When wingnuts retire...

...all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.

The wingnut in question here is Rep. Henry "Youthful Indiscretion" Hyde, who admitted in an interview for ABC News' Chicago affiliate that the impeachment of President Bill Clinton was simply "payback" for the threatened impeachment of Richard Nixon.

Republican Congressman Henry Hyde made some surprising comments Thursday on the impeachment hearings of President Bill Clinton. He now says Republicans may have gone after Clinton to retaliate for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

[snip]

In an exclusive interview, Hyde delivered a big dose of candor and some reflective second guessing. He said, among other things, he might not try to impeach President Clinton if he had it to do all over again.

[snip]

When asked if he would go through with the Clinton impeachment process again, Hyde said he wasn't sure. It turned into a personal and political embarrassment for Hyde when an extra-marital affair he had in the 1960's became public amid accusations of hypocrisy. He called the affair a youthful indiscretion.

"Accusations hurled at me to intimidate me were misplaced, and I regret having to deal with them, but they didn't intimidate me," Hyde said.

The veteran DuPage County congressman acknowledged that Republicans went after Clinton in part to enact revenge against the Democrats for impeaching President Richard Nixon 25 years earlier.

Andy Shaw asked Hyde if the Clinton proceedings were payback for Nixon's impeachment.

"I can't say it wasn't, but I also thought that the Republican party should stand for something, and if we walked away from this, no matter how difficult, we could be accused of shirking our duty, our responsibility," said Hyde.

Hyde's comments reflect what Democrats have been saying for years about the Clinton impeachment. It will be interesting to see what happens when Hyde's comments hit the national media.

I can tell you what will happen. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing will happen because it won't hit the national media. They won't touch it. And if they do touch it, it'll be to tell the American public that the Watergate cover-up was simply "politics as usual", while the Clinton impeachment was trying to get a moral degenerate out of office.

Now think about it: $70 million in taxpayer money was spent on investigating Clinton. While this investigation was taking place, Al Qaeda was working on planning the 9/11 attacks. And all of this was NOT based on any kind of sense of right and wrong, but was simple political "payback" for Nixon?

I wonder if the families of the 2700 people who died that day will think this made things "even", and that Nixon was worth it.