They were -- Clinton was getting slammed plenty, don't you think?

And for good reason......and the Dems were screaming bloddy murder.

Lots of people doing jail time for purjury..........why is he above it. Dems supported his doing it and went nuts when Nixon tried to hide something.

This do as I say and not as I do thing going on there.

__________________
Proud owner of ....
1971 280SE W108
1979 300SD W116
1983 300D W123
1975 Ironhead Sportster chopper
1987 GMC 3/4 ton 4X4 Diesel
1989 Honda Civic (Heavily modified)
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Section 609 MVAC Certified
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"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

After living thru 8 years of Ken Starr and Clinton, the absurdness of this statement is astounding.

Clinton was harrassed from Day 1--why are those who are so unwilling to forget Clinton also so unable to remember his administration accurately? Jim Smith, I think, did an admirable job of recounting the Whitewater fiasco, which cost the taxpayers something like $87 million and morphed into an investigation of Clinton's sexual escapades, and lies told therein, none of which was deemed worthy of removal from office.

Joe B.

Actually, he was harrassed even before Day 1. They were after him before he even took office. The thing that's odd about the Clintons is how they get continually lambasted for saying things that are clearly true. For example:

The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy - Hillary Clinton gets ridiculed for using that term, but it seems pretty accurate to me. Can anyone deny that there was a well-financed, well-organized right-wing effort to get Bill Clinton?

It depends on what "is" is - As I recall, Bill Clinton used that famous phrase to explain his deposition answer about whether he was having sex with Monica Lewinski. Well, at the time of the deposition, he wasn't having sex with her, so he answered in the negative. It was an entirely accurate, even appropriate, answer given the adversarial context of a civil deposition.

There are countless other examples, but our worthless media keep repeating the company line because it is financially advantageous for them. I don't think the media are either liberal or conservative. Why, for example, would General Electric want its wholly owned subsidiary NBC to be biased against conservatives? The media's bias is in favor of their pocket book. That's why they are nothing more than entertainers. The whole lot of them, particularly Tim Russert, are worthless.

The Democrats have no rule on members and indictments. I see crocodile tears.

__________________
Regards

Warren

Currently 1965 220Sb, 2002 FORD Crown Vic Police Interceptor

Had 1965 220SEb, 1967 230S, 280SE 4.5, 300SE (W126), 420SEL

ENTER > = (HP RPN)

Not part of the in-crowd since 1952.

"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

...unless, of course, you're the Republican leadership.

Ah, what a dance macabre that was.

A horrid political train wreck in extremely gelatinous slo-mo. Hope we never see that $hit again. Thank goodness that dang-fool 'Special Prosecutor" law died.

Just an excuse for Congress to feign legal insulation and run a freaking witch hunt for dang-near a decade. If Congress thinks there's been wrongdoing, let them carry out their own overtly and honestly political investigation and either impeach or shut the f**k up.

Congressional cowardice.


Bah.

B

So whats worse, not having the rule, or having the rule up until it needs to be enforsed then repeling it.

This whole thing started as Rep grandstanding back in the early 90's when the guy from (I think) Illinois, Rotenkowski (or whatever his name is) got indicted and ended up in prison. I think he was chairman of ways and means and kept his chair way too long.

The Reps, wanting to thump chest and show their moral superiority passed this rule. They didn't have to pass it, they always had the choice of removing anyone from any position (majority/minority leader, chairmanships, whatever) but they wanted to say "we are better because we have a rule"

I really don't care if they remove Delay or not, he's their leader and they can choose who leads. Just as the Dems didn't bounce Rotenkowski, their choice, but at least acknowledge the hypocricy of the situation.

Actually I have seen general outrage on this, not just partisan. For example, the Manchester Union Leader, a very conservative newspaper editorialized against it:

http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=47232

Myself, I rememeber when Jim Wright, the Democrat Majority Leader, resigned because he was accused of accepting a small honorium in a book deal. Bob Livingston (R) resigned a leadership position because he was accused of having a mistress. Mr Delay has been censured twice for what amounts to bribery, has had members of his staff indicted for felonies and is suspected of laundering millions of dollars in illegal corporate campaign contributions, and he laughs in our faces. He is setting a new standard in what is allowable behavior for a congressional leader, not much different than when Caligula appointed a horse to be leader of the Senate.

Every day our "democracy" becomes more of a joke. Mr. Delay has become immune because he above any other person is responsible for the millions of dollars of corporate money that now corrupts our democracy. He's the Greasy Thumbs McGurk of the Corporate State, the bagman who passes out the cash that has now essentially created a new form of government for us - of the Corporations by the Corporations and for the Corporations. Everyone, of all political parties should be outraged this man is even in office.

Was DeLay (what a great name for a politico!), censured?

Bringing up Wright and Livington shows the depth of the ethical slide--they seem like rank amateurs compared to DeLay, yet he endures and they're history.

Joe B.

My, my, gonna be a long four years.
by Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas


House Republicans have rewritten the ethics rules so Tom DeLay won't have to resign if indicted after all. Let's hear it for moral values. DeLay is one of the leading forces in making "Republican ethics" into an oxymoron.

The rule was passed in 1993, when Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was being investigated for ethics violations. And who helped lead the floor fight to force him to resign his powerful position? Why, Tom DeLay, of course. (Actually, it's sort of a funny story. The D's already had a caucus rule that you had to resign from any leadership position if indicted. The R's changed their rules to match the D's, except they deliberately did not make their rule retroactive, so the highly indicted Rep. Joseph McDade, senior Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, could, unlike Rostenkowski, retain his seat.)

DeLay has already been admonished by the House ethics committee three times on separate violations of ethics rules. Please note, that is the Republican-dominated ethics committee. The hilarious rationale offered by the R's for the new rule to exempt DeLay is that no one can accuse them of taking the moral low road here because, "That line of reasoning accepts that exercise of the prosecutor in Texas is legitimate."

Uh, that would Ronnie Earle of Austin, who is a known Democrat. One the other hand, Earle is quite noted for having indicted more Democratic officeholders than Republicans, so it's a little hard to argue that this is a partisan political probe. Or it would be, if facts made any difference these days to talk-show screamers.

Showing his usual keen sense of ethics, DeLay has already started a legal defense fund and raised $310,000 since last summer. According to the Austin American-Statesman, half the money has come from Republican House members, who are all dependent on the Republican Steering Committee for their committee assignments and chairmanships.

DeLay has three votes on the 28-member committee and, of course, more clout than anyone else in the House. (See Lou DuBose and Jan Reid's new book, "The Hammer," for more charming details on DeLay's House dictatorship). The other half of the contributions for DeLay's legal defense has come from political action committees, corporations and individuals.

Hey, no worries about corrupting influence there because DeLay already does favors for big contributors to his plain old political action committees, even without additional contributions to his defense fund. Moral values. DeLay is going to give born-again Christians a bad name.

In furtherance of moral values, Congress now has to raise the debt limit by another $800 billion. We actually reached the debt ceiling in early October, but obviously the R's didn't want that vote coming up before the election. Then after they finish spending a staggering amount of money, the R's will return to make Bush's tax cuts permanent.

Now I realize that the Bushies consider it a point of pride to pay not one iota of attention to what the rest of the world thinks about us. But I would like to point out that the rest of the world is holding our paper. And foreign investors have demonstrated elsewhere that they are quite capable of taking alarm over unsound fiscal practices and pulling out completely, leaving bankrupt countries behind.

Speaking of what the rest of the world thinks of us, the matter was nicely summed up by Britain's Daily Mirror with its classic tabloid headline, "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?" The Guardian just put a tiny, white-on-black headline: "Oh God."

I realize the "liberal elites" are not allowed to even quote the word "dumb" lest we be accused of "cultural condescension" toward our salt-of-the-earth red-state compatriots. Since I'm a populist happily living in the midst of a quite red state (some of my best friends are named Bubba), I never pay any attention to such horsepoop. But I do resent it when the people running the country think we're so dumb they can rip us off and then tell us to pray.

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

Ivens is a wonderful political writer. We get her locally in a weekly paper. It drives this very conservative community NUTS to have her published. They write the editor practically weekly in anger, to which her devoted followers respond with equal vehemence, which of course, the newspaper loves. Nothing like a heated controversy to stir interest and circulation.

Its way better than mud rasslin.

Anyone who wants to see how the new Ministry of Propaganda, aka Fox News, works hand in hand with the Republican Party, in this case smearing those who simply seek to enforce the law, should look at this analysis of Fox coverage of the Delay case at Mediamatters.org:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200411180003

This is what the furure looks like in this country - a corrupt One Party State, with any misdeed covered up by its slick mass media empire, aong with a daily outpouring of "news" that is spun only one way - far right.