10 Years Later

David Schribman had a very interesting column in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about a rather unusual anniversary: the 10th anniversary of the Clinton Impeachment. He explores the self-indulgence and bitter partisanship that racked that time in our history, mainly on how tragically we wasted that time. There are many fingers to point on both sides of the aisle, but it mostly shows just how much things have changed and how little we bothered to worry about in the late 1990s.

You can read the full column here, but an excerpt is below:

Winston Churchill described the years when Britain and France dithered away when Europe could have prepared, militarily, psychologically and strategically, for the Nazi threat as the "years the locusts ate." We might apply the same appellation to the years the impeachment consumed. We could have used them to examine our profile in the Middle East, to consider the dangers terrorism posed at home, to question whether the high-tech boom was instead a bubble, and to wonder whether the American dream of owning a home was vulnerable to being hijacked by the American dream of riches beyond the dreams of avarice.

We could have done all those things, but we spent them wondering why Hillary Clinton stayed with her husband, what Monica Lewinsky told Linda Tripp in a shopping mall and what Paula Corbin Jones meant when she talked about the president's distinguishing characteristics.