindsey..' I did not in fact do any such thing. Why should my denial be believed? It's not as if I care. I probably should have colluded with them, if my intention was to land a blow on Clinton (which it was) let alone to plant a Judas kiss on Blumenthal (which it was not). But every other fragment of Blumenthal's evidence and description shows—even boasts—that Congressman Graham was essentially punching air until the last day of the trial. That could not possibly have been true, especially in his cross-examination of Blumenthal, if he knew he had an ace in his vest-pocket all along. Only a tendency to paranoia or to all-explaining theories could suggest the contrary. I'd even be able to claim for myself, I hope, that if I'd truly wanted to gouge a deep or vengeful wound I could or would have made a better job of it.
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Christopher Hitchens
“
If Clinton gets impeached,” I said, “it will be for all the wrong reasons. The perversion diversion will have worked! That’s not tolerable! People need to realize truth or the same people will stay in control.” “Even if people did learn,” Mark said, gathering up tools to work on a motorcycle project, “they’ve got to restructure the voting system before they could get their own choice in office. Everybody already knows the majority didn’t vote Clinton into this second term.
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Cathy O'Brien (ACCESS DENIED For Reasons Of National Security: Documented Journey From CIA Mind Control Slave To U.S. Government Whistleblower)
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That August and for six months to come, as he became only the second president in American history to face impeachment charges, Clinton had neither the credibility nor the political strength required to lead the United States into a sustained military conflict even if it was an unconventional or low-grade war fought by Special Forces. His realistic options were severely limited. And Clinton could be certain that he would be harshly criticized no matter what he did or did not do.
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Steve Coll (Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan & Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001)
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Mr. President, can I be blunt?” she says. “You haven’t been so far?” She puts her hands out in front of her, as if trying to frame the issue for me, or maybe she’s pleading with me. “You’re going to be impeached,” she says. “And if you don’t do something to turn things around, something dramatic, the senators in your own party will jump ship. And I know you won’t resign. It isn’t in your DNA. Which means President Jonathan Lincoln Duncan will be remembered in history for one thing and one thing only. You’ll be the first president forcibly removed from office.
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Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
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The acquittal of Clinton, and the forgiving by implication of his abuses of public power and private resources, has placed future crooked presidents in a strong position. They will no longer be troubled by the independent counsel statute. They will, if they are fortunate, be able to employ “the popularity defense” that was rehearsed by Ronald Reagan and brought to a dull polish by Clinton. They will be able to resort to “the privacy defense” also, especially if they are inventive enough to include, among their abuses, the abuse of the opposite sex. And they will only be impeachable by their own congressional supporters, since criticism from across the aisle will be automatically subjected to reverse impeachment as “partisan.” This is the tawdry legacy of a sub-Camelot court, where unchecked greed, thuggery, and egotism were allowed to operate just above the law, and well beneath contempt.
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Christopher Hitchens (No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton)
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The two impeachment articles charged President Clinton with perjury and obstruction of justice.16 The charges satisfied the “high crimes and misdemeanors” threshold, for it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that a president who corruptly impedes the administration of justice is not fit for office. After all, his responsibilities include ensuring the administration of justice and otherwise faithfully executing the laws. Clinton, moreover, was clearly guilty.
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Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment)
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The Republican House members also moved ahead with impeachment without bipartisan support, which meant that President Clinton would almost certainly not be convicted by the Senate (he was acquitted there in February 1999).
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Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
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The apogee of 1990s constitutional hardball was the December 1998 House vote to impeach President Clinton. Only the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history, the move ran afoul of long-established norms. The investigation, beginning with the dead-end Whitewater inquiry and ultimately centering on President Clinton’s testimony about an extramarital affair, never revealed anything approaching conventional standards for what constitute high crimes and misdemeanors.
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Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
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In the political realm, Republicans could never get away with what Bill Clinton did. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was widely castigated within his party for having a love affair with a woman from Argentina. Sanford, unlike Clinton, wasn’t just exercising his sex organs; he was genuinely smitten by the woman. The affair was consensual, and the two of them got engaged, although they subsequently parted ways and never married. Republicans, however, promptly initiated impeachment proceedings against Sanford. Contrast Republican intolerance for sexual harassment with Democratic approval for it. Democrats ferociously resisted Republican attempts to impeach Bill Clinton. Not only did Democrats pooh-pooh Bill’s conduct but they even excused his lying under oath, insisting that lying about sex should not be counted in this category. Throughout Bill’s career, Democrats have turned a blind eye to his history of sordid behavior toward women.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
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Scaife rationalized his foundations’ funding of an obsessive investigation of President Clinton’s marital infidelities during the 1990s that came to be known as the Arkansas Project. Hiring private detectives to dig up dirt from anti-Clinton sources, the project funneled smutty half-truths to The American Spectator magazine, which was also funded by Scaife’s family foundations. Scaife’s foundations also poured money into lawsuits against Clinton, all of which helped whip up the political frenzy that led to the Clinton impeachment hearings.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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the Kochs’, declared, “The blue dress moment may have arrived.” But instead of using Monica Lewinsky’s telltale garment to impeach Bill Clinton, they would use the words of the world’s leading climate scientists to impeach the climate change movement.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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A Rationale for Violence At first, I thought I was merely witnessing the shocked aftermath of a shocking election. The Left did not expect Trump to win. As late as October 20, 2016, the American Prospect published an article, “Trump No Longer Really Running for President,” the theme of which was that Trump’s “real political goal is to make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to govern.” The election result was, in the words of columnist David Brooks, “the greatest shock of our lifetimes.”25 Trump won against virtually insurmountable odds, which included the mainstream media openly campaigning for Hillary and a civil war within the GOP with the entire intellectual wing of the conservative movement refusing to support him. Initially I interpreted the Left’s violent upheaval as a stunned, heat-of-the-moment response to the biggest come-from-behind victory in U.S. political history. Then I saw two things that made me realize I was wrong. First, the violence did not go away. There were the violent “Not My President’s Day” rallies across the country in February; the violent March 4 disruptions of Trump rallies in California, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Florida; the April anti-Trump tax rallies, supposedly aimed at forcing Trump to release his tax returns; the July impeachment rallies, seeking to build momentum for Trump’s removal from office; and the multiple eruptions at Berkeley.26 In Portland, leftists threw rocks, lead balls, soda cans, glass bottles, and incendiary devices until police dispersed them with the announcement, “May Day is now considered a riot.” Earlier, at the Minnesota State Capitol, leftists threw smoke bombs into the pro-Trump crowd while others set off fireworks in the building, sending people scrambling in fear of a bomb attack. Among those arrested was Linwood Kaine, the son of Hillary’s vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine.27 More of this, undoubtedly, is in store from the Left over the next four years. What this showed is that the Left was engaging in premeditated violence, violence not as outbreak of passion but violence as a political strategy.
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Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
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Section 377 made any sex apart from penile-vaginal intercourse between a man and a woman—any sex the authorities in power decide is ‘against the order of nature’—to be illegal. The Supreme Court ruling made it clear that the personal sexual preferences of adults was indeed as nature made them, and that it was lawful for them to be themselves. Obviously this was great news for the LGBTQ community, whose idea of what is ‘natural’ reflects their sexual orientation. But it also impacted married heterosexual couples since, theoretically, an act of oral sex between a husband and a wife is also illegal. And if you were not married to each other, of course, it was worse. If Bill Clinton had been an Indian, he might have survived impeachment after the Monica Lewinsky affair, but he’d have ended up in jail under Section 377.
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Shashi Tharoor (The Paradoxical Prime Minister)
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When I finally decided to share my information with Lew Merletti, I knew everything I said would be held in confidence. Merletti’s response to my revelation was immediate, and he encouraged me to tell my story to Ken Gormley, dean of the School of Law at Duquesne University (now the thirteenth president of the university) and the author of The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. Gormley had interviewed Merletti during the Monica Lewinsky scandal that led to President Clinton’s impeachment. Merletti trusted Gormley. I repeated my story to Gormley, and he agreed with Merletti: “You have a story here that needs to be told.” This is the story I kept
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Paul Landis (The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After Sixty Years)
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When I interviewed Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on December 30, 2019, about his impeachment, Trump said: “There’s nobody that’s tougher than me. Nobody’s tougher than me. You asked me about impeachment. I’m under impeachment, and you said you just act like you just won the fucking race. Nixon was in a corner with his thumb in his mouth. Bill Clinton took it very, very hard. I just do things, okay? I do what I want.
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Bob Woodward (War)
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As Roger Stone revealed in his book Nixon’s Secrets, Hillary was fired from the 1974 House Impeachment Committee shortly after she took, and failed, the DC bar examination. Hillary authored memos demanding Nixon yield his tapes (a little irony there?) and that the president was not entitled to a lawyer in the impeachment proceeding. Asked why she was fired, Majority Staff Director Jerry Zeifman said, “Because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.
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Roger Stone (The Clintons' War on Women)
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In mid-January 1999, prior to my subpoena and unbeknownst to me while I was at JJRTC, Monica Lewinsky had signed an affidavit, a sworn statement, about her affair. In a Pentagon City, VA hotel, Monica also handed Linda Tripp, her Pentagon staffer pen pal, a document (“Points to Make in an Affidavit”) detailing what to say on an affidavit so as to protect Clinton from charges of sexual harassment made by White House volunteer aide Kathleen Willey. Where that document originated is a mystery. But it was amateur hour for Monica, as usual. Monica and President Clinton had been subpoenaed by the Paula Jones lawyers and both swore in a public civil case, under penalty of perjury—an impeachable offense for the president—that they did not have a sexual relationship. The Clintons and Monica didn’t know it, but Linda Tripp was no Clintonite. She was feeding information on them all to Newsweek and to Ken Starr. Tripp had the affidavit document proving conspiracy, and Starr had his carte blanche. Janet Reno signed off on the Justice Department and FBI expanding their investigations from the Whitewater scandal—in which their main witness, Jim McDougal, mysteriously died—into conspiracy and perjury in Paula Jones’s sexual harassment case regarding a government employee. Tripp had taped her phone conversations with Monica detailing her affair with the president, how in the Oval Office she gave him oral sex while he was on the phone with ambassadors and with Dick Morris. President Clinton paid for a White House mistress with taxpayer funds and jeopardized national security with her compromisable and corruptible presence in a secure area, all for little more than on-demand oral sex. We thought we knew what was going on. We didn’t know the half of it.
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Gary J. Byrne (Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate)
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Historical tempers have cooled only slightly after the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying under oath about a sexual relationship. Many Americans still believe his actions were a threat to the very rule of law; others insist that the “offense” was more low farce than high crime, and that the zeal of Clinton's foes was partisan hypocrisy rather than constitutional passion.
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Garrett Epps
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Wall Street: I’d start carrying guns if I were you. Your annual reports are worse fiction than the screenplay for Dude, Where’s My Car?, which you further inflate by downsizing and laying off the very people whose life savings you’re pillaging. How long do you think you can do that to people? There are consequences. Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. But inevitably. Just ask the Romanovs. They had a nice little setup, too, until that knock at the door. Second, Congress: We’re on to your act. In the middle of the meltdown, CSPAN showed you pacing the Capitol floor yapping about “under God” staying in the Pledge of Allegiance and attacking the producers of Sesame Street for introducing an HIV-positive Muppet. Then you passed some mealy-mouthed reforms and crowded to get inside the crop marks at the photo op like a frat-house phone-booth stunt. News flash: We out here in the Heartland care infinitely more about God-and-Country issues because we have internal moral-guidance systems that make you guys look like a squadron of gooney birds landing facedown on an icecap and tumbling ass over kettle. But unlike you, we have to earn a living and can’t just chuck our job responsibilities to march around the office ranting all day that the less-righteous offend us. Jeez, you’re like autistic schoolchildren who keep getting up from your desks and wandering to the window to see if there’s a new demagoguery jungle gym out on the playground. So sit back down, face forward and pay attention! In summary, what’s the answer? The reforms laws were so toothless they were like me saying that I passed some laws, and the president and vice president have forgotten more about insider trading than Martha Stewart will ever know. Yet the powers that be say they’re doing everything they can. But they’re conveniently forgetting a little constitutional sitcom from the nineties that showed us what the government can really do when it wants to go Starr Chamber. That’s with two rs. Does it make any sense to pursue Wall Street miscreants any less vigorously than Ken Starr sniffed down Clinton’s sex life? And remember, a sitting president actually got impeached over that—something incredibly icky but in the end free of charge to taxpayers, except for the $40 million the independent posse spent dragging citizens into motel rooms and staring at jism through magnifying glasses. But where’s that kind of government excess now? Where’s a coffee-cranked little prosecutor when you really need him? I say, bring back the independent counsel. And when we finally nail you stock-market cheats, it’s off to a real prison, not the rich guys’ jail. Then, in a few years, when the first of you start walking back out the gates with that new look in your eyes, the rest of the herd will get the message pretty fast.
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Tim Dorsey (Cadillac Beach (Serge Storms Mystery, #6))
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Nevertheless, the American people obviously did not want him removed over the charges. Opinion polls illustrated that a majority of the public, while troubled by Clinton’s character, approved of his overall job performance;
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Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment)
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After then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified in a congressional hearing that she spoke with the president by telephone at around 10 p.m. that evening (by which point she knew that Ambassador Stevens had been murdered), the president and his other subordinates changed their story, reporting that the president had spoken with Secretary Clinton but providing few details and acknowledging no other contacts with top administration officials who were futilely responding to the attack.
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Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment)
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When I finally decided to share my information with Lew Merletti, I knew everything I said would be held in confidence. Merletti’s response to my revelation was immediate, and he encouraged me to tell my story to Ken Gormley, dean of the School of Law at Duquesne University (now the thirteenth president of the university) and the author of The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. Gormley had interviewed Merletti during the Monica Lewinsky scandal that led to President Clinton’s impeachment. Merletti trusted Gormley. I repeated my story to Gormley, and he agreed with Merletti: “You have a story here that needs to be
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Paul Landis (The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After Sixty Years)
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I was never burdened by the notion that I was working for a political party that was fundamentally hypocritical on the deficit and economy and one that would proceed to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about sex under the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was having an affair with a former House intern himself.
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Stuart Stevens (It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump)
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Never thought a Dr. Faucie is more powerful than a US president?
Bill Clinton did not got impeached for cheating on Hillary but for lying to Congress!
Faucie lied to the congress and still in the office, and get paid more than a US president!
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Zybeta Beta Metani' Marashi
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She does not always agree with us, but she's always straight." Over and over Bill sticks the landing, as they say in gymnastics, every applause line hits via a potent combination of elder-statesman gravitas and gleeful good fun; he is a granddaddy lion romping with the cubs. We get the full treatment tonight, the twinkly eyes, the coyly bit lip, the curl of devilment in the grin, and so we're reminded that seduction is his basic unit of being, every transaction a form of charming the pants off someone. One has to say it worked out pretty well for him, a large life by any measure though not without its lumps and bumps, an impeachment here, humiliated wife there, not to mention the histrionic "values" backlash that brought us George W. Bush. But Bill Clinton's so smooth you might forget all that, for an evening at least. Whoever said the man's lost it has rocks for brains. Perhaps he just needed a few days to strike the proper frame of mind, a trick of the Method actor's craft—he has to walk onstage pretending he's the candidate here.
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Ben Fountain (Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution)
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Trump will not always be president, but he has elevated the conspiracy theory to a new high status in American politics. His evangelical allies, in turn, promote conspiracy theories about Trump the strongman, a fearless, anointed leader who is laboring heroically to save the Christian nation despite threats from socialism, the deep state, or George Soros. In return for their veneration, the life raft his presidency needs daily, Trump has given the Christian right new life, has spared them a Hillary Clinton presidency and a more liberal Supreme Court, and has given them unprecedented free rein in his administration and a defining role in the government of the United States. He’s the leader they’ve been waiting for—the one who has been prophesied—who will affirm their authority as long as they accede to his. And they were there for him when he needed them most—to be his shield against impeachment—armed not only with all of their adulation, but with the escalating and ever-evolving set of conspiracy theories that became the president’s only defense.
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Sarah Posner (Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump)
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Of the last 11 presidents, Eisenhower through Obama (as of 2013), the American public now only rates three as “outstanding/above average.” Kennedy gets high scores from 74%; Reagan, 61%; Clinton, 55%. Two of those men were shot; the other impeached.9
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Paul Hellman (You've Got 8 Seconds: Communication Secrets for a Distracted World)
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Mueller’s report, if read carefully, establishes that Trump committed several acts of criminal obstruction of justice. The impeachment proceedings against both Nixon and Clinton were rooted in charges of obstruction of justice, and Trump’s offenses were even more extensive and enduring.
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Jeffrey Toobin (True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump)
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weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!” “IMPEACH! IMPEACH! IMPEACH!” phantasmagoric psychodrama are not about to give up their hunger for power. Even now, they plan increasing
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Thomas Horn (Shadowland: From Jeffrey Epstein to the Clintons, from Obama and Biden to the Occult Elite, Exposing the Deep-State Actors at War with Christianity, Donald Trump, and America's Destiny)
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I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster,” he said. “And if you ask them, I’m sure they would say, ‘No, actually what you’re experiencing is not because you’re black, it’s because you’re a Democrat.’
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
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James A. Baker III, George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, recalled a day in October 1992 when President Bush was approached by four Republican members of Congress who had an idea for how he could win reelection. “They told him the only way to win was to hammer his challenger Bill Clinton’s patriotism for protesting the Vietnam War while in London and visiting Moscow as a young man,” Baker writes. Bush didn’t reject the idea out of hand; in fact, he thought it might work. But when Baker heard that the only way to reveal this information would be to “contact the Russians or the British,” he realized that the administration “absolutely could not do that.” Why would someone as canny and strategic as Baker be so opposed to the idea of asking a foreign power to help his boss win an election? Because opposition to foreign interference in our elections is as old as America itself.
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Neal Katyal (Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump)
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in 2011, around the time Jeffress was insisting that a candidate must share the values of a Christian voter, the Public Religion Research Institute commissioned a fascinating survey. It asked Americans of all faith backgrounds to answer the question: Could a politician who behaved immorally in their personal life still perform their public duties with integrity? Only 30 percent of white evangelicals said yes, the lowest of any group surveyed. This trend line was steady since the days of Bill Clinton’s impeachment: Conservative Christians still believed character was a prerequisite for public office. In October 2016—the very week, in fact, that Jeffress sneered at the notion of turning the other cheek—the Public Religion Research Institute released a new survey that asked the same exact question. This time, incredibly, 72 percent of white evangelicals responded that, yes,
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Tim Alberta (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism)