(reposted)
One of the greatest political scandals of our lifetimes led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. It was the second impeachment of a US president in American history. Apparently the Commander-in-Chief had fooled around with a woman who was not his wife. Three or four times. Imagine that.
The scandal was so huge that all over the world the only thing Bill Clinton is remembered for is hanky-panky with Monica.
Was this normal in America? No. Years earlier John F Kennedy had extramarital sex several times a week with many different women. He was never impeached for it. In fact, there was not even a whiff of scandal concerning JFK’s sex life.
So what’s the difference? Why does one person’s actions cause a massive scandal while the same actions by a different person makes no waves at all?
The one and only difference is that Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr chose to make it a scandal.
It didn’t have to be. The whole thing was kind of a joke. No money was stolen. Nobody was killed. Nobody was harmed in any way. Looking at the facts, it’s not scandalous at all. Gingrich and Starr however opted to gin up a hysterical reaction to a giant nothing-burger.
Back in the 60s the reaction to John F Kennedy’s marital indiscretions set the precedent that the President’s private life is private, and his privacy is respected.
Newt Gingrich smashed that tradition and set a new precedent that a POTUS with a (D) next to his name can be impeached for any trivial, even harmless “misconduct”
Fast forward to January 2007. Nancy Pelosi has just taken the gavel as brand new opposition party Speaker of the House. She announces that “impeachment is off the table” infuriating her base. She had unilaterally disarmed. Bush had nothing to fear from her, and she let him know right off the bat. She wasn’t gonna play hardball. She also set a precedent. Her new precedent was that a POTUS with an ® next to his name can lie like hell in order to get authorization to start very bloody and even more expensive wars, which incompetents and profiteers can grift billions of dollars off and there will be zero consequences.
Contrasting these two precedents it’s pretty clear that a Democrat in the White House can and will be impeached for trifles, whereas a Republican POTUS can and will commit major crimes, ethics violations, and acts of outright corruption, with impunity.
This is the legacy of Gingrich and Pelosi.
Speaking of precedents, let’s talk about Keith Olbermann.
Days after it started, J.D. Vance refused to apologize for his role in spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. In fact he doubled down. Having had some time to think it thru I realized that telling lies in order to stoke ethnic hatred is really vile. and in my mind, anyway, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior from a United States Senator. So who’s responsible for the enforcement of standards of basic ethics on members of the Senate? Ultimately Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Do you remember Chuck’s statement on Vance committing these egregious acts of evil? I don’t. Obviously the man has no business in the U.S. Senate. If there was ever cause to expel someone this is it. So has Schumer done anything?!?! Has he at least forced a debate on whether to censure a man who brazenly lies inciting ethnic strife in this country of immigrants that we love?!?! To my knowledge Chuck Schumer has done nothing. And by doing nothing he is condoning the behavior and setting a brand new precedent. Vance’s eating-the-dogs disinformation campaign is now acceptable behavior for a US Senator. The Senate Majority Leader chose not to make it a scandal. So it’s not.
Vance’s actions here are a thousand times worse than anything Bill Clinton did with Monica. but the scandal is a thousand times smaller for Vance simply because Schumer chooses to ignore it. It’s Pelosi-ism. Why make waves about revolting misconduct committed by your opponents when you can just relax, sip wine, and have a great time?
Keith Olbermann is the only commentator I’ve heard mention the obvious fact that Vance should be expelled or at least censured by the Senate. Everyone else is normalizing absolutely unacceptable behavior.
Shortly after the 2016 election some Kuwaiti big wigs traveled to D.C. They stayed in a suite at a Trump owned hotel and paid exponentially more than the going rate for rooms of that quality. This was a clear bribe. They were paying off the president-elect. Why was this never a scandal? because Pelosi and her gang decided not to make any noise about it. She gave Trump a free pass.
This scandalous Kuwaiti-DC-Hotel-Trump bribe is a thousand times worse than Hillary’s email or Benghazi. Yet oddly nobody on the planet seems to have ever heard of it. When our leaders choose to make something a scandal it is. When our leaders choose not to make something a scandal it isn’t.
The three people who had the greatest impact on legislative Democrats in the last 20 years are Pelosi, Reid, and Schumer. There are lower level people engaged in the same do-nothing Pelosi-ism that’s destroying our country. Dick Durbin for example. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee he has the power, the time, and the money to launch brutal investigations into the flagrant turpitude of our Degenerate Supreme Court Justices. (There was more than enough dirt on Clarence Thomas to impeach him back in 2019, but, you know, Neville Pelosi is determined to overlook Republican depravity wherever it may be found). What did Durbin want to investigate this summer? The first assassination attempt on Trump.
Right now the extreme right has a super-majority on SCOTUS. They have a majority in the House. They have 50 votes in the Senate, meaning they can block almost anything there with a filibuster. The far right has been winning, consistently, almost every battle for decades. and this despite the fact that their policies make no sense, their leaders often speak gibberish, half of them are openly corrupt, and the rest are liars, buffoons, and crazies. and still Pelosi-Jeffries-Schumer et al can’t eek out a working majority. Sorry for the offensive language, but our leaders are idiots. Pelosi-Jeffries-Schumer et al are total failures on every level. and the most stomach-churning part of it all is that they don’t even try. They make zero effort. It’s their choice to be losers that keep getting steam-rolled by depraved weirdos.
