In Best of the Web today, James Taranto discusses some of the loony leftist Democrats calls for Bush’s impeachment (sorry, no permalink until tomorrow), and in the process makes a misleading statement:

the 20th century, Congress impeached 10 officials: Clinton and nine federal judges. As the chart on this page shows, all were charged with actual crimes, mostly financial corruption of one sort or another. (Of the 10, five were convicted and removed from office; four, including Clinton, were acquitted of all charges, and one resigned before his Senate trial began.)

No, James, Clinton was not truly “acquitted on all charges,” he was only acquitted for the ones for which he was impeached, in a sham trial. In a criminal sense, he wasn’t acquitted because he was never indicted, or went to trial. Had he done so, it’s possible (thought I think unlikely) that he would have been acquitted, but I think the most likely outcome would have been hung juries, as in the case of Susan McDougal, because it would have been very difficult to get a jury that didn’t have at least one member that was going to vote to acquit, the facts be damned. This is almost certainly one of the reasons that Bob Ray didn’t bring any indictments (though another one was probably the desire to spare the nation the trauma of a trial). Unfortunately, the impeachment acquittal provides an excuse for his diehard defenders to declare him innocent of everything, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

And when Clinton defenders say Ray had no evidence, that’s a lie, pure and simple. He had abundant evidence, despite all of the evidence destruction, witness tampering and other obstructions of the judicial process. The only way to really get to the bottom of it would have been to do a RICO type investigation, and the Justice Department never had the stomach for it, particularly with Janet Reno at the helm.

Certainly, if the defendant had been anyone other than Bill (and Hillary) Clinton, charges would have been brought.

Which reminds me. Sunday, in addition to being the thirty-fourth anniversary of the first Apollo landing, is also the tenth anniversary of the untimely end of Vince Foster, an affair in which the full truth still remains to be revealed.