Talk:High crimes and misdemeanours

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The section of text I changed originally read: "Some felt that the act of perjury, a federal crime, certainly rose to that level. Others felt that perjury, while illegal, did not reach that level." This is with regard to the section on former President Clinton.

This passage of text had a clearly biased tone in my judgement. Each sentence appears designed to explain each argument with equal weight. However, the second sentence is redundant in repeating that perjury is "illegal," as the previous sentence had already identified it as "a federal crime." Also, the word "certainly" in the first sentence seems to be placed in a purely editorial context, designed to add extra weight to the pro-impeachment argument. And finally, while the second sentence identifies that Clinton supporters disagree with that argument (i.e. "did not reach that level"), it does not the counter-argument as to -why- they disagree. It seems clear that whomever wrote that two-sentence passage had a pre-drawn conclusion, and wanted to lead the reader to that same conclusion.

Furthermore, that passage, while likely biased, did not do justice to either the pro- or anti- impeachment arguments. This point may admittedly be more subjective on my part, but it seemed to be rather haphazardly thrown together in a rush. Perhaps this was bias or simply laziness; either way, I felt it needed a re-write. I did my best to state both arguments with equal weight as I understand them, though feel free to tweak it if you feel I was unfair to either side.

I also went ahead and added the "neutrality review" tag to further ensure fairness, just in case my small edits are seen as too concise or weighted toward one side or the other. You can probably remove this tag if you think it's unnecessary; I just wanted to play it safe since this is considered a very contentious issue in modern political discourse.

Either way, I've been doing my thesis paper on the history of impeachment, so I hope what little insight I could provide will be regarded as helpful. =)

--Kris