By Juanell Garrett, Midwest Voices Panelist 2008

The Clinton years were a hodgepodge of scandals--Whitewater, Rose Firm billing records, huge cattle future profits (we all should be so lucky as to make 9900% on our money in less than a year!), and the more salacious ones involving women.

Bill Clinton considered running for President in the 1988 election cycle. His wife claims that the reason he didn't was "one word: Chelsea." Dick Morris, whom the Clintons called on repeatedly for campaign help, said the word was "women," as in all the women that Bill Clinton had had an affair with up to that point in time.

Sen. Clinton gets in a rare good line in her book Living History, like when she said that the 1995 Congressional Ball "was attended by the same people who were fighting Bill over the budget and decking our halls with subpoenas."

The next day, President Clinton vetoed the Republicans' budget reconciliation bill with the same pen that President Johnson had used to sign Medicare into law. He tried to persuade the Republicans to "negotiate with the White House." (Why are the Republicans always the ones expected to compromise?) His wife dissed the "revolutionary" Republicans who "refused to budge from their ideological crusade to dismantle the power of the federal government."

Clinton bemoaned the "truly terrible hardship" of furloughed government workers. The government workers were familiar with the routine. They were just getting a few extra days of vacation. The process had occurred several times during the '80s. I'm curious. What would she attribute those shutdowns to, a Republican President not negotiating with Congress?

Speaking of Carolyn Huber, the First Lady's personal correspondent assistant who came forward with the missing billing records related to Madison Guaranty and its possible connections to the then-ongoing Whitewater investigation, Sen. Clinton says, "But I trust her completely and know that her oversight was an innocent and understandable mistake."

The senator had lots of excuses about how the files could have disappeared--the Clintons didn't own a home where they could store things so they had lots of boxes to store and there was heating and air conditioning work going on in the White House. She doesn't mention that her own fingerprints were on the documents.

A few weeks before President Clinton was to testify in the Paula Jones civil case, the Clintons were photographed slow dancing in their swimsuits on a Caribbean beach. To those who questioned whether the First Couple were putting on an act, Clinton said, "Just name me any fifty-year-old woman who would knowingly pose in her bathing suit--with her back pointed toward the camera." Well, besides the obvious answer--a fifty-year-old woman who actually looks good in one--I can imagine that someone might sacrificially do it if she wanted to keep her husband from looking like a guilty scumbag.

The senator goes on to say, "Although there had been opportunities to settle with Jones out of court, I had opposed the idea in principle, believing that it would set a terrible precedent for a President to pay money to rid himself of a nuisance suit. The lawsuits would never end." That sounds like someone had been a really bad boy.

The President told her about Monica Lewinsky the morning the story hit the papers, saying "he had befriended her," "talked to her a few times," and "she had misinterpreted his attention." When cross-examined by his wife, he denied "improper behavior" but said "his attention could have been misread." That morning, the ever self-important Hillary went about her daily routine knowing "that everyone would be looking to me for their cues" and that she "had the dual responsibility of defending my husband and my country."

The day the news broke, President Clinton kept his previously-scheduled interviews, answering questions about his personal life with denials about the truthfulness of the accusations and promises of cooperation with the investigation. As we said when I was young, "Liar, liar, pants on fire!" On the Today Show, the First Lady blamed a "vast right-wing conspiracy" for her husband's woes, a charge for which the "vast right-wing" will probably never forgive the Presidential wannabe.

In her diatribe against the right wing, Sen. Clinton said, "Fueled by extremists who have been fighting progressive politicians and ideas for decades, they are funded by corporations, foundations and individuals like Richard Mellon Scaife."

Scaife must have forgiven her for the slam. Last month, his newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, endorsed Sen. Clinton after he wrote an editorial about how impressed he was with her. Mr. Scaife's judgement might be somewhat questionable. He's carrying on with a woman three decades younger, a fact that his former wife used to her own advantage, making off with at least half of his considerable fortune.

The chapter "Impeachment" could just as well have been a "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" column in Ladies Home Journal. Clinton tells us that the two of them went through marriage counseling, but she mercifully spares us the details.

Clinton did, however, have a lot to say about Ken Starr's handling of the investigation of her husband. She remained convinced "that there were no grounds to impeach Bill. If men like Starr and his allies could ignore the Constitution and abuse power for ideological and malicious ends to topple a President, I feared for my country."

Sen. Clinton would have us believe that she is an authority on what constitutes an impeachable offense. After all, she worked on the staff working on the impeachment of President Nixon.

Of that experience, she reported that her only problem with the media was when a reporter asked her "how it felt 'being the Jill Wine Volner of the Impeachment Inquiry.'" Clinton continues on to say that "Volner's legal skills and attractiveness were the subject of many stories." I guess she's comparing herself to the legally savvy and glamorous assistant to Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski who cross-examined President Nixon's secretary.

As President Clinton was preparing for grand jury testimony, a friend suggested to Ms. Clinton that there was a chance that some of the Lewinsky matter was true. She told him, "My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me." As they say, there's a first time for everything.

Ken Starr released his report with 11 possible grounds for impeachment. Sen. Clinton wrote that his "list of impeachable offenses included charges that the President lied under oath about his personal behavior, obstructed justice and abused his office. Bill never obstructed justice or abused his office. He maintained that he did not lie under oath."

Doesn't that depend on how you define "lie"? How do we know he wasn't lying when he "maintained" that he didn't lie under oath? I think we all remember the finger wagging in our faces as the President "maintained" that he didn't have sex with "that woman."

I guess in the long run it doesn't really matter because, according to Sen. Clinton, "a lie under oath about a private matter in a civil suit was not grounds for impeachment."

Monday--It's Hillary's Turn