[Announcer:] “Hear Ye, Hear Ye, Hear Ye. The trial of the impeachment trial is now in session. All Ted citizens are hereby required to laugh at their elected officials upon pain of imprisonment. Presiding over the trial of the trial is the opinionated Chief Justice of Ted: Pete Guither.”



I know you’re all busy. You don’t have time to follow the news, or vote, or do something about your government, which is why I’m here.

I’m going to fill you in on the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton.

It’s my job to follow all the sordid details and report them back to you, so you can watch “The Simpsons” and spend your other evenings partying. You see, I am sometimes one of those masochistic “news junkies.” I actually know by heart all the channel locations for news coverage. Channel 2 (Fox News), 3, 4, 5, 6 (the networks), 14 (CNBC), 18 (CSPAN), 27 (CSPAN2), 31 (Headline News), 33 (CNN), etc. You should realize that I don’t enjoy this, it’s that I’m morbidly drawn to it, or will force myself to watch it just to see what other people are getting as news -- sort of like watching the 700 club every now and then, but I can only watch about 5 minutes of that without having my head explode.

Now, here’s the tricky part. This story actually started 4 years ago or more, has been steadily in the news for the past year, has generated thousands of hours of work for lawyers, involved thousands of interviews and truckloads of stuff, and I need to boil it down to the length of a Ted skit.

Here goes.

[start music -- Tomita’s verson of “The Syncopated Clock”;
video of impeachment channel surfing with sound off]

The beginnings of this story are murky and bizarre.

Once upon a time, there was a political issue called Whitewater, which involved a failed savings and loan and a small investment made by the Clintons years ago (and they lost their investment). Well, once Clinton became president, some folks figured that Bill must have used his influence as Governor to lose that money, so they got a conservative judge to appoint an “independent counsel.” Kenneth Starr.

Now this independent counsel thing is new, they don’t have a boss, or a limit to their investigation — the closest analogue is the Spanish Inquisition, where if they thought you were guilty, they kept torturing you until you confessed to something. After four years and 50 millions dollars, he still hadn’t come up with anything concrete, but then an opportunity arose.

A sexual harrassment case had been brought by Paula Jones. Paula basically claimed that Bill had shown her his little Willy back when it was just the first penis of Arkansas, and now that it was the top penis of the land, she wanted a piece of the action. Ken Starr had actually helped with the case, and now it was given the OK to go ahead while Clinton was in office. As a side point to this case, the judge found there was no merit, and threw the case out of court.

In the meantime, Bill was taking full advantage of the perqs of being the leader of the free world, and showing he cared about the common people, by giving an intern a taste of the presidency.

Monica -- the intern -- was at that time giving a blow-by-blow account of the affair to her close friend and confidant Linda Tripp-Wire who convinced Monica to save her semen-stained dress to include in her hope chest and give to her grand-kids, and who then rushed out to give copies of the taped conversations to Ken Starr and the Paula Jones lawyers.

This was great news to Bill’s enemies who figured “OK, we’ll include Monica in the Paula Jones trial, even though it has nothing to do with sexual harrassment, just so we can ask the President if he had sex. If he says yes, he’ll be humiliated and have to resign, if he says no, we’ve got him on perjury.” Victory!!!

Unfortunately, they neglected to consider Clinton’s training in weasel-speak which he used effectively in court. So they decided to release all the sordid details to the public, knowing that Clinton would have to resign. But he denied it. So they said to the American People -- “Look at this president. He had sex with an intern and he’s trying to keep people from finding out about it.”

And the American People responded in unison: “Well, duh!!!”

Well this annoyed the hell out of Ken, so he took a lot more depositions, and inquisitions, and suppositions, and printed out 60,000 pages of documents {which used a lot of toner}, and told the H ouse of Representatives to Impeach the Bastard! Well the Republicans in the House hated Bill as much as Ken did, and they were already drooling over the sex references, so they said “Sure!”

Well by this time, the public was getting fed up. They were happy with the economy, and just a little bit nervous about Ken’s obsessions. Many men had just that touch of fear that if Starr was successful, it might mean the end of blow jobs as we know it. And women realized, “if blow jobs go away, how are we going to convince our boyfriends to go down on us?” So large groups of people marched through the opinion polls chanting: “The President got a blow job! Hip-hip-hooray!”

This made the republicans in the House foam at the mouth (even without Bob Dornan there), and the fateful day of impeachment arrived.

(music change -- more absurdly serious)

Never in the history of the world has there been such a day of politics of the absurd.

It was bizarre theatre unlike anything I’ve seen on stage. I watched CNN that Saturday for 9 straight hours (no commercials or intermissions). First, good old Newt Gingrich, Republican Leader of the House had resigned due to his failings regarding impeachment, so they had elected a new leader -- Bob Livingston. Then, pornography publisher Larry Flynt had offered $1 million for information on the sexual escapades of House Members and nailed Bob Livingston. (This was much cheaper than Starr’s $50 million taxpayer bill for the same kind of info) So while the House debated the ability to debate the issue of censure, Livingston announced his resignation. At this point, the republicans had lost two speakers of the house because of the President’s blow jobs, and the Clinton was getting even more popular. Then they had votes on impeachment -- this incredibly important process built into our constitution to protect the people from a tyrant. While they were voting, CNN was cutting away to show live bombing in Iraq. At one point the democrats walked out of the house in protest, walked out to the cameras, spoke to them and then rushed back in to vote. Two articles of impeachment were passed, Clinton was busy bombing Iraq, the Democrats all got in buses and cameras followed them as they all travelled to the White House and staged a protest, and then Clinton went to meet with his advisors to discuss the end of the bombing.

This was one day. Incredible theatre.

(music change back to “Syncopated Clock”)

Now Bill’s enemies thought for sure they had him. He’d resign. No. His popularity went up. This angered everyone, including the news media who had already been totally off on predictions so many times that people were turning to Dionne Warwick for news coverage. Fox News got really pissed off and started slamming everything they could. One of the reporters for the station with the slogan “We report, you decide” yelled on air “But the people are just plain wrong!”

Now it was time for the trial in the Senate. Henry Hyde, the silver ferret, led his group of cronies over to the senate to present the impeachment articles as if it was high theatre, but since they were actually trying to be theatrical, it failed to reach the excellence of the Leroy Community Players.

Now the trial began in the Senate, with a flurry of concerned senators knowing that they were about to get the heat, and each side presented its case. There was some controversy when the President’s attorneys included 2 attractive women (one of whom was african-american) and a man in a wheelchair. The Managers said this was unfair, because they were stuck with 13 white republican men with permanent sneers on their faces. (apparently they tried to get plastic surgery to remove the sneers, but it would have taken too many operations). Of additional concern to the House Managers was the fact that the two women and the wheelchair guy were in actuality more likely to have first-hand knowledge of what a blow job actually was than any of the House Manager (at least without paying for it) and this really made the managers mad.

The Senate has also shown its professionalism, as usual, in everything they do, including spelling.

• The pens they used to sign the oath at the beginning of the trial were marked "Untied States Senate>"
• The Watergate burglary was referred to in a chart as Bulgary.
• The House Managers were called Mangers
• Trial was spelled "Trail"
• and "mine field was called "mind field."

Yes, the trail in the Untied States Senate became a real mind-field for the House Mangers when they brought up Bulgary.

So this brings us up to the present. The Senate has no idea what it’s doing, the President is still doing well, and no one knows for sure when it will end. It could last years.

So just in case you ever decide you need to watch some of it, I’d like to help you to understand the coverage with these handy definitions:

What They Say	What They Mean
Rule of Law	Obviously the way we ignore the constitution when we pass laws against the American People, we have no idea what this means, but it makes us look serious and sounds better than ‘We want to nail the bastard.’”
It’s Not About Sex:	It’s about sex.
Perjury:	Pissing us off. (as in "The one thing we're sure of, is that he's guilty of perjury.")
Obstruction of justice:	Making it difficult for us to remove him for pissing us off.
Bi-Partisan agreement:	We came together and agreed to decide everything later.
My distinguished colleague on the other side of the aisle:	That ignorant asshole.
Our constitutional duty:	We need to keep this thing going until we can find a way to get the poll numbers over to our side.
Proper closure:	We need to keep this thing going until we can find a way to get the poll numbers over to our side.
Dignity:	Saving face
The President did not commit perjury:	He lied through his teeth, but was smart enough to use fancy footwork in his answers under oath.
Monica is an impressive young woman:	We have to be nice to the little slut or she won’t answer the questions the way we want her to.

At this point, part of me is almost in favor of removing the President from office. Because if they do, then impeachment trials will occur all the time, and if they have $50 million dollars to throw around, they’ll find a sex scandal on anyone. And if it’s about sex, congress will spend all their time debating and investigating and pontificating on Larry King live, and won’t have time pass laws that interfere with us.

But in the end, $50 million is just plain too much to spend on a blow job, let along the investigation of one. And it gets us wondering - if the taxpayers are paying the $50 million, shouldn’t WE be getting the blow job? Or do we have to be content with being screwed?

(music fade out)

For the trial of the impeachment trial, I’m Pete Guither.

Thank you.

© 1999 Peter Guither.

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