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I think Shays and Lieberman recognized the evil.

Listen to Shays.

Read the first half of Lieberman's bifurcated speech on the floor of the Senate. Here is an excerpt:

The president's relationship with Ms. Lewinsky not only contradicted the values he has publicly embraced over the last six years, it has, I fear, compromised his moral authority at a time when Americans of every political persuasion agree that the decline of the family is one of the most pressing problems we are facing.
Nevertheless, I believe the president could have lessened the harm his relationship with Ms. Lewinksy has caused if he had acknowledged his mistake and spoken with candor about it to the American people shortly after it became public in January.
But, as we now know, he chose not to do this. This deception is particularly troubling because it was not just a reflexive, and many ways, understandable human act of concealment to protect himself and his family from what he called the embarrassment of his own conduct when he was confronted with it in the deposition in the Jones case. But rather, it was the intentional and pre-meditated decision to do so.
In choosing this path, I fear that the president has undercut the efforts of millions of American parents who are naturally trying to instill in our children the value of honesty. As most any mother and father knows, kids have a singular ability to detect double standards. So, we can safely assume that it will be that much more difficult to convince our sons and daughters of the importance of telling the truth when the most powerful man in the nation evades it. Many parents I have spoken with in Connecticut confirm this unfortunate consequence.
The president's intentional and consistent statements, more deeply,may also undercut the trust that the American people have in his word. Under the Constitution, as presidential scholar Newsted (ph) has noted, the president's ultimate source of authority, particularly his moral authority, is the power to persuade, to mobilize public opinion, to build consensus behind a common agenda. And at this, the president has been extraordinarily effective.
But that power hinges on the president's support among the American people and their faith and confidence in his motivations and agenda, yes; but also in his word.
As Teddy Roosevelt once explained, "My power vanishes into thin air the instant that my fellow citizens, who are straight and honest, cease to believe that I represent them and fight for what is straight and honest. That is all the strength that I have," Roosevelt said.
Sadly, with his deception, President Clinton may have weakened the great power and strength that he possesses, of which President Roosevelt spoke.
I know this is a concern that may of my colleagues share, which is to say that the president has hurt his credibility and therefore perhaps his chances of moving his policy agenda forward.
But I believe that the harm the president's actions have caused extend beyond the political arena. I am afraid that the misconduct the president has admitted may be reinforcing one of the worst messages being delivered by our popular culture, which is that values are fungible. And I am concerned that his misconduct may help to blur some of the most important bright lines of right and wrong in our society.

No. As I argue above, I think Lieberman and Shay were influenced more by their own pathologic self-interest---what was good for them--rather than by what was evil, what was perilous for this country.

A man who rapes women, a wife who, in her lust for power re-abuses those women without a second thought, are, by definition, unfit to lead. Period. End of story.

Christopher Shays, and certainly the smarter, supposedly more moral man, Joe Lieberman, would have known that instinctively.

But they chose pathologic self-interest instead of the interest of this country. And the rise of terrorism, 9/11, civilization in the balance, are the sorry endpoint.

"WHAT HARM CAN HE DO?"

by Mia T. 12-14-01

"There wasn't a sicker person than I on September 11. I was on the telephone when it happened. The instant that second plane hit, I said to the person with whom I was speaking, 'Bin Laden did this.' I knew immediately. I know what this network can do.

bill clinton

"Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in '91 and he went to the Sudan.
We'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again. They released him [bin Laden].
At the time, '96, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have; but they thought it was a hot potato. They didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."

bill clinton
Sunday, Aug. 11, 2002
Clinton Reveals on Secret Audio:
I Nixed Bin Laden Extradition Offer

"I remember exactly what happened. Bruce Lindsey said to me on the phone, 'My God, a second plane has hit the tower.' And I said, 'Bin Laden did this.' that's the first thing I said. He said, 'How can you be sure?' I said 'Because only bin Laden and the Iranians could set up the network to do this and they [the Iranians] wouldn't do it because they have a country in targets. Bin Laden did it.'
I thought that my virtual obsession ² with him was well placed and I was full of regret that I didn't get him."

bill clinton
Sunday, Sept 3, 2002
Larry King Live

So anytime somebody said in my presence, 'Hey, if you don't do this, people will think you're weak,' I always asked the same question for eight years, 'Can we kill 'em tomorrow?'
I don't think we can bring 'em back tomorrow, but can we kill 'em tomorrow? If we can kill them tomorrow, then we're not weak.... ¹
I learned that as a 20-year-old kid watching Bill Fulbright. Listening."

bill clinton
Fulbright Prize address
April 12, 2006

Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history.

Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize

"What harm can clinton do? He has less than two years left".--Dale Bumpers

The irrational fear of the "right" whipped up by clinton spinners (watch them spin), had trumped the very rational fear of this pseudo-leftist psychopath.

The New York Times long ago labeled clinton "a documentably dysfunctional personality [with] delusions." The Times conceded that clinton (and the wife, too, BTW) had no character. (In its endorsements of the clintons for election and re-election, no less!!) And yet, the Times, and all the other usual suspects on the left, chose in the end pathologic self-interest and the easy Faustian deal.

The Left steadfastly put agenda above country.

"What harm can clinton do?" reasoned the aptly named Bumpers. "He has less than two years left."

What harm, indeed.

If the impeached ex-president's own claim is true, that he understood fully the capability and inclination of bin Laden to carry off a 9/11, then his passing up of Sudan's offer, including one as late as 2000 to hand over the terrorist and data on his network, his repeated failure 'to pull the trigger,' as CIA "Hunting bin Laden' chief, Michael Scheuer, characterizes it, reveal both the depth and danger of clinton dysfunction and the utter malfeasance of the Senate and the fourth estate.

I think that history will view this much differently. They will say I made a bad personal mistake, I paid a serious price for it, but that I was right to stand and fight for my country and my constitution and its principles...

clinton

...[bill clinton], a man who will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents.

Al Gore at clinton's post-impeachment rally
I suspect that, to spite us all,
Arthur Schlesinger will live to 120
just so he can write
the definitive clinton hagiography.
Mia T, Musings: Senatorial Courtesy Perverted

History Lesson

by Mia T

Someone--was it Maupassant?--
once called history "that excitable and lying old lady."
The same can be said of historians.

Surely it can be said of Doris Kearns Goodwin,
the archetypical pharisaical historian,
not-so-latently clintonoid,
Lieberman-Paradigmatic
(i.e., clinton is an unfit president;
therefore clinton must remain president),
intellectually dishonest,
(habitually doing what the Arthur Schlesingers of this world do:
making history into the proof of their theories).

The Forbids 400's argument is shamelessly spurious.
They get all unhinged over the impeachment of clinton,
claiming that it will
"leave the presidency permanently disfigured and diminished,
at the mercy as never before of the caprices of any Congress."

Yet they dismiss the real and present--and future!!--danger
to the presidency and the country
of not impeaching and removing
this admittedly unfit, (Goodwin)
"documentably dysfunctional," (NYT)
presidency-diminishing, (Goodwin)
power-abusing,
psychopathic thug.

Doris Kearns Goodwin and those 400 other
hog-and-bow-tied-save-clinton,
retrograde-obsessing historiographers
are a supercilious, power-hungry,
egomaniacal lot in their own right.

For them, clinton validates
what Ogden Nash merely hypothesized:
Any buffoon can make history,
but only a great man can write it.