The Enemies Of The American People Aren't Especailly Republicans Per Se Or Democrats Per Se… It's The Ruling Elites (Of Course)

When the House took up impeachment charges against President Clinton in the 1998 lame duck session right after the midterms-- in which the Democrats had an unlikely (and, for the GOP, ominous) net pickup of 5 seats-- a whole slew of right-wing Republicans were exposed for their own infidelities and hypocrisy, particularly Speaker Gingrich (R-GA), Speaker-designate Bob Livingstone (R-LA), Henry Hyde (R-IL), domestic terrorism supporter Helen Chenoweth (R-ID) and deranged sociopath Dan Burton (R-IN). Two articles of impeachment passed on December 19, a perjury charge, 228-206 and an obstruction of justice charge, 221-212.

Five Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party voted with the GOP on both articles. Three, virulently right wing Blue Dogs, Virgil Goode (VA), Gene Taylor (MS) and Ralph Hall (TX), soon after quit the Democratic Party and became Republicans. Goode got caught up in a series of corruption scandals and was defeated and just this year, Hall, drooling and senile, was finally defeated in a primary. Taylor went down to defeat when Democrats decided it was better to stay home than to vote for him again. The other conservative Democratic traitor was Blue Dog founder Charles Stenholm (TX), who became a sleazy lobbyist for the horse meat industry after he was defeated in a landslide. The fifth was Paul McHale (PA), who thought he could save his own career by demonizing Clinton. He was almost immediately forced to retire and his Lehigh Valley seat was won by right-wing extremist Pat Toomey. That pro-impeachment Republicans Vince Snowbarger (KS), Mike Pappas (NJ), Bill Redmond (NM), Jon Fox (PA) and Rick White (WA) were all defeated by Democrats should have served as a warning that the public was not interested in an impeachment. It didn't and 2 years later more Republicans lost their seats, all of whom had voted for impeachment, including impeachment manager Jim Rogan (R-CA), virulent, ranting and raving right wing psychopath Jay Dickey (R-AR), Matthew Martinez (R-CA), Steve Kuykendall (R-CA), and Brian Bilbray (R-CA).

The same week GOP closet case Larry Craig (ID) voted to impeach President Bill Clinton, he was out trolling for dick at Union Station

There are dozens of Republican congressman who voted to impeach Clinton who are still in Congress, many of whom have risen in the ranks, like now Senators Rob Portman (R-OH), Richard Burr (R-NC), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Lindsay Graham (R-SC), John Thune (R-SD), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Roy Blunt (R-MO), Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Governor John Kasich (R-OH), and lots of high ranking congressmembers currently helping Boehner set the congressional agenda-- from Fred Upton (R-MI), Pete Sessions (R-TX), and Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ) to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Randy Forbes (R-VA). Joe Scarborough (R-FL), who was caught up in a grisly sex-and-murder scandal with a young female staffer now has his own Republican TV show on MSNBC.

Among the other who decided to cast stones, Mark Foley (R-FL) was having sex with dozens of underage male interns and was eventually exposed and forced to resign in disgrace. Three other hypocritical GOP closet cases, David Dreier (R-CA), Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) and Jim McCrery (R-LA) who had all voted to impeach, were also eventually forced out of office. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) was arrested and found guilty on a slew of corruption charges and spent a few years in a federal prison. DeLay was also found guilty on corruption charges but was able to weasel out of serving time.

Plenty senators who voted guilty on the trumped-up, supercilious Republican impeachment charges agains Bill Clinton are still in politics. Sam Brownback was a Kansas senator when he voted yes on both charges and today he is likely to lose his gubernatorial reelection battle. Kansans have learned to hate him. Pat Roberts, the other Kansas senator also voted guilty and he's on the verge of losing in November as well. Thad Cochran (R-MS) is technically still a senator but he's completely senile and unable to function and would have been defeated in the recent primary if not for Establishment chicanery to prop him up in office while he's still breathing. Both the Idaho Republican voted guilty but one, Larry Craig, was caught committing fellatio on strange men in public restrooms all over the country and forced to resign and the other, Michael Crapo is still the epitome of a Republican zombie who just votes blindly for whatever the far right of his party is barking about. Mike Enzi (R-WY) is utterly indistinguishable from Mike Crapo except by Capitol Hill experts but he's still in the Senate too. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) voted guilty as well as he's still around, although also basically senile and incapable of functioning. Orrin Hatch is still around too but he's from Mormonland and it just doesn't matter. Jim Inhofe's not from Mormonland but he;s even worse. Obviously, the two KKK senators from Albama, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions and Diuck Shelby voted yes and they're still in the Senate. And two of the Senate's worst hypocrites, Miss McConnell and John McCain are both around after having both voted Guilty. Santorum thinks he's still in electoral politics too and he's so amusing that no one wants to tell him otherwise. Most of the rest are dead or drooling on themselves in retirement.

The whole charade was for naught since the perjury charge was defeated with 55 "not guilty" votes and 45 "guilty" votes. On the obstruction-of-justice charge, the chamber was evenly split, 50-50. 67 votes were needed and the Republican extremists never came close to getting them.

So why dig all that old news up again? The L.A. Times just published a piece, How Bill Clintion, Improbably, Became America's Favorite Politician. And, besides, his wife is likely to make a lot of history in 2016. When Clinton's second term was over, most Americans were glad to see him go. Today, asserts Mark Barabak, he "stands as arguably the most popular political figure in America."

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that, alone among today's major political figures, Clinton is seen in an overwhelmingly positive light, with 56% approving of the former president compared to 21% who disapprove.

Those handsome numbers compare to Bush's middling 37% to 38% rating-- though he, too, has been rising in the public's estimation since leaving office-- Obama's dismal 42% to 46% rating and overall disapproval of a pair of potential 2016 Republican contestants, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, seen favorably by 23% and unfavorably by 27% of those asked, and Bush's younger brother, Jeb, a former Florida governor, with a 22% favorable to 30% unfavorable rating.

Granted, Clinton is the most spectacularly gifted politician of his generation and the economic boom years coinciding with his time in office make him look, in the roseate rear view, all the better and more accomplished.

His globe-hopping good works, doting fatherhood and distinguished corona of white hair all give off the rarified air of a statesman and that, too, serves to enhance his stature.

This morning I was thinking about Obama's decision to go to war, quite unconstitutionally-- albeit, perhaps popularly-- and it caused me to ruminate on what my friends and colleagues would be saying now if it was George W. Bush embarking on such an outrageous adventure. We'd all be calling for his head, right? But it isn't about knee-jerk partisanship-- Republicans vs Democrats-- it's about the ruling elites against the rest of us and against our democracy. I went back to a couple of pages I read a few days ago in Michael Gurnow's book, The Edward Snowden Affair. Let me pick up with a look at the first interview Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.

Snowden divulges that his greatest fear is not death but his efforts might ultimately be in vain, "[ ... ] that nothing will change. People will see the media, all of these disclosures [and] they’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society, but they [the American people] won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests." He closes the interview with a prediction of where the current state of affairs might ultimately lead: "And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law and because of that, a new leader will be elected ... they’ll find the switch ... say that 'Because of the crisis-- because of the dangers we face in the world-- some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power' and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it and it will be turnkey tyranny."

Early in the dialogue, Greenwald bluntly puts to Snowden, “Does it [the intelligence community] target the actions of Americans?” Greenwald wants to have the world hear, directly from the lips of a high-ranking ex-CIA employee and NSA contractor, what is taking place behind the surveillance curtain.

“The NSA, and intelligence community in general, is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means possible. It believes-- on the grounds of sort of a self-certification-- that they serve the national interest. Originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas. Now, increasingly, we see that it’s happening domestically and to do that they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends.” He continues, “Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything, but I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president if I had a personal e-mail.” He adds that the American populace should take notice “[b]ecause even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded, and the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.”