Dave "Doctor" Gonzo's
Trial DIS-patch
House Confederates Wrap Up Case, Desecrate Graves and Monuments

January 16, 1999 --- New York (APJP) -- Before we get to today's droning, we'd like to quote a letter forwarded to us:

Bill McCollum, at 25 minutes into [his presentation], said:

"On August 6, 1998 Monica Lewinsky testified that no one asked her to lie, you've heard a lot about that statement, but look what she also says -- 'but no one discouraged me either.' How many times have you heard that part of her statement? They don't tell you that part."

For starters, it is NOT a crime to NOT discourage anyone from telling a lie -- but I digress.

Actually, McCollum is parsing words, misleading the Senate, or outright LYING on this point by taking this statement of Lewinsky's and equating it with the same statement that has been quoted numerous times of her saying no one told her to lie.

The statement that has been quoted was not from her August 6th testimony, which was her first day before the Grand Jury, it was from her LAST day of testimony before the Grand Jury -- AFTER Clinton gave his Grand Jury testimony and the OIC called her back -- that has been quoted. A Grand Juror asked her if she had anything she'd like to say before she left. Here is the testimony from that portion:

JUROR: ... Monica, is there anything that you would like to add to your prior testimony ...

LEWINSKY: I would. I think because of the public nature of how this investigation has been and what the charges aired, that I would just like to say that no one ever asked me to lie and I was never promised a job for my silence. And that I'm sorry. I'm really sorry for everything that's happened. (The witness begins to cry.) And I hate Linda Tripp.

... JUROR: And I also want to say that even though right now you feel a lot of hate for Linda Tripp, but you need to move on and leave her where she is because whatever goes around comes around.

Please, not that the portion McCollum states followed the often-quoted statement of Lewinsky is NOT in this portion at all. Should we now prosecute McCollum for LYING to the Senate?!?!?!?!?

This makes two House Managers that have unequivocally borne false witness in this Senate Trial: Sessenbrenner yesterday, when quoting White House Attorney Ruff; and McCollum today quoting them and Clinton defenders today!

Bearing False Witness is a LIE -- and these two have LIED to the Senate of The United States of American about The President of The United States!!

Steve Buyer was the first House Manager to speak after Chief Kangaroo Rehnquist gaveled the proceedings to order. he droned on at length about the constitutional basis for Clinton's conduct being impeachable, including detailed (boring) statements about the Constitutional statutes guiding impeachment, which all of the managers obviously had to review when Judge Rehnquist's first ruling went against the managers on the matter of calling the Senators "jurors."

We only wish he had added, "Oh, and while you're at it, please be more specific and refer to the Jones suit as an alleged civil rights suit."

He spent most of his time explaining why perjury is allegedly an impeachable crime. Boo-Yur underlined his description of the President as "the defendant" as he spent time describing court cases and impeachment of judges for perjury.

He spent about ten minutes characterizing "obstruction of justice" as "an attack on the legal system." When he said something about "which side uses more underhanded tactics," we could only laugh -- because what will no doubt be revealed as illegal collusion between an Independent Counsel and a bunch of politically motivated, evangelist-supported lawyers sure sounds more underhanded to us than hiding an affair.

He referred to Black's Law Dictionary at one point -- to parse words just as the Jones attorneys did.

Boo-Yur quoted Griffin Bell: "Truth and fairness are pillars of our judicial system." If that's the case, Boo-Yur, why not impeach Paula Jones (who recanted her sworn complaints under oath and denied Americans the fair chance to have a full-time president with her nuisance suit) and Kenneth Starr (who lied when he said his job was "a search for the truth" and hijacked the press to undermine the Presidency)?

He claimed that "once we deny the administration of justice to the least of us, we erode the social contract." With the way his rights have been eroded through the efforts of Ken Starr and other judicial activists, it could be convincingly argued that the President is "the least of us" -- with far less rights to protect himself from attack than average citizens.

Boo-Yer started talking about "the whispers" among the military that had they been charged with what the President had been charged with, they would have been drummed out of the military -- and this was having an affect on the military.

These words went far out of bounds -- and in fact were an indirect call to sedition and disloyalty in the military. Boo-Yer and the entire House Management gang, who had a part in approving these words, should be charged with and tried for sedition and conspiracy to promote sedition.

His wind-up recalled the words of Adams: "Facts are stubborn things." They are -- the fact that Starr is under at least four investigations; that the Jones team has been tied to illegal collusion with the OIC; that the impeachment case is a house of cards using innuendo and specious assumptions, not facts.

We were also reminded of the near-senile Reagan's legendary Freudian slip when he misquoted the same words: "Facts are stupid things."

Boo-Yur's talk of double standards within the judicial system and the military only served to reinforce the sense that the Managers have a double standard when it comes to fairness and truth.

After a ten-minute break, Lindsey Graham began the last presentation, on standards for impeachment, claiming he was a "child of the South" and knew a few things about "civil rights." Oh, brother -- Graham, who has inflated his resume with weasel-wording in the biography on his Web page that would have you believe he fought in Operation Desert Storm (he was in fact stationed in the Great 48, defending his beloved Confederacy), wants you to think he's some big champion of civil rights.

What a lie. We encourage all of you to check his voting record. Graham's idea of affirmative action is to answer in the affirmative to what Tom DeLay asks him to do.

"The reason we're here is not because someone wanted to look into the personal life of the President." Hey, Lindsey -- ask Mr. Paula Jones about this one -- he was telling fascist Brit journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that that is what they'd planned all along!

Naturally, he went back to "that meeting in a hotel room" as the origin of the "high crimes... What's a high crime? What if a person of high office hurts a person of low means."

Low means? Paula already had the rather sizable financial means of the rabid Clinton-hating right when she came out with her allegations against Bill Clinton!

Graham was clearly on a path that would lead him toward the president's team tearing him a new hole -- and not in his weak arguments. Graham is headed for the public sector in just under two years.

"Don't lie in a lawsuit by a fellow citizen," said Graham -- of course, the Managers had not proven this.

"What gets you oudda office... is the same legal standard [for presidents and judges], not because I said so, but because you said so." But Graham's argument is based on very narrow decisions -- and he knows full well that the President's team will nail the House managers on the point Graham is bringing up.

In one respect, Graham was great -- presenting the impression of a simple country lawyer. We're sure it played well among the Freepers. The problem was with his entire argument on impeachment standards and "cleansing the office... restoring honor and integrity to the office." Doesn't say anything about that in the Constitution, Lindsey. Nice try.

"If this is a football game, we're almost at halftime." Hey Lindsey, how can it be at "half time" when you want to call witnesses? The way you want to play the game, this isn't even the first quarter of Presidential Death Match.

Graham wound up by calling Senators to "a higher duty... cleanse this office."

Mousy House manager Charles Canady followed -- and came off as a huffy priss instead of the forceful advocate he was trying to be as he discussed the appropriateness of impeachment in the present case. But he did pull one clever gambit -- using the words of Al Gore in the Hastings impeachment in an attempt to bolster his argument. It's almost sure to come back and bite the managers in the butt, because they no doubt anticipated defusing everything that the Clintons and Al gore have said about previous impeachments.

It was a pretty dry presentation. We won't bore you the way he bored us -- it was a sort of "Graham lite" presentation, but claiming that the Senate would establish a standard that would either "strengthen or weaken" the Constitution and the impeachment process -- and that the Senate must therefore convict. No doubt the Clinton team will take the same senate decisions Canady cited and turn them upside-down. The funniest moment came when Canady stated that Andrew Johnson was greatly disliked -- but was not impeached.

What's that supposed to mean? That Clinton is popular -- and therefore must go? There you have it -- the Richard Mellon Scaife case in a nutshell!

At a later point, Canady said what sounded like "Constitutional doody." Yes, of course he meant duty -- or did he?

And Canady spoke of what happens when public officials act in a lawless manner, quoting Louis Brandeis. This was the pinnacle of hypocrisy, a defining point in the hearings -- the managers have used the lawless actions of public officials and right-wingers to railroad Clinton.

Canady ended with his central point: "The maintenance of a President guilty of perjury is inconsistent with the rule of law."

So? Has perjury even been close to proven? Not a chance.

Rehnquist treated us to another break, after which the final summations were made. The first, by the inarticulate George Gekas, did plenty to make the gang o'Managers sound like The Gang That Couldn't Impeach Straight in his summation. They should've opted for Asa Hutchinson -- at least he can construct a coherent sentence.

Gekas started by saying, "The moment of truth is fast approaching. That moment of truth will swoop down on you at some point in the near future at which time the millions of words that have been spoken thus far, the thousands of pages of documents and the hundreds of exhibits and the dozens of individuals that have been involved in the preparation and annotation and accumulation of all the data and evidence."

He never said what that moment of truth would do after it swept down upon us, though. Would it eat us? Tell lame Lewinsky jokes? Grab us by the collars and fly us away to some safe, GOP-dominated congressional district where Mom, apple pie, the flag, segregation, the Red Scare and overall denial were still the American way?

He continued: "All of that will be funneled into that last moment that you will have right before you cast that final vote. And that's an awesome moment in the history of this chamber, and in the personal history of your own careers in public service, and of your own life as well, your personal life, your surroundings, your family, all that means anything and everything to you."

We're not kidding -- this is Gekas, verbatim, in all of its awful metaphor and hyperbole.

Here's more: "We did not, as some people began to accuse and to orate, adopt 100 percent everything that the Independent Counsel said were the allegations and accept them as fact and then move on to that and to skip from September to this moment, not having used our intellect, our sympathies, our sense of right, our sense of wrong, our sense of fairness, our elements of truth, our experience, our own intellect, our own conscience."

And he's right -- they only adopted about 99 44/100% of Starr's half-baked case, the result of a 50 million dollar trawl for anything to pin on the President. They skipped the exculpatory stuff -- nothing on Whitewater, Filegate, Fostergate, Travelgate.

Gekas kept saying "We revere the presidency" -- after detailing how he and his House Managers supported the efforts by Ken Starr and the courts to strip the Presidency of rights which are in retrospect essential to shielding the office from harassment. They revere the Presidency about as much as they revere "civil rights" -- only when it serves their purpose at the moment.

More from Gekas: "These are times that try men's souls -- someone said -- and it was not my mother."

Huh?

Gekas, who was starting to sound like the late George Jessel without the smarts, wound up his presentation by paying tribute to adulterer Henry Hyde: "You should know, as we all feel, that the most stringent duty that he ever performed, the gentleman from Illinois, was to manage the managers. But he did that just as well and as profoundly as he has approached every single facet of this case."

We're sure he pursued it as diligently as he did Cherie Snodgrass, George.

Gekas turned the show back over to Henry Hyde, who started by trying to invoke the spirit of Lincoln by invoking the Gettysburg Address.

He then turned back to oaths: "This controversy began with the fact that the president of the United States took an oath to tell the truth in his testimony before the grand jury, just as he had on two prior occasions, swore a solemn oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and to faithfully execute the laws of the United States."

Again, talk of oaths coming from a man who broke his own oath to God -- "to have and to hold" -- rang with hypocrisy.

He went on to talk of "sacred honor ," the Presidency as an "office of trust," children, and the Presidency being an office of trust -- which set us to thinking that the Managers had failed to prove that the President had come anywhere closed to even hinting that President William Jefferson Clinton had committed high crimes of state. If he broke his "sacred honor," it was to his wife and family. And he apologized -- repeatedly -- to all of those he wronged, in public and private, trying to set right that which his own personal weakness set wrong. He spoke of his own path to contrition.

Now that, readers, is leadership.

Compare that to Henry Hyde, who dismissed his affair as a "youthful indiscretion," who reportedly threatened the husband of his mistress, whom he used while Mrs. Hyde slandered her as a "tramp."

Henry and his wife set a wonderful example -- for GOP opportunists who don't give a damn about little people. They're there to be manipulated, chewed up and spit out.

And don't get me started on Clyde Savings and Loan.

"Trust is the mortar that secures the foundations of the American house of freedom." And Henry Hyde is the corrupt inspector who would tell you that the White House is crumbling while his own home has collapsed, as the house of cards called the "case against the President," is about to.

"We must never tolerate one law for the ruler and another for the ruled. If we do, we break faith with our ancestors from Bunker Hill Lexington, Concord to Flanders Fields, Normandy, Hiroshima, Panmunjom, Saigon and Desert Storm."

How lofty. Here, Hyde is his typically slick, two-faced self: we already have "one law for the ruler," that is, less rights for the President. Hyde wants to destroy the Presidency to save his Hyde and that of the GOP. If he's allowed to do that, then our ancestors from Bunker Hill Lexington, Concord to Flanders Fields, Normandy, Hiroshima, Panmunjom, Saigon and Desert Storm will spin in their graves.

it was sickening -- Hyde's invocation of the Magna Carta, the Framers (as saints of a sort, which they weren't by any stretch of the imagination), political prisoners, and a letter from a third grader -- quite clearly written under the guidance of a Clinton-hater.

He ended with what he thought would be a flourish: " How do we keep faith with that comrade in arms? Well, go to the Vietnam memorial and the national mall and press your hands against the 58,000, a few of the 58,000 names carved into that wall and ask yourself how we can redeem the debt we owe all those who purchased our freedom with their lives. How do we keep faith with them?"

This, my friends, was too much to take.

The names of my relatives are on that wall. They were steamrolled by the events of the day, dragged into a war fueled by the death-throes of European imperialism, the opium trade, regional fiefdoms and the Cold War. They died for what they had been told was the cause of freedom. They were lied to -- by Lyndon Johnson, by Congress, by the admirals and generals calling the shots.

And Henry Hyde and his House Taliban Coup Klatsch insult their memories by using their names as props for Hyde's own lofty, rhetorical lie. He desecrated the Vietnam Memorial and the graves of every American veteran with his words.