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Jewish World Review March 31, 2000/ 24 Adar II, 5760

Jackie Mason & Raoul Felder

Jackie & Raul
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What's sleazier than a lawyer?


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- IN EVERY POLL ever taken, lawyers end up at the bottom, somewhere between ax murderers and used car salesmen. There are more "What's lower than a lawyer?" jokes than there are mother-in-law jokes.

When you talk about Arkansas lawyers, you usually think of one room over the local barber shop, with a ceiling fan and lots of flies buzzing around a spittoon, or since the age of Clinton, a bunch of crooks or future Justice Department officials (maybe it's the same thing), writing up phony time slips for doing work on even phonier land deals, or planning what they will wear for next year's spring dance at San Quentin.

Bill Clinton is, or was at least on paper, a lawyer. He has been able, so far, to dodge criminal charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, subornation of perjury, rape, attempted rape, finance law violations, and adultery. There were enough crimes committed by him to disbar a carload of lawyers, but he was still a member of the bar, until one more thing happened -- he was held in contempt by Judge Susan Weber Wright.

Somehow "contempt" was more important than any of the myriad of foul things he did. Apparently, in Arkansas you can obstruct justice, commit perjury, trick the whole country, bomb people to take the heat off yourself, send planes and missiles flying all over the world on reckless and meaningless missions, and use a teenage girl for self-gratification, but "contempt" you can't do.

Because of this contempt charge, the Arkansas legal authorities are seeking to disbar Clinton. When this news was made public, every fourth-rate Third World country immediately went into high alert for fear Clinton would start bombing them, and use this as an excuse for claiming he didn't have time to attend the disbarment proceedings. Since Clinton had just about run out of targets -- at least those that couldn't shoot back -- the Third World breathed a sigh of relief.

Clinton nevertheless still claimed he was too busy right now, and instead, offered to deal with the situation after his term of office expired. In view of the fact that he was able to find time to jump on anything with a skirt that could walk, crawl, or creep, and to make dirty phone calls in the middle of the night, his excuse was not accepted by the authorities.

Clinton will be the first president to be disbarred -- Nixon had the decency to resign from the bar before they could kick him out. But Clinton will not have to practice law to earn a living. There are many other things he could do, but hopefully, he won't do them in our neighborhood.

Only in America could there be a situation where a person is declared unfit to handle a nine-dollar case in which somebody pretends to trip on a broken sidewalk, but is qualified to make decisions that could send half the world up in flames if it suits his political purpose.

Maybe the Arkansas people are right. Clinton is probably the only person in America who could give lawyers a bad name.


JWR contributors Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder need no introduction. Comment on this column by clicking here.

Up

03/23/00: Clinton the 3-D Man
03/10/00: Politics or Pro Wrestling?
02/28/00: Free advice to the pundits: Get a life --- and new jobs
02/14/00: She Flunked!

© 2000, Jackie Mason & Raul Felder. This article first appeared in The American Spectator online