And then it was announced that Wyatt unknown even to his family had been keeping a diary and The Sunday Times was
Posted in General on 06. Aug, 2010
And then it was announced that Wyatt, unknown even to his family, had been keeping a diary, and The Sunday Times was serialising it. He deserves the humiliation of a trial at the very least.Arkansas Democrat GazetteCLINTON ACTS as if he’s in just one more campaign, a battle to manipulate public opinion by demonising opponents. The White House calls the GOP impeachment move an effort to embarrass the President Wrong Mr Clinton is the embarrassment. Perhaps the pressure of an impeachment inquiry will make him confront his own demons.The Providence JournalTHE IMPEACHMENT drama challenges us to consider the role of tradition in a constitutional democracy. The new left of the Sixties dispensed with the established order. It tossed away the ideal of common good and boasted instead about its own moral grandeur.
It jettisoned the notion that politicians serve the public and installed the polar opposite: a government determined to enlighten taxpaying lumpen proletarians. Official Washington cares less about duty these days than the transformational power of the loophole. The President famously captured the trend when he tried to escape a perjury rap by telling prosecutors: “It depends on what the meaning of the word `is’ is.”Detroit News. However, there’s a very good chance that the House will vote to impeach him and bind him over for trial in the Senate. There is no sign whatever at present of Mr Clarke forming such a party; he was the first to congratulate Hague yesterday on a “very good speech”.
But the more reselection phobia reduces their visible support, the greater will be the forces pulling the leading pro-Europeans outward. And the more fundamentalist party policy becomes, the less possible will it be to offer Kenneth Clarke the terms under which he could rejoin the highest ranks of the party and fill again the yawning vacuum in the Shadow Cabinet.Failure in next year’s elections could destabilise Hague’s leadership But the issue is bigger than that. The young turks around Mr Hague idiotically condemn the pro-Europeans as “yesterday’s men” – while, of course, still persisting in regarding Margaret Thatcher as today’s woman. It is appropriate that her looming presence has dogged Mr Hague this week; for those driving his own European policy are those who have never accepted her demise in 1990 and were encouraged by her to continue their torment of John Major. The claims of unity only work if you write off the party’s biggest beasts. Behind the Europhobic rhetoric there are hints from one or two of the cleverer people around Mr Hague – and there are several stupid ones – that its European policy will have to include proposals which might eventually render Europe fit for a Conservative Britain to become more closely integrated in.
The second danger from the ballot is that this will be elbowed aside by the ratcheted demands of triumphalist anti-Europeans.The Conservative European Alliance poll shows that a pro-European breakaway party led by Heseltine and Clarke is nowhere near as unfeasible as many people in Bournemouth think. Domestic policy, albeit of a right-wing, clear-blue-water, type is beginning to be in prospect Mr Hague may even start doing things. He hinted yesterday that he has at last resolved to use his leverage in the Lords to try and outflank the Government with credible proposals for a democratic second chamber. To do so will mean confronting the most reactionary elements in his own party in ways which can only do him good. By not closing down debate on an English Parliament, he has at least shown more sign than ministers of understanding the implications for Westminster of the Scottish Parliament.But all this, interesting as it is, is overwhelmed by the single issue of Europe. From this week’s ballot result flow a number of consequences. Mr Hague has increased the salience of the one issue on which the party still appears divided.