2/25/99
The acquittal votes of President Clinton by Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have more than minimally damaged the Republican Party in Maine, they have exacerbated the polarization that is currently inherent in the party.
What possessed the two senators to acquit the president is troublesome. Their votes lower the standard of conduct, the moral fiber, the rule of law of this republic and replaces them with the Clinton Defense Rule. That is, one can lie, commit perjury, one can dismiss the oath of office as irrelevant, one can define on-the-job philandering and adultery as private sex gratification.
And above all, the president shreds the Constitution into meaningless ribbons of valueless political parade confetti.
Senators Snowe and Collins became a part of the national hysteria over impeachment. They became prominent power brokers in an institution gone awry. We should have expected as such, history tells us.
Frank Kent, writing in Political Behavior in 1928 said "...the great mass of voters have no inherent or instinctive objection to corruption that they may have felt in former decades. They do not now expect or demand rigid honesty in public officials, party leaders or party candidates."
Kent continued that "...when times are good, work is plenty and wages high they, the voters, look upon corruption in public office with a curious degree of tolerance and complacency."
Among the curious and tolerance of modern day Americans is their acceptance without accountability the plethora of polls that presume to gauge (and lead) the attitudes of the country.
One such sham poll released just two days before the Senate vote was by the Strategic Marketing Services of Portland, a partisan Democratic outfit, showing that 65% of Maine voters wanted Senators Snowe and Collins to acquit the president of perjury and other high crimes.
The so-called poll was an irrefutable propaganda sham designed to influence the vote of Maine's two senators. It was dishonest, unaccountable as to who paid for the lobby poll and so partisan as to timing release to be completely false and damaging. It is incredulously dishonest to say that 65% of Mainers condoned the actions of the President.
However, apparently the senators were affected, especially Sen. Snowe who stands for re-election next year.
Both senators must now stand before the citizens of Maine, especially the children of Maine, and explain their political vote succinctly and thoroughly - if they can, which is doubtful. Their acquittal votes were not for or against personal impeachment, they were against morality and trust and the law of the land which the president so consciously trampled into his and the nation's legacy.
Never again will the Office of the Presidency be viewed by the people as the office of wholesome leadership, of integrity, of honesty. Bill Clinton has so damaged the presidency that political catastrophe may have to occur before healing.
This nation is in a great struggle, whether to continue down the road of greed in a an escalation of personal gluttony, or to return to the morality upon which the nation was founded and prospered by the rule of law until the 1960s. We are spending our moralism at an alarming rate of squander with nothing to take its place except self-deception.
Like the gooney birds of history we are flying in ever-decreasing concentric circles until we will eventually disappear unless we change our moral direction..
Our Senators Snowe and Collins must live encumbered by their consciences of politic. They are bound one and the whole with the defamed president, with his unconscionable behavior and lack of attrition to the moral fiber of this country.
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