Tag: Russia Collusion

by Stephen B. Presser   It is one of the puzzles of history that Republicans once sought to impeach Bill Clinton. Predictably, they failed to convict him in the Senate with the requisite two-thirds vote, and then Republicans lost the midterm elections that followed, all while President Clinton’s popularity increased dramatically. Even if the Republican effort to remove the president had succeeded, however, he simply would have been replaced by Al Gore, his vice president, and Gore probably would have been positioned to do better in his election bid than he did in his eventual match with George W. Bush in 2000. In hindsight, the impeachment of Bill Clinton looks like nothing so much as a grave political miscalculation; something Republicans never should have undertaken in the first place. Why, then, did they do it, and what does their behavior teach us that might be relevant to the current rumblings about impeaching President Trump? The Republicans moved against President Clinton because they believed that he had committed perjury and sought to obstruct justice in matters ultimately connected to the private lawsuit brought against him by Paula Jones, who had accused him, of sexual harassment, years earlier, when she had been…

by Thomas Farman   The people who thirst for justice over Washington’s continued attempts to deny Donald Trump the power of the presidency make a mistake in treating Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe as an actual whodunnit. If this were an Agatha Christie novel, it would have ended with the revelation that the investigation was sourced in Hillary Clinton opposition research renamed for dramatic effect “the Steele dossier.” The “who” that “dunnit” was none other than Barack Obama’s CIA and FBI turning that facial absurdity into probable cause to go fishing into the life of Donald Trump to find something, anything, that might damage him. The object of the Mueller probe was never to investigate collusion because nobody could possibly believe something so idiotic. It was to create suspense in stupid people by generating headlines about Russia. The following definition of “suspense” is sometimes attributed to Alfred Hitchcock: Suspense is a feeling of pleasurable fascination and excitement mixed with apprehension, tension, and anxiety developed from an unpredictable, mysterious, and rousing source of entertainment. Hitchcock distinguished between suspense and the whodunnit. Suspense is a dramatic device to engage distracted people who lack sufficient intellectual curiosity to bother with actual causal connections.…