Tough crowd.During the impeachment impeachment, formal accusation issued by a legislature against a public official charged with crime or other serious misconduct. In a looser sense the term is sometimes applied also to the trial by the legislature that may follow. saga of the late '90s, certain Washington journalists and commentators drove Democrats crazy by seeming to side with President Clinton's Republican pursuers. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that Clinton would "say anything and hurt anybody to get out of a mess." Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University George Washington University, at Washington, D.C.; coeducational; chartered 1821 as Columbian College (one of the first nonsectarian colleges), opened 1822, became a university in 1873, renamed 1904. law professor, relentlessly argued that impeachment was the only appropriate punishment for the president's crimes. And Susan Schmidt, a reporter at The Washington Post, often seemed little more than a stenographer An individual who records court proceedings either in shorthand or through the use of a paper-punching device. A court stenographer is an officer of the court and is generally considered to be a state or public official. for the steady flow of damaging leaks engineered by Ken Starr's office. Lately, though, we've noticed that they've all been equally hard on the current president. Dowd recently wrote that under Bush, "We've lost all moral influence" Turley has been arguing that this president, too, should be impeached for ordering the NSA NSA abbr. National Security Agency Noun 1. NSA - the United States cryptologic organization that coordinates and directs highly specialized activities to protect United States information systems and to produce foreign to conduct illegal wiretapping A form of eavesdropping involving physical connection to the communications channels to breach the confidentiality of communications. For example, many poorly-secured buildings have unprotected telephone wiring closets where intruders may connect unauthorized wires to listen in on phone . And Schmidt, along with two Post colleagues, recently won the Worth Bingham Prize for her reporting on the Jack Abramoff scandal. So, we asked them: Which president is worse? Dowd: "Clinton was a farce, Bush is a tragedy." Turley: "When you review these two presidents in terms of the impeachment clause, I see no distinction. All I see is two presidents who believe that they could commit criminal acts." Schmidt: "I'm not particularly interested in being interviewed on this. My stories speak for themselves." |
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