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Jewish World Review / Nov. 18, 1998 /22 Mar-Cheshvan, 5759
MUGGER
Who could have imagined!?
HERE’S SOMETHING TO PONDER: What if, one year ago, the following
question were put to a national referendum: Should a sitting president
of the United States, who has been accused of perjury, charged with
obstruction of justice, who has settled a sexual harassment suit for
$850,000, been known to have orchestrated a surveillance operation
against political enemies, been suspected of arranging hush money for
potential witnesses and squandered eight months of his administration
huddling with lawyers rather than attending to affairs of state be
subject to an exhaustive impeachment inquiry in Congress?
The answer, of course, would be a resounding "yes," for in this country
it’s a sacred tenet of our democracy that no man, even the president, is
above the law.
The demonization of Starr is baffling. In a political culture that is
driven by daily polls, thanks largely to Clinton and his guru-in-exile
Dick Morris, Starr, a prosecutor, is thought of as a politician, even
though he was never elected to office and was appointed by the current
administration. The media is outrageously complicit in the denigration
of this good man: Because journalists feel guilty about pursuing
Oralgate so vigorously this year, they’ve now turned on Starr and
portrayed him as a prurient villain, a "pornographer" who’s wasted $45
million on a fruitless quest through Clinton’s myriad scandals. Because
Starr has a low public approval rating, they feel justified in saying
the GOP-controlled Congress has gone overboard in its halfhearted
impeachment inquiry of the President; after all, "it’s just about sex."
And the Republicans, who were shaken by the election results, and are no
less hypocritical than their Democratic opponents, have now gone squishy
on the subject of impeachment.
New York senator-elect Chuck Schumer, a member of the House Judiciary
Committee, said on the floor of Congress last month that "[I]t is clear
that the President lied when he testified before the grand jury [and]
the President has to be held to a higher standard and must be held
accountable." One wonders, after Clinton and his wife stumped so hard
for Schumer’s successful campaign against Al D’Amato, if the Democrat
will repeat that sentiment when hearings begin again this Thursday.
Jeffrey Toobin, in a Nov. 16 "Comment" valentine to the President that
reads like a Bennington creative writing exercise, takes top honors this
week for obeisance to the White House. He begins: "Mistah Impeachment,
he dead. Last Tuesday’s election inflicted a gun shot... Now the only
suspense is whether the matter will get as far as the House floor before
a deal is struck to end it. Henry Hyde, the Judiciary Committee
chairman, hastily redrew his schedule after the returns came in. Even
so, the Washington creature called 'the impeachment process' will
stagger on, zombie-like, awhile longer. That is crazy, because the
result is preordained. But, in our sclerotic, lawyer-plagued
investigative culture, Washington is crawling with these process
zombies. Kenneth Starr’s grand jurors, arms outstretched, lurching
toward the millennium... Mr. Hyde’s panel of Mr. Hydes, quaffing
pornographic potions. Run!"
Again, it’s pornography, not perjury, that fuels the partisan
journalist. Never mind that if a conservative had been accused of
Clinton’s crimes, perhaps William Rehnquist or Clarence Thomas -- not to
mention all the CEOs and middle-level managers who’ve already been fired
for similar indiscretions -- Toobin would be leading the charge for a
continuation of the impeachment process, saying, "Justice must be
served."
He concludes: "[T]he impeachment of Clinton was always far more popular
among political and journalistic insiders than among the people...
Madison’s idea was that the constitutional machinery would enable the
elites to restrain the passions of the mob. This time, though, it was
the elites that needed restraining. And it was the mob that restrained
them." How absurd. The "mob," with their pockets full in a surprising
continuation of a flush economy -- it’s bound to falter, but then this
bear’s been saying that since ’97 -- didn’t give a hoot about impeachment,
Ken Starr or Bill Clinton for that matter. It’s typical of the current
"writerly" climate at The New Yorker that an essayist would be daft
enough to think that his fellow citizens, the low number of those who
voted, actually think about the Constitution. If the economy were in the
toilet, Clinton would’ve been sent back home to Little Rock, Hollywood
or the pokey a long time ago.
But still the venom against Starr persists. It’s really quite
unfathomable when you consider the facts. Yes, he’s been at times
overzealous in prosecuting his case; what human being wouldn’t be when
faced with extraordinary efforts by the White House to throw a roadblock
in front of his every move; to delay testimony from key administration
officials and employ a "war room" of spinners to win the battle of
public relations? It wasn’t out of line for Ronald Rotunda, a Starr
lawyer, to tell the New York Post last Sunday: "If Richard Nixon had
such loyal devotees, I guess he would have probably served all eight
years. They always see conspiracies. These people must think ‘The
X-Files’ is a documentary because they have these dramatic conspiracies
that I don’t even understand." Rotunda continued with a well-deserved
screed against Clinton "dirt devil" Sidney Blumenthal.
But in reality, Starr, who’s now lost his dream of a Supreme Court
appointment, is simply a plodding prosecutor, not a politician, who’s
trying to complete a difficult job. The notion that he revels in
pornography is crazy; it wasn’t Starr who was playing games with cigars
while foreign leaders were waiting to meet with the President.
This week’s edition of New York is especially laughable, adorned with
the headline "Impeach the Media."
Editor Caroline Miller, who’s dumbed
down the magazine so dramatically that it now resembles a local version
of People, must be proud of herself that a publication, which a
generation ago was thrilling and vital, is more like its lame provincial
imitators across the country. To be fair, all the blame can’t be pinned
on Miller; Ed Kosner, soon to be Sunday editor of the Daily News, and a
longtime caretaker of New York, is every bit as complicit.
It gives me no satisfaction to note that Michael Tomasky, a talented
political writer, and one of the few literate writers at New York, had a
heavy hand in this week’s ridiculous issue. Tomasky’s lead sentence:
"Who’s been injured in this car crash of a political year?" Mike, get a
grip. It was an election, not a "car crash." His piece is called "Off
With Their Talking Heads," and has a rash of polling numbers that
purportedly prove that the great unwashed are fed up with the media. So
what else is new? The same story could’ve been written 10, 20 or 30
years ago.
I refuse to believe that Tomasky undertook this assignment on his own
volition: It’s just too dumb. He writes: "Do you trust us? Do you
respect us? Do you...love us?" What’s that Sally Field horsesh--t about?
Of course
not. You can take all the polls you want—and it’s disheartening that the
media is now emulating Clinton’s slap-happy reliance on such data—but if
a new bimbo emerges or Hillary is caught in a tryst with a Secret
Service guard, I don’t think Americans will say, "Enough is enough."
They’ll lap it up, just like the media will.
As always in matters relating to Washington, it’s useful to apply the
universal metaphor of life imitating high school: Clinton’s the BMOC,
allowed to mess around on the side—while his steady gal looks aside—and
tell a few fibs, as long he schmoozes the right cliques; Starr, the
science nerd with thick Buddy Holly glasses, who always volunteers for
extra credit and studies in the library after classes instead of playing
football, is left to suffer the adolescent cruelties of the in-crowd.
Journalists like Richard Cohen, who currently is allowed to waste op-ed
space for The Washington Post, want to be popular too. So after a little
tut-tutting, calling Clinton a "skunk" on one occasion, Cohen climbs
aboard the winning float, hoping to bask in the Prez’s adulation.
Cohen wrote with exaggerated fury, two days after the election, that
even though Starr wasn’t on the ballot, he was the big loser. He said:
"But it was he—his image, his actions, his ideology and the very bad
company he keeps—who propelled me to the polls at an early hour and
would have, had I lived in a different place in an earlier era, prompted
me to vote several more times. Take that and that and that." Nyah-nyah,
four-eyes! And who, exactly, is the "very bad company" that the
independent counsel keeps? His wife of 28 years? His children?
Michael Kelly, editor of National Journal, who writes a weekly column
for The Washington Post, is one journalist who has stuck to his
convictions throughout the 10 months of Oralgate. Unlike the Times’
Maureen Dowd, who apparently has let her personal life trump her
professional duties, Kelly remains resolute in his belief that Clinton
is an admitted liar who must be removed from office. (Dowd continued her
newly formed vendetta against Starr last Sunday: "After Ken Starr wrote
up [Monica Lewinsky’s] story so voluminously and with bodice-ripping
fervor...")
In a Nov. 11 column, Kelly lampooned the remarks of the brain-addled
John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who
protested that Clinton’s violations of the Constitution don’t meet the
bar of impeachment because they were private in nature. Starr, says
Conyers, had no right to invade Clinton’s personal life, even though
he’s the president of the United States and was conducting an affair in
the Oval Office.
Kelly writes: "The president, chief enforcer of the law, aggressively
and repeatedly broke the law. He was sued, and he was ordered, by a
judge, to answer questions posed by the plaintiff, in the interest of
the plaintiff’s constitutional right to justice. He lied under oath,
both in the lawsuit and before a federal grand jury, and he encouraged
others to obstruct justice, conspiring to violate the constitutional
rights of the plaintiff... And to let such a president skate is to
establish the precedent most feared and despised by the Framers: One law
for the rulers, another for the ruled."
Even The Washington Post’s David Broder, who defines the term
"centrist" political pundit, is appalled at the current rush by the
media and historians to sweep Clinton’s crimes under the rug. On Nov. 1,
he took a well-deserved shot at Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the aging
Kennedy sycophant who accused Starr of being "America’s No. 1
pornographer." Broder, in an uncharacteristic display of moxie, said
that Schlesinger, although dignified, "wound up sounding at times like
James Carville in cap and gown." Broder continued: "What the historians
seemed notably reluctant to recognize was that the charges the Judiciary
Committee will consider are not the sexual misconduct which Clinton has
acknowledged but the accusations, which he vehemently denies, that he
committed perjury in his deposition before a federal judge and his
federal grand jury testimony, suborned perjury by others and obstructed
justice."
Rabil questions the President’s authority, saying: "[W]hat about the
orders given by a known criminal? Should we trust in the integrity of
directives given by a president who violates the same basic oath we
take? Should we be asked to follow a morally defective leader with a
demonstrated disregard for his troops? The answer is no, for implicit in
the voluntary oath that all servicemen take is the promise that they
will receive honorable civilian leadership. Bill Clinton has violated
that covenant. It is therefore Congress’ duty to remove him from
office... For a while, it was almost possible to laugh off Mr. Clinton’s
hedonistic ‘college protester’ values. But now that we have clear
evidence that he perjured himself and corrupted others to cover up his
lies, Bill Clinton is no longer funny. He is dangerous. William J.
Clinton, perhaps the most selfish man ever to disgrace our presidency,
will not resign. I therefore risk my commission, as our generals will
not, to urge this of Congress: Remove this stain from our White House.
Banish him from further office. For God’s sake, do your duty."
Finally, in the December Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens, taking the
role of the brilliant juvenile delinquent who skips classes and slugs
from a pint of Smirnoff under the bleachers at the pep rally and always
gets the girl in the end, deftly skewers Clinton and his legion of
fawning defenders. Hitchens points out that it’s not the sex that
bothers him -- he wouldn’t care a whit even if it were a male intern
Clinton was diddling -- but the President’s constant lying and ruining the
lives of innocent people. He’s distraught that writers he "admires" like
Gore Vidal, Joan Didion and William Styron have been flummoxed by
Clinton and adopted the prevailing wisdom that his predicament is "just
about sex."
He says that they "knit their brows needlessly at this point and speak
darkly about American Puritanism, sexual McCarthyism and the right to
privacy. You even hear that only a cad tells the truth about 'affairs.'
It’s as if Clinton had kept some pouting little mistress in the Virginia
suburbs and pleasured her zealously on weekends with the adult
complaisance of his worldly wife. A moment’s reflection is enough to
make this comparison as remote as Pluto from the real facts of the case.
Obviously, if such had been the president’s practice, he would be in no
legal trouble now...
"Plainly put, a man who has often been accused of humping the help, or
hitting on the help, was asked "under ordinary penalties of perjury, and
also under a law he had initiated—if he was getting any action while on
the White House payroll. He lied with the same clever-stupid facile ease
that had extracted him from tight corners before. And thus, his problems
have become ours... So it seems to me both idle and fatuous to go on
moaning, as most of my journalistic colleagues in Washington love to
moan, about the grimy details and the way that they are forced to dilute
their own" no doubt very elevated—standards by covering them from dawn
till dusk. (I know, I know, they’d rather be reassigned to write about
the budget agreement and NAFTA.)"
He concludes his Vanity Fair essay with typical clarity: "So I think
that the Lewinsky matter, with its Dick Morris and Vernon Jordan
crossovers, is a minor metaphor for the political and financial
corruption of Clintonism. I wish it had come out as a footnote to the
larger campaign-finance inquiry, which still will hit Clinton like a
truck if he manages to retain office. Meanwhile, this president has
depraved the language, fooled around with the law, wasted great tranches
of everybody’s time, betrayed all his friends and colleagues, and given
fine old terms like ‘philandering’ a dirty name. That’s at least five
strikes. So should he be out? Hell, no. He should stick around, until
all his admirers have had the same amount of ‘face time’ with him as his
old and disillusioned supporters already have. That could be a real
political
But these are strange times. Bill Clinton, the luckiest politician of
this century, and one of the most crooked, has successfully bamboozled
not only the public, but much of the legal establishment, media and
historians as well. Clinton, who lied to the country in his Paula Jones
deposition back in January when asked about his affair with Monica
Lewinsky, and then on Aug. 17 finally admitted, sort of, his misdeeds,
has convinced most of his constituents that he’s the victim of a zealous
independent counsel, a prude who’s on a sexual witch hunt. Clinton and
his flunkies have successfully portrayed Kenneth Starr as the mastermind
of a jihad against the presidency, a modern-day Joseph McCarthy who’s
intent on engineering a bloodless coup d’etat. As a result, Clinton,
emboldened by the midterm elections and the spineless Republican
leadership, is now poised to avoid all culpability for crimes that would
put an ordinary citizen behind bars.
Starr
Many of the nation’s most respected publications and journalists have
reduced Starr to an evil caricature in a bizarre effort, whether overt
or accidental, to burnish Clinton’s legacy. Let’s ignore, for the time
being, the true worms in this repellent spectacle; people like Salon’s
Joe Conason, The New York Times’ Frank Rich, Time’s Margaret Carlson and
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter. In the past several months, it’s been The New
Yorker that’s sacrificed its "Talk of the Town" section, as well as much
of its political reporting, to Clinton apologists who are better suited
to fringe online and leftist alternative weeklies.
Schumer
The balance of Toobin’s "Let’s Move On" piece is both silly and
condescending. He writes: "Impeachment used to be a once-in-a-century
exception to politics as usual. Yet until the voters intervened
impeachment was being treated as if it were the budget or the highway
bill --- just another item on the legislative calendar." Now, according to
Toobin’s odd logic, if a 19th-century president aside from Andrew
Johnson -- say William McKinley, charged with bribery -- had been impeached,
it would be perfectly fine for a second 20th-century impeachment
inquiry. There are no quotas for such serious tests of the Constitution,
as Toobin at one time presumably knew.
Toobin
It’s said that the public is sick of hearing about Monica and Starr, and
Clinton’s never-ending search for [that certain type of satisfaction]. Maybe so. But have the
circulation numbers of the major newspapers fallen precipitously? Have
tv viewers declared a moratorium on the nightly news or CNN?
Monica
"Your average painting contractor," if he was discovered to be culpable
of all that Clinton has, would be in jail right now, with the Democratic
administration’s approval. Let’s remember that Clinton is the equal
rights president, the man who’s in favor of hate crimes legislation,
prosecution for sexual harassment and every other Barbara Boxer-liberal
idea that’s seeped into the fabric of our country.
Cohen
Not all the students at Clinton High are willing to go along with the
Prom King and Queen. In a blistering, and courageous, op-ed piece in the
Washington Times last Nov. 10, Daniel J. Rabil, a major in the Marine
Corps Reserve, risked the wrath of his superiors to speak out about his
compromised commander-in-chief, an essay that’s all the more poignant
this week when Clinton is playing footsie with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
Broder
Hitchens, simply put, sees through the layers of Clinton deceit and
pays no attention to the manners of journalistic etiquette in
Washington. I’ve never met the man, and he does appear rather
disagreeable and pompous, but he has a sharper mind than 99 percent of
the fools he’s required to call colleagues. Watch Hitchens one morning
on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. He appears in a disheveled state,
probably working on five hours sleep and in desperate need of a
cigarette, butt-ugly tie askew and bleary-eyed. You’d think he’d be no
match for the well-coifed and rested opponent he’s been set up with to
discuss the news of the day. But as the Jonathan Alters and James
Carneys of the world respectfully scan the newspapers and offer safe
opinions, the "conventional wisdom" of the working press corps, winking
at the host like certified Beltway insiders, Hitchens takes it all in
and then eviscerates his fellow guest with clear, precise facts,
delivered in astonishingly devastating prose. When Clinton ordered
airstrikes against Sudan and Afghanistan just days after his disastrous
Aug. 17 "apology" speech, it was Hitchens, almost alone among
journalists, who rose up to denounce the President’s actions as a
nefarious means of distraction.
Morris
JWR contributor "Mugger" is the editor-in-chief and publisher of New York Press. Send your comments to him by clicking here.
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