Impeachment Follies

Here's a story from my own backyard that I had to find out about from Atrios because I didn't watch the right newscast last night. Retiring Representative Henry Hyde admitted in an interview with Chicago's WLS, the ABC affiliate, that the House impeachment of President Clinton was payback for the effort to impeach Richard Nixon 25 years earlier. I guess the Republicans in the 1998 Congress forgot that Nixon wasn't actually impeached. Perhaps they didn't notice that the House Judiciary Committee vote to approve three articles of impeachment against Nixon was not a strict party-line vote--the three articles passed with six, six, and two Republican votes, respectively (out of seventeen--ten Republicans, including Trent Lott, voted against all three). Maybe it never came up that, although the articles cleared the Judiciary Committee, they never went to the House floor for an up-or-down vote. But when it comes down to it, I guess revenge is not generally motivated by a careful examination of the facts.

According to The Raw Story, WLS pulled this report from its Website, but it's been reedited and put back (with a less obvious head and without a link to the video featured on the original). For the time being, that original can still be found in Google cache. In its first manifestation, which I'm assuming was a transcript of the actual broadcast, reporter Andy Shaw stated, "It will be interesting to see what happens when Hyde's comments hit the national media." He might be right, but Atrios speculated that the liberal media would ignore Hyde's statements completely. More than twenty-four hours after the original story aired, his assumption is correct. A quick search on Google News lists only three additional references to the original report (one of those is the Raw Story piece I linked to above, and none is a mainstream source). Not even ABC, the owner and operator of WLS, has picked this up at the national level.

UPDATE: As it is wont to do, Google updated its cache, so the link above now shows you the newer version of the report. For the record, as of 3:00 Saturday afternoon, Google News still shows no mainstream media picking up the story--just WLS, The Raw Story, one progressive blog, and two conservative blogs (without trying to step into the middle of the blogs/journalists war, why are blogs listed in Google News?).

I've got webshots of the original Google cache, but they're 2 megs apiece, so I don't want to put them in online storage. If any tech-savvy readers can tell me if these can be compressed without making them unreadable, I'd be greatly appreciative.

Another Update: Thanks to Stevie T., we can now offer you screen shots of the original report here, here, and here.