The impeachment isn't over

www.salon.com (linkrot: 403)

In testimony before the Senate, Olson denied any involvement in the Project – but that testimony was later fully documented as false. Yet Olson is now solicitor general of the United States …

"Coming out of the election," Republican congressman Peter King later said, "I didn't hear anyone discuss impeachment. It was over. Then DeLay took over." ... Since then he has been promoted for his "deranged" attack on the Constitution by being named House majority leader.

In 1998, Bret Kavanaugh ... coauthored the salacious so-called Starr Report ... Today, Bret Kavanaugh is deputy legal counsel at the Bush White House.

In 1995, Michael Chertoff was chief counsel for Sen. Alphonse D'Amato's Senate Whitewater Committee that churned endless baseless allegations against the Clintons. Since then, he has served as Attorney General John Ashcroft's assistant atop the Department of Justice's criminal division (and a leading force behind the authorship of the so-called PATRIOT Act) and been nominated by George W. Bush to the federal bench.

... Richard Mellon Scaife has been, by now, thoroughly exposed as the financier behind numerous false stories about the Clintons that led to the impeachment drive ... Yet that has not ... shamed numerous respectable institutions, including Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago, into declining his support.

... Even before the Lewinsky story broke, Murdoch's outlets remorselessly hyped malevolent stories about the Clintons -- from Whitewater to Travelgate -- even after they were proven to be false. In 1998 and 1999, their slanted coverage of the impeachment drama performed a singular disservice to the truth. They have never corrected their numerous false reports, let alone apologized for them.

...In the battle begun in 1998 between historians and journalists over the facts of the case and the legitimacy of impeachment, the historians have won.

But the journalists' insistence that we all put the matter to rest is itself a continuation of the partisanship and hopelessly confused logic that drove the impeachment effort in the first place. That insistence amounts to amnesty for abuses against the Constitution, some of which were committed by persons who now help to run the country, and who are utterly unapologetic for what they did.