Pity the Perjurer

Roger Clemens must be feeling more than a little oppressed these days.  His first trial, for perjury in his congressional testimony about the use performance-enhancing drugs, ended in a mistrial with a judge that was severely pissed at the amateurish tactics of the prosecution.  Apparently secure in the righteousness of their cause, the prosecution is back at it in a second trial.

 Now I'm not in favor of allowing perjury to go unchallenged, but we certainly know that prosecutors are selective in deciding which cases to prosecute.

It might seem like ancient history and that, as Antonin Scalia likes to say in regard to Bush v Gore, I should just "get over it," but since we are all still living with the results, it is worth noting that, without a doubt, either Anita Hill or Clarence Thomas committed perjury in their congressional testimonies in 1991.  Why, in a matter as important as a Supreme Court appointment, with which we have already lived 20+ years and no end is in sight, has there never been any attempt, except by investigative journalists, to determine who lied and extract punishment?

Actually, I think all Supreme Court nominees (anyway since Bork) lie, at least in the sense of misrepresenting their judicial philosophies and their approach to controversial issues.  Yeah, for sure Roberts is just acting like an umpire in a baseball game (Citizens United?), and any number of nominees apparently never gave a thought one way or the other to the matter of abortion before their nomination. 

And then there was the sad case of Alberto Gonzales, whose total memory loss at such a young age was really tragic.

There are nuances to what one remembers and one doesn't.  One can finesse questions about judicial philosophy and what one might think about matters like abortion that are likely to come before the court.  But the Clarence Thomas case was different, in that he was responding to specific allegations that either happened or did not, and clearly somebody lied under oath.  And, frankly, it should not have been that hard to find out who.

There are allegations that the BP executives who testified before congress a few months before the blow out in the gulf of Mexico knowingly committed perjury by, among other things, not admitting to a similar blow out some months earlier off the coast from Baku, and misrepresenting the safety of their operations.

Roger Clemens has never been a favorite of mine, but he has my sympathy if he is asking himself these days, "why me?"  All he was trying to do was stay on a glide path into the Hall of Fame by maintaining a clean-cut image.  It seems a pretty minor offense in comparison with the other examples.