Just What Did They Expect? Listen to them whimper...they've been betrayed! DUH!

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Just What Did They Expect?

Phil Brennan Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2001

Listen to them whimper. They've been betrayed. Their hero has left office like a sneak thief, leaving behind stark evidence of his inherent dishonesty and his utter contempt for even the most rudimentary conventions of decency and morality.

Listen to poor Charles Schumer, the microphonophile senator from Hillary Clinton's new home state. He's beside himself with anguish over the slickster's unpardonable pardon of Marc Rich. He simply can't believe that the former president he defended with such passion during the House impeachment hearings could do such a thing.

After all, as a member of the House during the impeachment process, he told the nation time and again that the whole thing was simply an attempt by those rascally Republicans to harass a fine president just because he committed a mere felony. It's really all about sex, he insisted, ignoring the shocking evidence that revealed the man he was defending as a moral degenerate who couldn't be believed if he swore on that proverbial stack of Bibles.

He wasn't alone. His Democrat colleagues on the House Judiciary Commitee sang in unison their now-familiar hymn "It's just about sex." Nadler, Frank, Wexler, the whole sorry crew, all members of an obscene choir chanting the refrain over and over again. Sex, sex, sex, it's all about sex. And everybody lies about sex.

But they were careful to distance themselves from their hero's misdeeds - oh, to be sure, he was a bad boy, but what the heck, it was only sex and who cares about that. But it was wrong and he shouldn't have done it. They all gave themselves that little moralistic out. And in so doing they unwittingly showed they understood the character of the man they were defending.

Like their fellow Democrats in both Houses of Congress, they were very careful to steer clear of that roomful of evidence locked away in the Ford Office Building, evidence that shocked those Republicans who'd previously been on the fence about impeaching the president into voting against him - evidence so graphic and disgusting it remains hidden from the public eye. Evidence that revealed that the President of the United States was most probably nothing less than a brutal rapist.

By ignoring that evidence - by refusing to look at it, they could plead ignorance.

Over on the Senate side, the Democrats in the upper body held their noses and went through a sham proceeding, utterly abandoning their sworn duty to judge the matter before them in the light of constitutional law. They just wanted the whole business over and done with. If the defendant was a ruthless, conscienceless scoundrel so be it. He was one of them and they simply couldn't convict him - it was a matter of the party's survival.

So they let him go, and by so doing they set themselves up for the embarrassment they now feel at having ever supported and defended the man in the first place. What's worse, they can't plead ignorance about the character of the man - what he did on leaving office - those unforgivable pardons, his wholesale looting of the White House, his attempt to stick the taxpayers with the bill for his extravagant penthouse in the heart of uptown New York -were just about what he could have been expected to do.

Bank robbers rob banks, car thieves steal cars - blackmailers extort - it's their nature to do these things, just as it is Bill Clinton's nature to do whatever he wants to do, no matter how slimy and devious it is. The evidence of his corruption has been all there all along, as anybody with half a brain could see. So why the hell are they surprised? Did they expect him to go quietly, and retire to a monastery, perhaps to contemplate his sinful past?

These people knew what they were doing when they turned the man loose. Had they done their duty and convicted him they might have saved the nation a lot of grief - and themselves a massive embarrassment.

We should keep this in mind when all those people who voted to acquit him come up for re-election. He was their boy, and they shouldn't be allowed to forget it. Ever.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s and also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.

Just What Did They Expect? Listen to them whimper...they've been betrayed! DUH!

-- Ain't Gonna Happen (Not Here Not@ever.com), February 15, 2001


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