Why Clinton Will Be Impeached

There is a footnote in Kenneth Starr's 445-page report to Congress that says everything about the investigation, and exemplifies the reason that Clinton will ultimately be impeached. The footnote is attached to one of the salacious accounts of Clinton's sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky:

(vii) Sunday, March 31, 1996
Ms. Lewinsky testified that she and the President had sexual contact in the hallway outside the Oval Office study during the late afternoon of Sunday, March 31, 1996.(36) <7grounds11.htm> The President arranged this encounter by calling Ms. Lewinsky and inviting her to the Oval Office. During this encounter, Ms. Lewinsky did not perform oral sex on the President. The President fondled Ms. Lewinsky's bare breasts with his hands and mouth and fondled her genitalia directly by pulling her underwear out of the way. In addition, the President inserted a cigar into Ms. Lewinsky's vagina.(37) <7grounds11.htm>

This is footnote number 37:

37. Id. at 37-38. The President then put the cigar in his mouth and said to Ms. Lewinsky: "it tastes good." Lewinsky 7/30/98 Int. at 12-13; see also Lewinsky Depo. at 38.

Nothing published in English this year approaches this footnote for sheer meanness. It is astonishingly cruel, and almost inhuman in the depth to which it goes to humiliate Bill Clinton.

The account of the encounter itself might be justified on the grounds that it establishes a sexual relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky, and thus the basis of Clinton's perjury. The footnote attached to it can't be excused on this basis. It serves no legal purpose. It does not provide evidence as to Clinton's guilt. The footnote does not, as I was taught it should in high school English, serve to illuminate the main text. It has no function but to make of the president the butt of dirty jokes, to ridicule him, to expose his human indiscretions and subject them to inhuman judgment.

The footnote doesn't need to be in the document. Just citing the page of testimony would have been enough to serve the basic function of a footnote. Instead Kenneth Starr has chosen to dredge up the most puerile consequence of his investigation and parade it before the public, as he has with this footnote:

41. Lewinsky 8/26/98 Depo. at 47. On this occasion, the President ejaculated. Id.

And this one:

44. Ms. Lewinsky testified that she had multiple orgasms. Id. at 50.

And this one:

45. Id. at 50-51; Lewinsky 8/6/98 GJ at 21. On this occasion, the President ejaculated. Lewinsky 8/26/98 Depo. at 50-51.

Defenders of Starr might argue that he is forced to such explicit detail as a consequence of Clinton's tendency to debate the semantics of his encounters with Lewinsky. To that, the explicit detail he provides in the body of his text is more than sufficient. It accounts for every single assignation between Clinton and Lewinsky, in graphic detail. The footnotes add nothing to this basic argument. They are, simply and purely, an insult.

Those footnotes define Starr's report. Those footnotes define Starr's investigation. After four years, $40 million, and 455 pages, there is not a single instance Starr can cite of Clinton's dissembling that is not tied to the Lewinsky affair. There is no evidence of wrongdoing in Whitewater. There is no evidence of misdeeds in Travelgate. There is no evidence of malfeasance in Filegate. There is no evidence of abuse of office. There is no crime against the state or the people. There is nothing except the fact that Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky and then-and this is debatable--lied about it in civil court. The evidence for subornation of perjury is laughable. And the charges of obstructing justice revolve around Clinton's unwillingness to fess up to the affair in January because presumably he was concerned that confession in that instance would have led to calls for his impeachment, as confession in this instance has done.

There is nothing in the report that is even remotely impeachable save for Clinton's behavior after the scandal broke. And the scandal broke because Linda Tripp illegally taped confidential conversations with someone to whom she professed friendship, and then turned those tapes over to Starr's team, who used the information in them to depose Clinton, and catch him in a lie.

In other words, they set him up.

They set him up for a crime so petty that it wouldn't last a day in a criminal court divorced from politics. They set him up to confess about behavior that is no one's business but his family's, Monica Lewinsky's and his. They have acted as an inquisition and subjected him to a digital pillorying. And they will hang their case on the issue of his lying, and insist that no one is above the law, and the law must be administered impartially upon everyone

But there is nothing but the evidence of partiality in this case, of bald partisanship, of sheer out-and-out blind hatred for Bill Clinton. There is no other way to explain the footnotes. They are the work of professional Clinton-haters. They are the work of a minority opinion in this country, convinced of their righteousness, and united in the conviction that anything to the left of Newt Gingrich is rife with moral turpitude, fiscal prodigality, and cultural nihilism.

And they will not stop. They will not stop because the sad fact of the matter is that the Clinton/Lewinsky affair is fundamentally an insignificance, a trifle. But precisely because there is nothing to this story, it must be pursued to its inglorious end. Having stooped this low, Starr and Gingrich and Richard Mellon Scaife and the sensationalized Murdoch press must lean down deep and drag their bellies through the mud all the way to impeachment. Because otherwise all this would be exposed as nothing-nothing other than a bare-faced effort to effect a coup against the electoral will of the American people, who always knew Bill Clinton was a philanderer and dissembler, and voted for him anyway.

Which suggests that what the right-wing hate most in this county is not its Democratic president, but the democratic processes that elected him.