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The Laughingstock-in-Chief
Posted: Sat 20 Mar 1999 1:31 pm
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Seems like the National Hockey League’s Nashville Predators are having a bit of sport with the Lewinsky scandal.
After a player was penalized in Tuesday’s game, the Nashville arena’s big screen TV showed a picture of President Clinton with an impersonator’s voice saying: “Let me say once and for all I did not have physical contact with that player.”
The Nashville Tennessean newspaper reports that after “a moment of stunned silence, the arena erupted in laughter.”
The faux-Clinton vignette is one of three such clips being shown during the Predators’ NHL games, and the idea seems to have been inspired by TV’s Conan O’Brien, who has been putting words in the president’s mouth for years. » Washington Times “Inside Politics:”
Slap Shot
The Eighth Deadly Sin
Posted: Fri 5 Mar 1999 2:56 pm
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Somehow while I was growing up I managed to absorb a number of rules of proper manly conduct that don’t seem to get taught these days.
Don’t lie, cheat, steal, brag, threaten, or betray, nor try to induce others to do these things. Don’t come to a judgment if you aren’t reasonably sure of the facts. Don’t avoid coming to judgment if you are reasonably sure of the facts. Once your mind’s made up, get moving. If you’re wrong, admit it. Apologize when appropriate, but only when appropriate. Don’t promise more than you honestly think you can deliver. Order your loyalties and stick to that order.
But of all the rules I absorbed, I guess there was one that stands above them all. Breaking any other rule might be defensible, but not this one.
Never whine.
Whining, of course, means more than just making that annoying, childish sound while complaining. It also refers to a complaint repeated so often that it takes more energy to keep repeating it than would be invested in addressing it. Constant reiterations of blame constitute whining, as does any campaign of demonization. According to the code of conduct that I learned, a grown man makes his point as best he can, argues it if necessary to ensure he is understood as well as he thinks he needs to be, then he pipes down and either sets about fixing the problem or learns to live with it.
The prohibition against whining was so vehement, back then, because no grown man wanted to be mistaken for a child in his behavior. In those days one of the worst insults anyone could hurl at another was “crybaby.” Nor was this a new thing. In Owen Wister’s The Virginian, the character Steve, who is about to be hanged for cattle rustling by a party of cowboys that includes his friend the title character, snubs the latter rather than speak and risk breaking down with emotion over his impending death. Steve takes the noose more or less cheerfully, and only later does the Virginian discover his written farewell on a scrap of newspaper.
Maturity, however, is out of vogue in these post-modern times. Where scarcely a generation ago a TV character with absolutely no emotions became a cultural icon, today a politician draws fire when he fails to respond favorably to a mob of whiners on the steps of his state’s Capitol. Although the most scathing insult one can hurl today remains “racist,” “cold-hearted” is certainly in the top rank. Crybabies not only don’t draw scorn anymore, they’re admired. To rise in any field of endeavor anymore one must whine louder, more persistently, and more nerve-wrackingly than the rest. It’s progressed beyond merely wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve—to get the full effect one must fly it like a banner, waving it back and forth, hurling cholesterol in every direction.
And what are the grown-ups doing about it these days?
Well, it’s been said often enough that in any war the sides tend to behave more like one another the longer it goes on.
This is why Paul Weyrich’s comments have created such consternation both in and out of politics. On the one hand, Weyrich’s complaint sounds like whining. On the other hand, what he’s advising is that those who feel as he does stop complaining—which is all that politics has become, after all. When he suggests that “moral majority” conservatives consider opting out of political activism, what he’s suggesting is that they stop whining and apply their energies to addressing those aspects of the problem that are within their reach.
It’s a suggestion that would be well considered in all camps of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Okay, so Newt Gingrich made the present congressional majority possible, only to lose his way and then his job. Whaddaya gonna do about it? So Bob Dole and George Bush ran the most inept presidential campaigns this side of Lyndon Larouche. Whaddaya gonna do about it? So the Omnibus Broadcasting System has been out of the closet for six years and openly favoring the other side. Whaddaya gonna do about it?
Whining is not a strategy.
If the Republicans keep their congressional majority for a hundred years, will that by itself fix anything? If some other political party eclipses the GOP by offering an ideologically pure platform more suited to your own point of view, will that by itself fix anything? If you find a magic lamp and the genie residing within grants you three wishes, will that by itself fix anything?
Whining is not a strategy.
I don’t mean simply that we ourselves shouldn’t whine. I mean that it’s time to establish and enforce a hard and fast no whining rule just as ruthlessly as others enforce their no racism rule.
Juanita Broaddrick
Posted: Wed 24 Feb 1999 7:24 am
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My advice is to let the story generate its own momentum, if it’s going to. Conservatives should talk about tax cuts, domestic freedom initiatives, and generic discussions of integrity and trust in high office.
If anyone asks me about Juanita Broaddrick, I’m simply going to refer to how Newsweek’s “Winners and Losers” page reacted to the story by noting, “Sounds like our guy.”
If anything, I think conservatives should try to keep the Christopher Hitchens/Sidney Blumenthal story alive.
Bill Clinton’s Harmless Legacy
Posted: Fri 19 Feb 1999 7:10 am
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[...or, “Never Mind”]
Okay, let’s get over it.
William Jefferson Clinton, the quintessential American frat boy, has happened to take over the leadership of Upsilon Sigma Alpha just after a stunning victory over its rival, the Hammer and Sickle Society—a victory engineered by his Republican predecessors.
Naturally, being the quintessential American frat boy, he has been dipping into the hard-won resources left for him by those predecessors to celebrate. For the last six years he has been presiding over the longest and least exclusive “kegger” of all time. And while us accounting majors in the house next door have been losing sleep over the noise and the debauchery, we should take solace in the knowledge that eventually this party, like every other, will eventually come to an end. And although there will be the Mother of All Hangovers the next morning, we’ll all get back to the serious business of being America.
This is not to say that we should regret having called the cops—only that we shouldn’t despair over the fact that the cops were unable to collar the ringleader because certain august “pillars of the community” were in attendance and blocked the arrest.
It has long been a truism in the popular culture that people in high places are not to be trusted. In reality it’s been only among committed activists within the two major parties that this belief has not been shared for many years. Leftists trust fellow leftists in power because they believe—as recent events have made plain—that leftists are incapable of doing wrong. Conservatives have lately been inclined to trust elected officials since the Reagan years, utterly failing to grasp the fact that Ronald Reagan was the exception that proves the rule, although Henry Hyde managed to look and sound vaguely like an unsmiling, duty-bound version of the Gipper—for a while. Newt Gingrich forsook the agenda in pursuit of media approval. Trent Lott deferred to his Senate colleagues’ dread of actually having to work for a change; obviously the post of “leader” in the Senate is bestowed upon the man who best knows his place, the least inflated ego in a chamber crowded with ego-shaped balloons. And if he can keep the chamber from being diverted from its business of self-adulation by an unwelcome risk of accomplishment, so much the better.
So although those of us who still place some value on trustworthiness are and ought to be deeply disappointed by the outcome of the recent business, we have no right to be surprised. The great mass of the people have been aware of this all along, and have progressed so far beyond telling us this that they actually snicker at us when we make it obvious that we don’t get it. This is why the Republicans who pursued the impeachment of the quintessential American frat boy have apparently failed to earn the vicious rage that the leftists forecast for us. The same masses who opposed Clinton’s removal—because they have never expected elected officials to be trustworthy (better to be pleasantly surprised than deeply disappointed)—have been watching us for the last several years not with dread or outrage as the left would have it, but with cynical, tolerant amusement. They look upon us as naive but basically okay.
It isn’t that the American people do not care about character. It’s that they have concluded that sterling character is too much to expect as a consistent trait in elected officials. So they make their voting decisions (when they vote) based on other factors, and if the winner proves to be of good character, so much the better.
We would have the issues to win elections, if we bothered to put forth an agenda. We used to be able to do that, as demonstrated in such years as 1980 and 1994. And although we didn’t manage to motivate the people to oust a known felon from the most powerful office in the modern world, we have established ourselves as being serious enough about honesty and trustworthiness that we’ll risk their ire by challenging a popular president. If the GOP presidential nominee in 2000 has a solid reputation for integrity, I am confident that nominee will have a definite advantage going into the campaign. Let that nominee talk credibly about tax cuts and furthering the cause of freedom here at home as well as abroad, and he (or she) will surely win.
We also need to get over the idea that Clinton has co-opted the Republican agenda. No. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Republican agenda has co-opted Bill Clinton.
I readily admit that I have been among those who have predicted that the legacy of an acquitted Clinton would be one of profound hazard to this nation and to the civilization over which it now presides. Well, life is full of hazards. But one goofball of an overgrown frat boy, destroy the greatest nation in the history of mankind?
Get real.
[I remain convinced, in May 2007, that thanks to such eminent Republican Senators as Trent Lott, Ted Stevens and Arlen Specter, what was conducted in February 1999 was not a trial but a pantomime. So what? We took our shot, and lost. That’s life.]
Dark President of the Sith
Posted: Mon 8 Feb 1999 4:43 am
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I have come to the conclusion that the more Bill Clinton is hated, the stronger he becomes.
When the Senate fails to remove him, he and his supporters will gloat publicly. They’ll pop the champagne corks in our faces and express variations on Alec “Stone ‘Em to Death” Baldwin’s comments on “Politically Incorrect,” all in a deliberate effort to make us even angrier.
Are we strong enough to resist such manipulation?
If not, then we deserve Bill Clinton, for as long as he wants to stay.
The Cowardice of Senate Republicans
Posted: Fri 5 Feb 1999 10:21 am
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As I write this, it appears that the impeachment trial will end with either no verdict, or an acquittal largely engineered by gutless members of the Senate’s Republican “leadership.”
Clearly those members, along with a sizable proportion of the populace, believe that once they can “put this behind us” everything will return to whatever they think things were like before the Lewinsky matter first arose.
Like all nostalgia, this is rooted in fantasy. Bill Clinton has been proven to be nearly as horrible a human being as his most extremist critics have been saying for years. The four major divisions of the Omnibus Broadcasting System, or OBS, have demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt among persons with better than a room-temperature IQ, that they are devoted to the preservation and perpetuation of the Clinton presidency, if only because its well-deserved early termination would constitute a victory for those e-e-e-e-evil Republicans who swarmed over the walls of the citadel in 1994.
Worse, a number of Republican Senators (and a handful of their brethren in the House) have been proven beyond a doubt to lack the fortitude God gave pond scum. Even though OBS has portrayed the House managers as fanatical witch-hunters, the queasy “moderate” wing of the Republican Party has made itself look worse by fleeing from even the slightest chance of short-term political difficulty, no matter the demands of long-term public duty.
A few years ago I predicted to an acquaintance that history would label the 20th Century as the Era of Nonsense. In 1999, my prediction is given credence that I could not—and certainly would not—have expected back then.
Every aspect of our lives is beset by bureaucratic idiocy—rules and regulations having no basis in achieving any public good. The law is subjected to a series of twists and knots that look less like George Orwell’s vision than Lewis Carroll’s. With all the information at their fingertips that they could possibly need to be informed members of civilization, the vast majority of Americans prefer to concern themselves with the grim future facing the profession of supermodeling.
Here Be Dragons
Posted: Sun 31 Jan 1999 4:31 pm
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Who can predict the ultimate outcome of current events?
It may have been fairly simple to predict that the Denver Broncos would win the Super Bowl (he wrote, with the game still being played), but who can say how events will play out surrounding, say, the approaching reckoning in Washington? Pundits and Democrats have been saying for months that without 67 Republicans in the Senate there would never be a guilty verdict in an impeachment trial. But before that they were saying there would never be an impeachment trial in the first place—and before that, that there would never even be an impeachment, much less a trial.
Who could have anticipated two years ago that a casual act of presidential perjury, committed in casual contempt of a citizen’s civil rights, would lead to this decidedly un-casual point? Back then the buzz was about campaign corruption and abuse of executive orders to benefit Chinese and Indonesian interests at the expense of companies owned and run by U.S. citizens.
Who could have guessed back then that a television network would elevate an impassioned and openly avowed pro-Clinton partisan to host two separate regular shows on which to defend the President? Who could have guessed back then that this same network would record, and then spike, an interview with a woman who claims that the President raped her when he was Arkansas’ state attorney general? Who could have guessed that the sleaziest man alive would become the most visible defender of the President’s morality—by airing innuendos against his critics? Who could ever have guessed two years ago that William Jefferson Clinton, then newly inaugurated as President after his 49-percent popular vote re-election victory (a record for him), would sink to such depths?
Who among them would have been believed?
Those who claim that Vince Foster was murdered, are frequently dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorists. Those who circulate the lists of people close to Clinton who have died under mysterious circumstances, are laughed off as fanatic Clinton-haters taking a vacation from their surveillances of Area 51. And perhaps rightly so. But aside from those types of people, who would have foreseen the spectacle that Clinton 1999 would degenerate to? After all, these are the ones who have made the most noise about those purloined FBI files. These are the ones who have followed the Clinton scandal front since 1992, who believed Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones the instant their stories broke.
And these are the people at whom Clinton’s defenders point in this hour of desperation, to explain why they stay with him. As Andy Rooney put it, they like Clinton’s friends more than they like his enemies. His enemies, therefore, cannot be allowed to be right, not even when the evidence actually comes down on their side of the story. It’s as though Clinton called up all of his high-profile supporters in Hollywood and the media, and demanded, “Who are you gonna believe, me or a bunch of right-wing facts?”
In their hyper-politicized world view, even truth has a political spin to it, and when the spin goes against their way of thinking, it has to be denied, disparaged, demolished and despised. To the rest of the world, truth and facts are neutral, and only the actions and words of men and women carry a spin. If the facts say that Clinton is a felon and unfit to hold office, the bad reflection is not on the facts, but on Clinton. And people to whom this is clear, have a hard time understanding those for whom politics, and especially Left-wing politics, is more important, and more pure, than the truth.
The recent past, up to about this time last year, seems in hindsight to have been as easy to anticipate, seven years ago, as the outcome of today’s football game. After his 90-percent post-Desert Storm approval ratings blew over, President Bush suffered from the more durable memory of his “no new taxes” betrayal, and from the unprecedented partisan spin of television news reporting surrounding the 1992 election campaign. Bush ran a lackluster campaign, and tried ineptly and belatedly to pander to his base—which only played into the spin of the hostile media while offending the Right (which unlike the Left does not appreciate being pandered to).
Meanwhile Clinton’s character issues were passed off by the same media as being irrelevant to the campaign. Character didn’t matter, we were told. Today these same media voices allow that maybe character does matter after all, while more die-hard Clinton partisans argue that policy lip-service matters more than the trustworthiness and mental stability of a man whose finger rests on the nuclear button. (Perhaps that button seems less dangerous today than ten years ago, but what of North Korea? What of Saddam Hussein? Can we afford to keep a President who makes Saddam look positively sedate and predictable?)
But today, no one can guess what will happen tomorrow. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr has concluded, rightly I think, that he can indict a sitting president—but he hasn’t decided whether he will. The pundits having assured us that witnesses would never be examined in the impeachment trial, perhaps we could have guessed at what has proven to be the case: there will be witnesses. The Juanita Broaddrick story is said to have influenced wavering House members to vote for impeachment in December, and now it reposes like a powder keg on the shelf at NBC News. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Events of the past have been converging on this point, from long before the 1960s. Historical trends set in motion by occurrences before the Vietnam war, before the Kennedy assassination, before the birth of Billy J. Blythe, have developed a momentum that will contribute to an unfathomable crescendo some time between now and the end of the century—and even lifelong observers of the political, cultural and social scene are at a loss as to what to expect. We are entering into terra incognita, where all the lessons of the past seem useless in preparing for what is to come.
If there we find dragons, who will be surprised?
[I expected a crescendo before the end of the century—was I only off by nine months?]
The Cowardice of the Senate
Posted: Tue 26 Jan 1999 7:05 am
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There is a trial balloon floating in the Hall of Wind—er, I mean, the Senate chamber—aiming to attract Senators into voting to convict President Clinton on the articles of impeachment, without having to remove him.
This proposal is based on alleged ambiguity in the Constitution relating to impeachments. Here are the relevant provisions:
Article II, Section 4: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Article I, Section 3, Paragraph 7: “Judgment in all Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shal nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to law.”
The provision in Article II clearly declares that the minimum that the Senate may do upon convicting an impeached official, is remove him or her from office. The provision in Article I says that the maximum that the Senate may do upon convicting an impeached official, is remove him or her from office and disqualify him or her from ever again holding an office of honor, trust or profit under the United States. Ambiguous? Only to a spineless wimp of a Senator who’s scared nuggetless of doing his or her Constitutional duty.
Many of these Senators have tried impeached officials before (e.g., former federal judge Alcee Hastings, now a member of the House of Representatives)—this is nothing new for them. They know what the Constitution says and means about impeachment trials. The only thing different here is that the official in question is a President whose defenders are in possession of over a thousand raw FBI files.
By seeking to evade their obligations in this trial, the Senators are conducting a self-impeachment trial on themselves, and lining up in their eagerness to self-convict.
The State of the Civilization
Posted: Wed 20 Jan 1999 6:23 am
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It’s hard not to think malicious thoughts about some of the players in this impeachment business, but it’s a temptation to be resisted at all costs.
Everything we’ve tried in hopes of overcoming the cult of personality surrounding Bill Clinton, has failed. The Omnibus Broadcasting System—with its subsidiaries ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN—has made use of its influence over the passive majority in our country to keep his popularity high despite everything. Truth has made no impact on the people largely because it hasn’t been told to them. And even if we had the means to reach them, they’ve been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they would refuse to listen to it, rejecting it as propaganda rather than truth.
Clearly if there is to be a happy ending to all this, we’re not capable of writing it into the script.
We are faced with a test of forebearance, a lesson in the folly of pride. All through the century that is about to end, we as a civilization have convinced ourselves that we can understand all that needs to be understood—that we can learn all that is to be known. We’ve decided that we can set our sights on any goal and achieve it through the determined application of will and know-how. And this is where it has gotten us.
Having been warned that the Devil can quote Scripture to suit his purpose, we are nevertheless eager to debate him when he reminds us about turning the other cheek, judging not lest we be judged, and not casting stones if we are not without sin. We forget that Jesus also said, “Cast not your pearls before swine.” How can we make sense of this without judging the character of those to whom He referred? The point of His comment was that there are some whose hearts we can never hope to turn with words, and that it would be a waste, not to say a sin of pride, to preach to them rather than to those whose hearts and minds are open. In our Information Age, words fly like bullets and bounce off the Kevlar that OBS has thoughtfully placed over the ears of the narcoleptic majority. Having placed our faith in The People, we find they have feet—and heads—of clay.
Faced with such futility, we are tempted to give in to malice. That part of ourselves inherited from long-dead pagan ancestors whispers to us that if we can’t persuade them, we must destroy them, or at least wish them ill. After all, the voice points out, we already are seeking to punish their leader. Why not also wish to punish those who support him, for their work in trying to shield him from justice?
When the hogs trample the pearls into the mud, do we get angry at them? Do we blame all hogs everywhere, and campaign to have them all slaughtered?
The matter is beyond our best powers of persuasion. We can’t turn the hearts of those determined to avoid doing the right thing. God alone can move them, and if He chooses, He will. It’s out of our hands. Maybe it always was.
Where Is the Love?
Posted: Sun 3 Jan 1999 6:49 am
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Shortly after winning the 1996 presidential election, Bill Clinton told a gathering of fellow Democrats that his opponents constitute a cancer on American politics, and swore to excise them from the political scene during the next four years. Before that, he claimed that our Constitution is “radical,” and that its authors may have set aside too many freedoms and rights for ordinary American citizens.
On the evening of Dec. 31, 1998, a reporter for CNN Headline News named Candy Crowley was talking about the dimming prospects for a Senate censure of the recently impeached Clinton, in the face of insistence from “conservatives” that the Constitution requires that the President stand trial. Crowley bemoaned the fact that censure, “a popular, mainstream idea,” was going down in flames on Capitol Hill.
Political discussion (and “reporting”) throughout 1998, and indeed since 1992 by some odd coincidence, has been brim-full of such indictments of conservatives and the things we hold dear. We’re “extremists,” they say. We revere a “radical” Constitution and use it to shoot down “popular, mainstream” ideas.
One might be excused for getting the impression that those speaking don’t like us much. Indeed, they despise conservatives and conservatism. They hold the Constitution in contempt as an obstacle to their imposing on us uneducated, unenlightened, unwashed masses the kind of shining bureaucracy on a hill that they believe will bring about Heaven on Earth. So much for the separation of church and state.
But what’s most disturbing to someone like me, someone who though young at the time nevertheless remembers quite well the message of the New Left in 1968, is that the price of one Summer of Love seems to be a decade-long Winter of Hate from the same bunch.
Of course, the Summer of Love was only one face of the Boomer Left—that same splinter of American society also gave us the terrorist Weather Underground, the thuggish Students for a Democratic Society, and the murderous Black Panther Party (ask David Horowitz if you don’t want to believe me). The gentle, dope-smoking hippie popularized in those songs by the Mamas & Papas, or in “Hair,” was simply the benign face that the movement’s darker elements found useful to win acceptance of their agenda by once-mainstream liberals and their successors, the moderates.
The Summer of Love icon remains strong with many in politics and media who have rationalized the devastation caused by their “ideas,” and by their constant suppression of opposition, on moral grounds rooted in the presumption of their own moral unimpeachability. After having gained ascendancy preaching that “the end does not justify the means,” they have come around 180 degrees to the certainty that any means, however foul, are justified if they help to keep themselves on top and their opponents in the gutter. After all, their opponents are, by definition, evil; they want to stop The Anointed from carrying out their mission, which would be divine if there were a god, which of course there isn’t, but it’s still a moral imperative that brooks no dissent.
Thus their slavish devotion to The Impeached One.
In their view, he stands like a colossus, between us e-e-e-e-e-evil conservatives and the people at large, blocking our message with an unprecedented talent for distraction, and co-opting any ideas that threaten to be popular with the hoi polloi on whose goodwill his power depends. His interests may have nothing real in common with those of the true Boomer Leftists, but he frustrates us conservatives, and that’s enough. Since we have no claim on the Summer of Love heritage that he and his supporters have wrapped themselves in, we are by definition hateful, and therefore fair game for their own hate. At the same time they tut-tut over the vengefulness of capital punishment, and argue that “an eye for an eye” is an outdated ethic, in politics they return real hate for perceived hate, real evil for alleged evil. And when the bombs are being dropped by their guy, and promise to derail efforts to punish him for his crimes, suddenly it’s a “good” war.
They don’t want Albert Gore, Jr. to be president before 2001—and many of them don’t want him at all. They know that he does more damage than good to the Green agenda with his lack of knowledge, his rhetorical clumsiness, and his lackluster persona. They know that as president Gore would be unable to carry off the kind of hate campaign on which Clinton has thrived. Where Clinton comes off (God help us!) as a good-ole-boy trying to do right, Gore would be perceived more accurately: as a hack politician trying to manipulate public opinion for his own benefit. Where Clinton has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest nightmares, Gore would be the conservative commentator’s dream. And with Clinton no longer in the spotlight to distract the people, Gore would be recognized instantly as the reality that is the flip side of Dan Quayle’s reputation.
And so they are afraid. And fear is a primal emotion, far more basic than love. The modern face of the Boomer Left is that of a prince past his prime, soured on life and bereft of his ideals, blaming his misfortunes on those whom he once claimed to love—and plotting their destruction in revenge.
And that is where the love went.
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