Nixon @ MindSay 
deep throat
• I found out that the girl I blogged about last week is not interested in me. Moving on....
• I find the sounds of Electric Wizard exhilarating these past few days. Getting "Witchcult Today" last Friday was a good thing.
• If you don't watch the show Scrubs, you should. It's excellent.
• I'm leaning towards trying to eat more vegetarian again lately with the possibility of eliminating all non-seafood again in the future. For a number of reasons, I'm thinking that this isn't the worst idea I've had in recent months.
• I cannot wait until March 24th when the new Mastodon album comes out. Also, March 3rd is when MLB 09: The Show comes out. Merely an update of what my next few purchases will be.
• Frost/Nixon got highway robbed at the Oscars. So did The Dark Knight.
Playlist for 2-24-09
Obscura Cosmogenesis
Afro Samurai Season 1
Mastodon everything
Scrubs Season 2
Electric Wizard We Live
Black Tide Shockwave (haven't gotten into the rest of the album yet, but that song rocks)
As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.
The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.
Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.
Why?
“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”
How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.
Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.
The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.
The brief involved precedent for representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970.
“As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said.
The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee’s public files. So what did Hillary do?
“Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public,” Zeifman said. Hillary then proceeded to write a legal brief arguing there was no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding – as if the Douglas case had never occurred.
The brief was so fraudulent and ridiculous, Zeifman believes Hillary would have been disbarred if she had submitted it to a judge.
Zeifman says that if Hillary, Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar had succeeded, members of the House Judiciary Committee would have also been denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, and denied the opportunity to even participate in the drafting of articles of impeachment against Nixon.
Of course, Nixon’s resignation rendered the entire issue moot, ending Hillary’s career on the Judiciary Committee staff in a most undistinguished manner. Zeifman says he was urged by top committee members to keep a diary of everything that was happening. He did so, and still has the diary if anyone wants to check the veracity of his story. Certainly, he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.
But they show that the pattern of lies, deceit, fabrications and unethical behavior was established long ago – long before the Bosnia lie, and indeed, even before cattle futures, Travelgate and Whitewater – for the woman who is still asking us to make her president of the United States.
brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. abi and I are imprisoned inthe master suite while my husband paints the book cases for the "library" a room which was the original dining room of the 1929 house long before it was redone twice. the wiindow is open so I dont sneeze too much and because she loves to sit on the sill and smell the outer world.
the last few days have been ideal. leisurely meals with jim, naps, reading another burroughs book, and chomping chocolate covered raisens from trader joe's. tonight we will watch another prime suspect with a raging fire as we settle into a delightful routine.
Thinking about President Ford reminds me what a decent and sensible man he was and how much kinder history will be to him than the every day press were. And as much as I would have loved to see Nixon go to jail as he needed to do...the pardon was the sensible rational thing to do. I thought that maybe the presidency was recovering and now i look at the damage Dubya has done. A president who has consistently compromised the constitution hangs in there and one of the best presidents of the 20th century ( bill clinton) gets revoled due to a petty sex problem. oh enough.
we interviewed another carpenter today, a terrific and gentle man named Tom who will get some more small cabinetry work done so we can finally install my second oven. slowly this is all falling together. I think by New Year's the kitchen might actually be done. wow.
I am happy to make the following report:
In (or about) 1974 Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs. At (or about) the same time, I declared the war on sobriety.
Over the last 32 years I am happy to report that I am winning.
Hip, Hip, HUZZAH!
Hip, Hip, HUZZAH!
Hip, Hip, HUZZAH!
Where's my bong? Did you take my bong? What d'you mean I'm paranoid? You took it din' you? G'it back ya bastard!
This blog dealt with the idea of controversy in a two-part epic. I would like to make this post the final installment in my controversy trilogy.
Yes, controversy sells, and it sells well. But do you want success at the cost of your own values? This is a topic authors have been dealing with for years. Philip Seymore Hoffman as Truman Capote touches on this in the beginning of Capote, and any aspiring writer has to touch on it, as well. What is more important to you, selling millions of books and getting your name in the media, or staying true to yourself and what you believe?
Ann Coulter, the conservative TV personality, chose the first one. While one could argue that she has always been controversial (in fact, Wikipedia describers her as being, “well-known for her distinct speaking and writing style, which is often intentionally aggressive and controversial, intended to provoke a hostile response and garner attention”), she has achieved a new level for the definition, and, in my opinion, shows the world she is hypocritical and contradictory and doesn't practice what she preaches with a 21st Century fire and brimstone mentality.
Her latest book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, criticizes four 9/11 widows for calling for the 9/11 Commission. That’s right, she is angry at these women for asking the government to find out why their husbands died. Her argument for why this is wrong? “How do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies?”
The opinion that she claims to hold is that The Democrats recruited these four women and had them attack the current administration because the American public would consider them infallible. She claims that The Democrats knew nobody would question these poor suffering women, so they enlisted them to Bush bash. And why woudl the widows be alright with being used? According to her, they are actually enjoying their husbands' deaths.
Now, Coulter went to Cornell. She is not a stupid person. Yet she is making a stupid argument.
Let’s look at her concept visually (yet still through words). She says “The Democrats.” She doesn't specify certain people, she just uses the broad stroke of "The Democrats." Is that like “The Man?” Who are these clever conniving PR genius Karl Rove types? I picture them at the top of a skyscraper, their offices actually looking down on clouds, wearing black sunglasses and always keeping their faces hidden in shadow. According to her, these evil Godless Democrats came up with the idea to use the 9/11 widows to turn people against Bush. His own increasingly bad decisions that were even leaving life-long republicans scratching their heads in wonder wasn’t enough. They were after the worst approval rating since Nixon before he resigned. So they called in all the widows and had an audition process. That must have been awkward. "Okay, Number Two. Your husband just jumped off the top floor because the fire was too unbearable. Pretend to cry. No, I'm not feeling those tears. Give me more." Eventually these nameless, faceless monsters found the four that could most pretend to be upset about their husbands’ deaths and could best fake curiosity over why the attack occurred. I’m sure it was very difficult finding women that seemed upset that their husbands were killed in the worst attack on American soil. That must have been a tough search for these behind-the-scenes democrats.
Right, so now “The Men” have found their four and have let them loose on TV. It turns out they are the greatest actresses in Hollywood, and they actually convince the American public that 9/11 was a sad day. Julia Roberts look out.
Can this Cornell grad honestly believe what she is writing? She can’t believe it. She can’t be that dumb. She simply took perhaps the most emotional topic in America and found a way to create controversy around it. She did it so she could sell books and make headlines.
She calls the widows whores for profiting off the death of their husbands, but isn’t she just as bad a whore? Isn’t she now profiting off the death of their husbands?
She claims to be a religious person, yet she had no problem selling her soul to the devil for a quick buck and some big press. I think the first half of the title of her book seems quite appropriate.
So what’s the point? To bash this woman like she bashes the 9/11 women? No, not necessarily. She knew the truth that controversy sells, and she tried to use it to her advantage. It worked, too. Here I am talking about it, informing you about it. People like me are part of the reason it is number two on the bestseller list right now. But my question is: was it worth it?
Does she still have credibility? Once sales for this book wane, will anyone pay attention to what she says anymore? When a town board member in Huntington, New York gave her a letter stating that her “latest comments deriding the widows of 9/11 are a disgrace to thousands who perished on that day," and that it is a "nauseating misrepresentation of their struggle to keep the memory of what happened that day alive," she tore the letter up. People, she tore the letter up. This woman has gone crazy. As we mentioned previously, an author has to market him or herself to succeed, and this author obviously had to keep the anti-widow image up or her controversy would have lost its edge, but it makes her look insane. Are people going to ask her to come on their shows and give real commentary now? After so obvious a sell-out and loss of standards? I can’t imagine why they would.
So is it worth it? There are plenty of authors and aspiring authors that read this blog. Give me your opinion. Is it worth it, and if so, would you do the same thing? Would you choose money over morals? Would you do whatever it takes to sell a book?
For the converse view, how much would you be willing to sacrifice for your value system? Another Ann (Anne Rice) made her career writing about vampires. She recently changed that trend, however, when she wrote a first-person story about Jesus Christ. She wanted to write this story, she felt morally obligated to write this story, and so she wrote it - even though it could turn off fans and cost her hundreds of millions of dollars. While Ann chose fame and fortune over morals, Anne chose morals over fame and fortune.
So, here are two extremes. Towad which side do you stand? As Linda Richmond would say: "Discuss."
-Catch Ann Coulter on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno tomorrow to see her go head-to-head against the king of controversy himself, comedian George Carlin-
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