Your Congress has fallen back into the very bad habit of calling people before them to testify...the sole purpose of which is to HOPE that they lie so that they can be charged with perjury. Ask your father or grandfather who Alger Hiss is. He was a rock-star political guy during the Red Scare, and a not-too-well-known writer/reporter said that Alger Hiss was a communist. There was no crime that he could be charged with, so he was called before Congress to say, under oath, whether he was a Communist or not. The end result of his emphatic denial before Congress was two trials for perjury (one hung jury and one conviction). Now, all this kept the media not only employed, but very busy. In the end, though, the public got nothin'.
So it goes with Roger Clemens and Andy Petitte, and probably a later string of players. The whole point of Congressional hearings can only be to have these fellows hopefully lie before Congress so that they can be charged with perjury. The public hearings will allow the Congresspeople put on their indignant faces and publicly wonder how a baseball player could have ever made more money and received more public attention than an elected representative. The later trial will diminish these athletes in the public eye, I'm sure. But, I wonder whether the marketplace will do that by itself -- without the horrendous expenditure of public funds and energy.
If I've made myself clear in this post, it is apparent that these are not the only times that this method has been used to puff up the collective congressional chest. Other examples?
So it goes with Roger Clemens and Andy Petitte, and probably a later string of players. The whole point of Congressional hearings can only be to have these fellows hopefully lie before Congress so that they can be charged with perjury. The public hearings will allow the Congresspeople put on their indignant faces and publicly wonder how a baseball player could have ever made more money and received more public attention than an elected representative. The later trial will diminish these athletes in the public eye, I'm sure. But, I wonder whether the marketplace will do that by itself -- without the horrendous expenditure of public funds and energy.
If I've made myself clear in this post, it is apparent that these are not the only times that this method has been used to puff up the collective congressional chest. Other examples?
1 comment:
Well said about Alger Hiss. And you're probably right about Clemens and Petite. No Steinbrenner fan myself, I would hope that both players have the sense to keep good lawyers with them at all times, or to simply refuse to testify under oath --- one of the oldest rackets in the USA.
And Hiss, by the way, was probably completely innocent of anything, at least judging by the information that has gradually come to light over the last 60 years --- Nixon "pleading" the grand jury to indict Hiss and not Whittaker Chambers [illegal then, illegal now], Hoover and the FBI refusing to release exculpatory documents and information, the FBI feeding "information" to Nixon and HUAC, Hoover keeping secret the fact that typewriters could be remanufactured to duplicate the typing of any typewriter on earth [as the British did to the Germans in Brazil during WWII], the FBI planting a mole inside the Hiss defense team, unauthorized mail covers on Hiss, telephone taps --- the whole shebang, in other words.
Two good places to look for more information about the Hiss Case are http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/home.html and an intriguing article about the “agent” mentioned in the now famous Venona cable #1822:
“The Mystery Of Ales” The American Scholar http://www.TheAmericanScholar.org/su07/ales-birdlong.html
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