Saturday, February 04, 2006
On Impeachment
John Hinderracker over at Powerline had a really interesting post the other day.
For them the power matters. That is the path to corruption. Power is useful, but it is not an end to itself - it's a tool to create some greater good. The Democrat pathology, as Hinderacker calls it, stems from the fact that they simply want to tell us what to do. That is a grossly self-destructive problem. We just have to make sure they don't do too much damage to the rest of us while they work through that.
Related Tags: Democrats, Republicans, impeachment, pathology, power
But I also think that a considerable part of the Democrats' current pathology dates from the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I thought at the time, and still believe, that impeaching Clinton was a mistake. Unlike most Democrats, however, I don't think it was politically motivated. On the contrary, it was obvious at the time that the most politically expedient course was a censure vote, followed by ridicule. And the last thing any Republican wanted was to make Al Gore the incumbent President.This brings to mind the thought that for some, in this case the Democrats - holding the levers of power matters more than what you do with them. The rank-and-file Dems may be upset ebcasue they think they should be able to have sex with whomever (or whatever) whenever and however they would like, without accountability, but that isn't true for the office holders. They aren't stupid - they know the sex thing was spin and not the charge.
Clinton's impeachment was certainly justifiable--like Nixon, he obstructed justice; worse, unlike Nixon, he lied under oath--but in my view, the whole sordid affair didn't rise to a level that warranted the nuclear option of impeachment. Reasonable minds can differ about that, and when the process was over, Republicans moved on. Many Democrats, somewhat ironically, did not. They remained enraged that the right to lie about sex--it's got to be in one of those amendments, somewhere--had been infringed, and they've remained enraged, in many cases, right up to the present. So the current talk about impeaching President Bush was pretty much inevitable.
For them the power matters. That is the path to corruption. Power is useful, but it is not an end to itself - it's a tool to create some greater good. The Democrat pathology, as Hinderacker calls it, stems from the fact that they simply want to tell us what to do. That is a grossly self-destructive problem. We just have to make sure they don't do too much damage to the rest of us while they work through that.
Related Tags: Democrats, Republicans, impeachment, pathology, power
