"Evictions may foreshadow Iraq Civil War."
But it's all good. You see, we're having the Shi'ites and Sunnis kill each other there so they don't have to kill each other here. Protecting the homeland from violence between Muslim sects!
Yes, I don't think the dumbest American can be fooled into thinking the sectarian violence is fueled by foreign terrrorists.
But I shouldn't speak too soon. I can hear it now: "Better a Shi'ite shrine than an American skyscraper."
Hutchinson is not at all inconsistent. As Hutchison's spokesman explained:
IN the Oct. 25 editorial "Double standard," the Chronicle incorrectly
compared U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's recent remarks on "gotcha"
investigator tactics in general to her comments during the impeachment of
President Bill Clinton, even though they are as different as night and day.
In 1999, the senator said President Clinton committed a serious crime when
he purposely perjured himself and obstructed justice, and she was absolutely right. He intentionally lied to a grand jury and the nation and then obstructed justice to protect himself politically. That is very different from a case where an investigator fails to find evidence of a crime and instead looks for any shred of inconsistency, no matter how inadvertent, in testimony that may have stretched over a period of years.
As Sen. Hutchison said in 1999, the standards for perjury and obstruction
of justice are not gray. Deliberately lying to a grand jury is not the same as forgetting a name or not remembering a date. She believes that prosecutors play a critically important role in our system of justice and, to keep the integrity of the process, must avoid playing "gotcha."
--CHRIS PAULITZ press secretary, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Washington, D.C.
At the time, Republicans said it was not about the sex, it was about the lying. But how, using Hutchison's standard, can perjury related to anything other than sex be anything other than trivial? If one misspeaks under oath about a blow job, one must be willfully misleading, because one cannot credibly forget receiving a blow job. But confusing, say, your boss Dick Cheney and journalist Tim Russert is not willful. It's just "forgetting a name."
In other words, if Libby or Rove had screwed Plame and lied about it, that would be a serious crime. But since they apparently just lied about screwing her in the figurative sense, it's a technicality.
A couple more points. Hutchison's spokesperson says the "testimony may have stretched over a period of years." But when did Rove, Libby, et al, make the allegedly perjurious statements? Based on reports, they misspoke about Cooper, Russert, etc. when the investigation began, and may have made false statements to FBI investigators even before the investigation began.
Hutchison's mouthpiece says, "That is very different from a case where an investigator fails to find evidence of a crime and instead looks for any shred of inconsistency..." What did the blow job have to do with the original subject of Starr's investigation, Whitewater? Did Starr find any evidence of a crime related to Whitewater?
As I recall--and I may need some refreshing of the details--Starr conferred with Paula Jones lawyers, setting a perjury trap for Clinton. If that's not a "gotcha" investigator tactics, what is?
I was reminded as well, however, that the laws of our Country are applicable to us all, including the President, and they must be obeyed. The concept of equal justice under law and the importance of absolute truth in legal proceedings is the foundation of our justice system in the courts.
...Do the crimes of perjury, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice as alleged in this proceeding rise to the level of the `high crimes and misdemeanors' included in our Constitution that would justify the automatic removal from office of the President of the United States?
This Senate on numerous occasions has convicted impeached Federal Judges on allegations of perjury. Moreover, the historical fact is that `high crimes and misdemeanors,' as used and applied in English law on which portions of our Constitution were founded, included the crimes of `obstructing the execution of the lawful process' and of `willful and corrupt perjury.'....
If President Washington, as a child, had cut down a cherry tree and lied about it, he would be guilty of `lying,' but would not be guilty of `perjury.'
If, on the other hand, President Washington, as an adult, had been warned not to cut down a cherry tree, but he cut it down anyway, with the tree falling on a man and severely injuring or killing him, with President Washington stating later under oath that it was not he who cut down the tree, that would be `perjury.' Because it was a material fact in determining the circumstances of the man's injury or death.Some would argue that the President in the second example should not be impeached because the whole thing is about a cherry tree, and lies about cherry trees, even under oath, though despicable, do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution. I disagree.
The perjury committed in the second example was an attempt to impede, frustrate, and obstruct the judicial system in determining how the man was injured or killed, when, and by whose hand, in order to escape personal responsibility under the law, either civil or criminal. Such would be an impeachable offense. To say otherwise would be to severely lower the moral and legal standards of accountability that are imposed on ordinary citizens every day. The same standard should be imposed on our leaders.
Nearly every child in America believes that President Washington, as a child himself, did in fact cut down the cherry tree and admitted to his father that he did it, saying simply: `I cannot tell a lie.'
I will not compromise this simple but high moral principle in order to avoid serious consequences to a successor President who may choose to ignore it.
Or perhaps perjury is not a crime but a technicality:
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, speaking on the NBC news program "Meet the Press," [Sunday, October 23, 2005] compared the leak investigation with the case of Martha Stewart and her stock sale, "where they couldn't find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime."
Ms. Hutchison said she hoped "that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."
If you send an example of a Republican politician or pundit belittling perjury, please post it to my blog and I'll try to find an accompanying quote from the impeachment trial. If you can find the quote yourself, even better. I'll post the pair of quotes in a new blog entry, with credit to the quote-spotter.
I don't have access to Lexis/Nexis, but someone or ones with access should start compiling all the 1998 quotes from conservatives arguing that perjury is a high crime--and why.
The orange ribbon went semiotically unchallenged for weeks, until leftists and centrist disengagement supporters realized that the orange was boosting the morale of disengagement, even affecting opinion polls. Peace Now started handing out blue ribbons, to signify support for disengagement. Other disengagement supporters started sporting blue and white ribbons, the colors of the Israeli flag. A friend told me that she had heard a disengagement supporter teased on the radio for touting these "blue ribbons." The word for ribbon (seret) also means "film," and a blue film (seret kachol) is a pornographic film in Hebrew. The disengagement proponent was quick to point out to the radio commentator that it was a "blue and white" seret, not a blue seret. Blue and white are the colors of the Israeli flag. When I stopped by Peace Now to pick up some blue ribbons, I asked why just blue, referencing the unfortunate pun. The woman at Peace Now said (in Hebrew) that they called it seret be'tseva kachol ("a ribbon in the color blue") to avoid the double entendre. (I think there is a subtle semantic difference between blue and white ribbons and a blue ribbon. A blue ribbon simply says "I support disengagement," while a blue and white ribbon says "I support disengagement and I am a Zionist." I've yet to find a source of blue and white ribbons.)
The day after Peace Now announced their blue ribbon initiative, I saw no blue-ribboned or blue-and-white-ribboned cars. The next day, I spotted one. The following day, a handful. For a week, the frequency of the blue- and blue-and-white ribboned cars increased daily, especially in the Moshava Germanit neighborhood, which is like the Upper West Side of Jerusalem. I saw one woman with blue and white ribbons in her hair and all over her backpack. The blue/white ribbons seemed to double after disengagement opponents threw nails and oil on highways and almost stoned and beat an Arab to death. However, the orange ribbons increased too, especially after the suicide bombing outside the Netanya shopping mall and the rockets in Gaza: orange ribbons on car antennas, rearview mirrors, side mirrors, backpacks, wrists. Orange flags. Orange wristbands. Orange t-shirts that say "Because we have no other country" in Hebrew. Orange posters. Occasionally I've seen blue, white, and orange ribbons tied together, which I assume means "I support the state of Israel and oppose disengagement."
I put a blue ribbon on my door and tied a blue ribbon to my purse strap. I used to remove the blue ribbon when I entered the office, because I felt that the office was not an appropriate place to trumpet one's political views. But when my coworkers starting wearing orange ribbons on their bags, I decided not to remove my blue one. I ran into a friend at a party, a peace activist, who had just returned from a two-month trip to the states. She thought my ribbon was a fashion statement. This prompted amazed laughter from me and another friend of hers: our politically aware friend had been out of the country for a couple of months, and was clueless about this ubiquitous war of political symbols. We explained to her what had been going on since she'd been out of the country. So she summoned another friend who was wearing orange pants, and asked if it was a political statement. (It wasn't.) I explained that it was not pants, but ribbons and t-shirts. (That was before I spotted orange shawls on female disengagement protesters.)
So who's winning the color war? I don't know about other cities, but in Jerusalem, it's orange by a long stretch. In the office parking lot where I work, I count nine or ten orange ribbons for every blue-white ribbon. An ad on a highway overpass for Orange, the French cellphone company that is popular in Israel, is flanked by orange ribbons. The other day, my boyfriend picked me up in his car with a new addition: an orange ribbon hanging from his rearview mirror.
The man in the cubicle next to me, a middle-aged man with three kids, took two days off to protest disengagement, sleeping on the lawn of a home in Gush Katif with hundreds of other protesters. When he returned, my coworkers started talking about the heavy-handed measures of the Israeli police and army: pulling a guy with a kippah off a bus in Maale Adumim, a large Jerusalem settlement, because he was probably on his way to the Gush Katif protest. Someone referenced a video (which I have yet to see) of a soldier purportedly gauging a protesters' eyes with his thumbs and tearing his nostrils up. "Nazis," another orange-wristed coworker said in response. I objected, and asked him: when treatment of Arabs by Israeli soldiers is compared to Nazism, doesn't he object to this? Wouldn't he call this anti-Semitism? (Even anti-disengagement leaders have objected to protesters wearing orange stars of David.)
I am dismayed by reports of police and army brutality, but seeing the anger it generates only cements my opinion that Israel has to get out of Gaza. In the past few weeks, Gush supporters have gotten just a little taste of what Palestinians have endured for decades: restriction of movement, inconvenience, area closings, heavy-handed police and army tactics, imminent eviction and home demolition. The co-worker who called these Israeli soldiers "Nazis" said he's thinking of leaving the country and is deeply disillusioned with the state. If these things make a Jewish-Israeli citizen this angry at the State of Israel, occupation can't be doing us any good.
