Table of Contents:

General News

• The Haters Won: Impeachment
• Vitriol Shortage Victim: Carryon Baggage

Computer Industry News

• More on the Last NCC
• A Sad Day For American Legal Education
• Boring Us Out Of Court
• Nicely Put Putdown of Bill

Web Site of the Week

• TechWeb Week in Review

Humor

Letters

• Kent Peterman, Joe Brancatelli, Daniel P. Dern

How angry am I? I, a creature of habit, have re-arranged the order of this column so that, if you read nothing else, you read my editorial on the impeachment process. I was tempted to make it the whole column, but that would make me just like them, the monomaniacal haters. I considered leaving out the humor this week too, but as Adlai Stevenson said, "I laugh because it hurts too much to cry."

I just wish I knew more about HTML, because I'd like to drape this column in black crepe this week, in honor of the dishonor the rabid Republican partisans on the Judiciary Committee have brought to our country. If you know the coding or own the art to put this column in mourning, let me know.

General News

The Haters Won: Impeachment

The haters have won. Articles of impeachment are on their way to near-certain approval by the House. And not ten times ten thousand honeyed words from the lickspittle Republicans on the committee, from the hypocrite Hyde on down, can change the facts.

• This is not about perjury. It is about sex.

• These are not impeachable offenses.

• This is about hatred, about reversing the results of an election the white racist southerner haters who dominate the GOP have never accepted. This is about their intense hatred of Bill Clinton and everything he stands for. They hate me too, even though they've never met me.

Now I know from my email, published and unpublished, that some of you believe impeachment is the right thing to do, and I respect your motives. I don't respect the motives of a single member of the committee. If there was a scintilla (to borrow a word Henry Hyde was amused by) of evidence of a crime that rose to the level of treason or bribery, at least one Democrat would have voted for one of the articles of impeachment. Nixon's impeachment was bi-partisan. This is a witch-hunt and we'll be feeling the pain of it for generations to come. Thank you Newt.

For you see it was Newt who advanced the modern idea of criminalization of political disputes. It wasn't his idea; he just improved on it. The Democrats tried it first with Reagan. Interesting, isn't it, that the Democrats had a prima facie case of blatant, deliberate anti-constitutional behavior against Ronald Reagan in the Iran/Contra affair. Congress said no money for the Contras. It is an undisputed fact that Reagan decided to support them anyway. It doesn't get more unconstitutional than that.

The Democrats controlled Congress. They didn't impeach Reagan because he only had two years left in his second term and was very popular with the American people. Sound familiar? Thanks to the suicidal GOP actions of the last few weeks, Ronald Reagan will go down in history--as the last American president to miss out on the thrill of being impeached by a Congress in the hands of the other party.

The modern GOP didn't invent hatred of presidents either. They just refined it to an art. Roosevelt was so hated that capitalists toasted his death. Kennedy haters abounded. Even I joined in when it came to hating Nixon, although I like to think I had good cause. (By the way, one of you regular readers once told me a Jerry Vorhees anecdote. If you mail it to me, I'll add it to this column).

But none of the hatred in my lifetime has matched the Rush Limbaugh-fueled Get Clinton crowd, funded by Scaife interests and other conservative people and foundations with more money than brains and more time on their hands than good sense.

Hating the president, while corrosive, as least was an historical fact of American life. Impeachment is something new, and it is now too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube. There are good reasons that we've only impeached two presidents before now. All of those reasons have been trampled into the dust in the GOP rush to fulfill their hate.

Here's what's going to happen:

• We're in for a run of lackluster American presidents. Just as Andrew Johnson's party-line impeachment led us to the string of nonentities who occupied the White House from Grant through McKinley, so this impeachment could well produce a generation or two of presidential impotence. {Note that Nixon's bi-partisan impeachment didn't have the exact same effect)

• On the plus side, wait until 2000. Apparently the Republicans didn't get the message of the 1998 mid-term elections. The people will speak louder next time.

• We move a step closer to parliamentary government. Even if the House doesn't vote to impeach (an unknown at this point), we no longer have co-equal government branches, we have Congress in a raw, naked power grab that has been successful and unopposed.

• You thought the bitter partisan wrangling was bad before? Wait until you get a load of it from now on, if the vote to impeach in the House is strictly on party lines, or very close to it. Remember, not a single Democrat on the committee voted for a single article of impeachment.

• I meant what I said about Reagan before. The precedent has been set. Regardless of what happens with the Special Prosecutor law, from now on, no American president who faces a House controlled by the opposition party will escape unimpeached. Either for actual crimes (like Nixon and Reagan) or imagined, trumped-up ones (like Clinton).

After days and days of facts, opinion and Republican bloviating, I found one quotation that summed up the whole matter for me. There have been many references to this passage. Still, it took me almost two hours (way longer than it should have) to find it on the Internet. I wasn't sure of the date, the professor's name, and I thought he said "hunt down" instead of track down. The Republicans, with the same kind of attention to factual accuracy as they have shown throughout the hearings, quoted him as saying hunt.

I am including the hard-to-find URL here (and by the way, when it comes to free, well-indexed general news, I recommend CNN hands down), in case you want to read the whole statement of Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz, But I think this really says it all:

Guess what? I am younger than most of the GOP zealots and fanatics on the Judiciary Committee, and I am smarter than all of them put together--even if you count Mary Bono twice. Plus, I am a writer, so I get to help draft history. I have a long memory.

I promise everyone who reads this that I will take care of myself so that I live long enough to hunt down and destroy the reputation of every craven GOP lackey, on and off the committee, who inflicted this inexcusable damage on our system of government. Writers always get the last word. Professor Wilentz, I accept your challenge. I will track them down and condemn them before history for their cravenness. I now have one more thing to live for.

Vitriol Shortage Victim: Carryon Baggage

Remind me to tell you why I hate Microsoft Word.

Anyway, I am really upset about the irrational and punitive policies airlines are instigating with regard to carryon baggage. I'd be more upset if I still flew frequently. I'd also be more upset if I hadn't just blown my whole wad of vitriol writing about the impeachment proceedings.

This issue resonates with me personally. Once, shortly after United baggage check-in at SFO was automated, my bags took a lovely vacation in Hawaii while I went to New York City. I've never waited less than a half-hour for my bags, and have had them lost on a dozen occasions in 20 years of regular flying. That's why I carry on. That's why I resent the manufactured crisis. My good friend Joe Brancatelli, who writes about travel, knows much more about this than me, and wrote about it in his column last week (you may have to get into the archives to see this one if you don't read my column right away):

I wrote Joe to ask him what I could do, and he responded:

Well, I didn't write a column about it, Joe, but I did the next best thing: I pointed people at yours. And let me conclude by saying that thank goodness my employer has a deal with American for transcontinental air flights. If you haven't switched yet, and you can, do. Let's make sure United gets the message: we carry on because your baggage handling stinks like yesterday's diapers.

Computer Industry News

A Sad Day For American Legal Education

The Judiciary Committee debate was a sad day for American legal education. So too is every day during which a Microsoft lawyer or spokesman steps before a microphone, on the courthouse steps or anywhere else.

In the case of the committee, all of its members are lawyers. All of them know there is a difference between lying and perjury. Not every lie is perjury and they know it. The audacity of the Republicans' deliberate attempt to mislead and confuse the American people is breathtaking in its scope and cynicism. Weren't these people taught any ethics in law school?

Only Microsoft's legal counsel bests it. I say again, shame on you William Neukom, chief legal counsel to Microsoft. I expect you to vigorously defend your client. That's the heart and soul of the American legal system. But I have yet to hear you open your mouth in public without gratuitously misrepresenting the nature of American antitrust law. We can argue--well, you can argue--about whether or not Microsoft has violated it. But to lie about the nature of the law, as I have seen you do time and again, is simply inexcusable. I'm no lawyer, but I know the law when I see it.

Boring Us Out Of Court

I want to offer further circulation to an interesting theory I heard from John McChesney on NPR last weekend. He suggested Microsoft's slow, deliberate cross-examination of witnesses is a deliberate attempt to bore the reporters out of the courtroom so they will not be present to report the weak and half-baked nature of the Microsoft case to the American people. It is a shameful tactic, and one that seems right in line with other tactics we've seen from the Microsoft legal team (such as fighting the release of the Bill Gates videotape while accusing the government of releasing only snippets). Shame on Microsoft again. This makes it all the more important for us in the media to stay focused on the trial of the century, no matter how long it takes.

More on the Last NCC

I couldn't decide whether to make this a letter or a news item. It was so well written and so evocative, I decided to make it a news item. It comes from a man I am proud to call my friend, one of the finest, most honest, hardworking and intelligent people it has ever been my privilege to know in the fields of PR or journalism. Paul Franson got the job I wanted in 1976 at Electronic News. Later, he went into PR and founded Franson and Associates. He is now retired in the Northern California Wine Country. He writes:

Nicely Put Putdown of Bill

Craig Reynolds noticed this and forwarded it to me and a select group of friends:

Web Site of the Week

TechWeb Week in Review

If you haven't heard my voice in a long time and have a hankering to, or if you're merely interested in an intelligent audio discussion of the week's two or three most important news events by knowledgeable reporters, give a listen to the TechWeb Week in Review. I am the host and ringmaster. You'll need a RealAudio player to hear it. I am very proud of this program. It used to involve a newscast, a commentary, a promo and the roundtable, but we decided the roundtable provided more value than the other segments. It is a mere coincidence that it was also the easiest part of the program to produce. As I've said many times to many of you, audio on the net is either TV in 1946 or quadraphonic sound in 1975. I wish I knew which. You can hear it here.

Humor

The ol' column is gettin' kinda long, so I'll put my Top 15 list winners from this week here, and let you find the rest of the list here.

This is my sixth number 1. And while I didn't have a hat trick, I did get two submissions onto the list:

I know Leah Garchik came in for some criticism when I ran similar items of hers two weeks ago, but she does cite her sources; now maybe those sources plagiarized them...

See Leah's column here.

Letters

I now have the honor of sharing a correspondent with the late, great Herb Caen. Kent Peterman of Benicia, Calif., schoolteacher, bon vivant and wit was a frequent contributor of bon mot to the Caen column. This week, he chipped in for my column:

I once knew a Richard (the late Richard C. Parker) who hated being called Dick. He hated it with a passion. Thus I understand the emotion behind this brief missive from Daniel P. Dern of Massachusetts. I knew him as Dan in college, but a lot of people prefer to be known formally in print:

Henceforth and forever more, every time I remember to get it right--which I hope is every time, Daniel. My sincere apologies. Everyone deserves to be known by the name they prefer.

Joe Brancatelli writes from the Hudson River Valley about last week's nearly-all humor issue:

I agree. If you haven't seen them (or didn't realize what they were advertising), watch them carefully. They are funny and clever, which is more than you can say for most Internet advertising on TV.