I can’t believe I’m having to live through my third impeachment. I know Republicans. Nixon was not impeached. Well, to an 11-year-old who only wanted to watch TV during the long hot Texas summers of 1973 and ’74, it seemed like he was already impeached. And, my poor mother the teacher! Oh how she rued the daily interruptions, two whole summers of monotonous day-long congressional inquiries carried on all three networks. The whole boring mess left her unable to catch up on her favorite soap operas. Those were the days. Bored out of her mind, she often took my brother and me to spend afternoons at the city swimming pool or go to amusement parks. Mom would read romance novels while catching a glimpse of us every so often.
Fast forward to the Clinton impeachment of 1998-99, which was brief yet seemed just as long and even more intense with 24-hour news and the internet months before and analyses after. But the salacious scandal had sex, so no one was bored, maybe a little queasy.
And now for a good year if not longer, the mass media has done nothing but blast the Trump investigations and congressional impeachment hearings ad nauseam.
It’s just too much to bear for a middle-aged American let alone the seniors among us.
Russia, if yer listenin’
I knew when candidate Donald J. Trump asked Russia to hack into the emails of his rival Secretary of State Hillary Clinton … he would be impeached if ever elected U.S. President. My jaw dropped upon hearing the words spoken at a campaign rally, amplified by microphones and videotaped for posterity by the mass media. He thought he could run a nation, a democratic country, like he did his business: cut throat competition, finding dirt on competitors, paying off people to stay silent, survival of the fittest, constant firings, loyalty oaths. All brass and crass.
This is precisely why I think a businessman is not the best candidate for U.S. President. I seek a candidate who’s actually run a government whether federal, state or city. I also trust a candidate with a law degree and who has practiced law. They know more about the law and understand the law and respect the law better than lay people. Military background is good in this day and age. But high intelligence and well roundedness is what I ultimately seek in a presidential candidate. Running a modern nation, by far the strongest in the Free World, is not like running a business. In fact, communism is more like running a business. The leaders have ways of dealing with the weakest. Trust no one. People are for the good of the nation not the nation for the benefit of the people. In communism and business, the mission is survival of the entity, and the people, the workers, be damned.
Trump and his die-hard supporters appear to be unfazed by the looming impeachment trial. That is because the Republicans in the U.S. Senate are lockstep behind the president. Their anti-impeachment blather, however, has been used by Republicans and heard by the American people before, during Watergate. The media is the enemy of the people. The media has brainwashed the public against the president. It’s a witch hunt. It’s a coup to overturn the previous election.
It all ended when Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment and a public trial. He had accepted word from the Senate that the majority of his party and the people no longer supported him. The following election found many Nixon Republicans losing another term, and a lot of Democrats were sent to Washington to get busy doing the nation’s work, a nation of people with human needs.
What goes around comes around
Fast forward to Clinton, who did not resign but instead faced the impeachment trial, allowing himself as Executive to be judged by the co-equally powerful Legislature. He was slick, though, and in the end was not removed from office over lying about an affair and trying to cover it up during a federal investigation.
And who’s the wiser? Nixon laid low for a long while, and comedians like Rich Little dropped their impressions of “I’m not a crook” while waving two-handed peace signs (it was actually the V for Victory sign, I would learn decades later) to audience laughter. Nixon returned to handling global affairs even at the request of President Clinton. And Clinton left office with high approval ratings, wrote a tome of his life story to explain his motivations and all-too-human short comings, even approved an entire wing of his presidential library to present and explain the scandal and his impeachment. Even his former lover Monica Lewinsky has come out of hiding from the public after 20 years, now over 40 and claiming she made the mistake of falling in love with her boss, a married man and popular Leader of the Free World, and that she was just too naïve back then to fully understand the consequences and repercussions.
Living history is funny to watch sometimes. Having lived through near-impeachment and impeachment and the aftermath of both, I look forward to the day when all Americans can be light hearted and rational when discussing the Trump impeachment trial—shortest one in modern history, we are promised. I have faith that as Americans we will again return to our collective purpose: being one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all.