Quote:
Originally Posted by spence
As I said to my mom when I was 15, but everybody does it.
Never mind that Clinton was trying to cover up a BJ, while Nixon was trying to cover up his staff and associates involved in burglary, theft and misuse of the FBI.
It must have been simple politics that brought Nixon down, because you know, everybody does it.
-spence
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So what's the big deal about a blow job? Why lie under oath about it? Why cover it up? If his staff and associates had gotten a BJ, would he have covered it up, lied under oath to deny it?
And misuse of the FBI? So you want to expand Nixon's cover-up of his staff's crime by stringing a bunch of words: burglary, theft (is that a different kind of burglary?), and misuse of the FBI (was that part of the same operation?). Didn't the Clinton's have their own "misuse" of the FBI in Travel Gate (having the FBI bring false charges against employees of the White House Travel Office to justify their dismissal to make room for Clinton cronies), and Filegate (collecting and storing in the White House FBI background files on hundreds of individuals no longer employed there,
in violation of The Privacy Act)? Even David Broder of the Washington Post condemned it as "one of the most flagrant abuses of constitutional authority any president can allow or commit."
The "everybody does it" aspect (as you put it, not me) of my discussion was not to excuse or justify Nixon's cover-up--he deserved what he got. But Clinton deserved as much, and so did, and do, most of the politicians that have made it to the Hill. Of course, the vast majority get away with, and are usually allowed to get away with crap that the rest of us can't. And politics is dirty, has been dirty, and I don't foresee it not continuing to be dirty. And they are famous for lying, abusing, slandering, smearing their way into power. And therein lies the essence of "polarization"--not Bush, not the Clinton impeachment. Claims that a particular President has caused the "polarization" are a manifestation of it, not an explanation. It is, in itself polarizing to point to "Bush" as the cause. Politics, by its nature, is polarizing. Contests of any sort, by definition, are struggles between polar forces. When the prize is as serious as in the political arena, it is naive to think that anything but the "all's fair in love and war" attitude will prevail.
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