Category: Politics

Comments on recent political activities and developments primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

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Karacter and Politics

Karacter

What is character? The Republican’s keep trotting out the word “character” because they think it’s something they have and Clinton doesn’t. Someone with “character” doesn’t cheat on his wife. Oops. Bob Dole left his first wife to shack up with Elizabeth at the Watergate hotel. Where’s your first wife, Newt? The one that had cancer?

How about that fling of yours, Henry Hyde? Well, a “character” has principles. Oops. Gingrich has been charged with more than 60 violations of various ethics rules for House members. George Bush refused to intervene to prevent slaughter in Bosnia because he was afraid he would lose the next election.

Well, a “character” doesn’t give in to cheap temptations. Oops. The Republicans, eager for campaign money, keep granting all the wishes of corporate America so the money keeps pouring into those PACS. Oops, oops, oops.

Well, a “character” doesn’t sneak around recording conversations illegally, doesn’t cheat in order to get his way, doesn’t blow things out of proportion or sensationalize, and knows the value of discretion and honor. Kenneth Starr, anyone? Linda Tripp? A “character” doesn’t preach one thing and practice another. Henry Hyde, are you there?

It’s weird how this group of self-serving, conniving, dishonest hypocrites seems to have succeeded in hi-jacking the term “character”. Most people know pretty well what is meant by “character”. Honesty and integrity. Above all else, a willingness to put principles ahead of expediency. Clinton failed in regard to Monica Lewinsky, but he hasn’t done all that badly in almost every other area of government. Henry Hyde and his fellow leaders of the holy jihad, currently conducting show-trials in Congress, have demonstrated over and over again a willingness to sell their votes to whichever corporate lobbyist carries the fattest check.

This isn’t mere hypocrisy. You have to understand that while this show trial continues, Congress has been writing laws that take money away from middle-class and poor voters and hands it over to the rich as quickly as possible. Disney and Citibank are only two of the beneficiaries. Archer Daniels Midland. Microsoft. RCA. Boeing. Line up boys: the pork barrel’s full and nobody’s looking!

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Pinochet Ricochet

Baltasar Garzon is my hero. If I get a picture, I’m going to put it up on my web page.

Baltasar Garzon is a Spanish judge. He found out that some Spanish citizens had been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Chile in the 1970’s. He found out that the murderers were never apprehended. He was outraged. Then he found out that the leader of this gang of criminals was in England getting some heart surgery. Like any conscientious magistrate, he immediately issued a warrant for this man’s arrest.

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The man is Augusto Pinochet.

In 1973, Chile held a democratic election. The people chose a socialist, Salvador Allende, as their new President. The Americans didn’t like that. Mr. Kissinger was heard to remark something like, “Why should we stand back and let an irresponsible people elect the wrong party?” So first, with the aid of reactionary forces within Chile, a crisis was created. Then, fig leaf in place, with the help from the CIA, General Pinochet led a bloody coup d’etat, during which Salvador Allende was cold-bloodedly murdered (Pinochet’s cronies claim he committed suicide). (There is a good film, Missing, on this story). Pinochet’s army then rounded up as many dissidents and potential dissidents as it could find, held them in the Santiago soccer stadium, tortured as many as he could to get more names to arrest, then murdered thousands of them.

A few years ago, Pinochet did what all ugly, maggoty, disgusting despots do when faced with a powerful reform movement: he agreed to step down only in exchange for a full amnesty. I don’t understand how any government can even pretend to be part of this farce. A man walks into a bank . He shoots five people and locks another twenty in the vault. He takes all the money. He runs off with five hostages. He kills four of them. Then he says, “I didn’t do anything wrong, but I will turn over this last hostage to you unharmed if you agree to not prosecute me for anything I might or might not have done before this.” The people say, “if you didn’t do anything wrong, then what do you have to worry about?” Maybe the police are smart. Maybe they say yes. He turns over the hostage. Then he is arrested and tried and convicted and executed.

Except that here, no one arrested or tried or convicted Pinochet, because they were afraid of the army. The army supports Pinochet because, after all, they are the bloody arms and hands of this evil man. They are complicit.

But Garzon had the guts to say, this man is a murderer and a torturer plain and simple. And he had the audacity to serve the warrant. (The French and Swiss governments have since done likewise.) And Blair’s government seized Pinochet and are holding him pending the outcome of the legal wrangling.

Think what a bizarre, crazy, mixed up message this is going to send to the world. That we are all equal before the law? That torture and murder are criminal acts? That justice awaits even the most powerful? Idi Amin, the happy guest of the Saudi Arabian government for twenty-years, since, presumably, his last meal of fresh humans, must be quaking in his boots!

* * *

Someone says to me, in defense of Pinochet, how would you feel if Castro, on his way to the United Nations, was arrested by the FBI and held for murder and torture? You see? We must have separate rules for dictators.

Well, first of all, if seeing Castro arrested was the price to pay for having assholes like Pinochet and Amin and Hussein, and Karadzic arrested, I think I’d go along with it. Let’s arrest him and have a fair trial and see what we come up with. I doubt you’d find nearly as many serious offenses for Castro as you find for Pinochet, or the others, but if you do, then, yeah, he should be charged. The witnesses should be brought forward, and let’s try him. Yes, it would be worth it, even though I like Castro, and his beard.

There is one other complicating factor. Pinochet was not an invited guest of the British government. He came as a private citizen seeking medical treatment (using the money, undoubtedly, that he pilfered from the state treasury).

If he had been an invited guest of the British Government, they would not have had a legitimate right to arrest him. If they did, the whole system of international diplomacy and the conditions under which negotiations can take place would begin to break down. Fair enough.

When Castro speaks at the U.N., as an invited guest, he has the same protection.

But hey, if goes for a walk in Central Park: arrest him! He and Pinochet can share a cell.

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Mickey Rat

We were about to see the “Mickey’s Day Care Centre”. With a big picture of Mickey Mouse on the sign in the front yard. Yes, the day was coming.

But not yet. Right now, if you own a daycare, you can’t call it the Mickey Mouse Day Care, and you can’t put a picture of Pluto or Goofy on the sign. Mickey and his friends were copyrighted by Walt Disney way back when, and the copyright stays in force for fifty years. And The Disney Corporation has generally been quite ruthless about enforcing it’s copyright, taking day cares, schools, and other institutions to court to force them to remove Donald and Mickey and Goofy from their advertisements or classroom walls and pay up.  That’s because Disney loves children.  That’s Disney’s “family values”.

Well, in 2003, Mickey is “Public Domain”, which means anyone can use him.

Unless….

Let’s say for a moment you’re the Disney Corporation. The law says your copyright is going to expire because the first legislatures who created copyright law decided that you should not be able to cash in forever on your creative work, to sit on your assets, indolent, dependent on a legislative teat. After a reasonable period of time, you should have to do more work to continue to make money.

But you make a lot of money off this copyright.  It’s had work coming up with new ideas and new products.  So you go to the government, like any other citizen in this great country of ours, and say, “Please, can I keep my copyright?” The government says, “No, of course not. Ideas belong to everyone. Copyright, you see, is not about protecting your rights as an owner. It is merely designed to encourage innovation and creativity by giving a temporary period of protection. Your Mickey Mouse did not come from nowhere. Mr. Disney benefited from all the artists and innovators and creative persons who all contributed techniques and language and styles to our culture before him. Now, Mr. Mouse goes back where he belongs: to the greater body of culture.”  (And, of course, we discover that Mr. Disney did not, as it were, actually invent Mickey.  Someone else did and Mr. Disney took credit.)

“Well,” says Disney, “would you change the law if I pay you some money?” And Congress says, “Money! You have Money! Why didn’t you say so! Of course we can. We are a group of utterly corrupt and gutless wimps who always pass laws that favour the people who keep us in office by providing us with an endless supply of money to spend on election campaigns. Ask Archer, Daniels, Midland! Ask Jack Valenti! Ask anybody with money! It’s true! And since you have a lot more money than all of the day care owners in the world, you win!”

And so it was.

Disney’s Political Action Committee (PAC’s are created to bypass election laws that restrict the amount of money corporations can give a candidate, just so this sort of thing can’t happen, ha ha) gave election money to 10 of the 13 sponsors of the new copyright bill.

Now you might naively think, “that’s bribery!  That’s corruption!”  Well yes, but those same congressman wear flag pins in their lapels and promise to stop protestors from burning the U.S. flag and illegal immigrants from taking your job.

The new copyright bill extends legal protection for an additional 20 years, from 50 (after the death of the creator) to 70.

Now in 2023, do you think, by any chance, we will see another extension of the copyright law? Why don’t they just go for the gold: “in perpetuity”?

Maybe that would be too expensive for them.

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Clinton Clinton Clinton!

Two events signaled a decisive change in the course of the Clinton Scandal and the impeachment proceedings. Firstly, CNN ran a little piece by a reporter who is actually OUT THERE covering congressional elections. He gently chided people who think that the Clinton scandal matters. He reported that the people are interested in Education, Health Care, and the minimum wage. Nobody is asking candidates where they stand on the impeachment, and Republican candidates are not advertising the fact that they are in favour of it. Could it be they have SOME shame? That CNN aired this report indicates the passing of a fantasy. CNN is not exactly known for their bold, independent analysis of facts. They tried to play up the scandal big time and now appear to have accepted the fact that most Americans just don’t see it as that big a deal, and regard the entire impeachment stuff as nothing more than partisan politics. In the latest poll, less than 11% think Congress should proceed with impeachment. That’s less than the percentage of people who think the Earth is flat.

Newsweek ran an article on the scandal this week that compared it to Watergate. It was a light, irreverent piece, that made it clear that there was no comparison. Watergate was about a lot of very serious criminal acts by the President and his top advisors.

Both magazines are playing to a very subtle thing: the winds of perception. What they are saying is that there is now a widespread consensus that the Lewinsky scandal won’t wash as justification for impeachment.

Something I’ve been saying since January.

* * *

Conservatives like to rant and rave about the Presidency sinking to a new “low”, as if letting tens of thousands of people die in Rwanda or Bosnia wasn’t a “low”.

* * *

Have you bought a magazine lately? Have you ever gone to a really good magazine store, where they stock everything? I walk down the display case, boggled. There are magazines on every conceivable interest, including “Feminist Lesbian Natural Healing Cyber Music Guide” and “Mollusk Interpretations for Franciscan Feminist Social Worker Anthropoid Researchers”. Is there too much information in the world? Is there such a thing as too much information? There is probably a magazine on “Information Overload”. I think there is: “Adbusters”.

You can’t keep up with everything anymore. You just hope that Time or Newsweek picks up the important stuff, and that TV movies give you the basic issue information that you need to make intelligent conversation at parties.

The Internet is like one of these magazine stores, except a hundred times bigger. A million times bigger. I think what will happen is that, after spending hundreds of years making new information, we will spend the next hundred years sorting information into useful categories and subsets.

***

They are everywhere now: cameras. Web-cams. Video-conferencing.

Some day-cares are now installing T-1 connections and “KinderCams”. Parents can check on their little ones through the internet, at any time during the day. Some people find this scary. They’re right. It is scary. We’ll deal with the scary aspects of it. It’s also great. As long as the workers know they’re being watched, I think it’s great. On the one hand, yes, we are being suspicious and cynical about people. On the other hand, we will know more. It is always better to know more than to know less. We may learn that we have been hysterically paranoid for all of our lives for no reason. Or we may learn that life is full of little complexities that are best left alone. Or we may learn that generally day-care workers do a good job. Who knows? We just learn. We have this voracious appetite to know and see and hear everything.

***

Shift Magazine printed a Q&A between some hackers and Senator Fred Thompson. It was pointed out that when the Volkswagen Company found a defect that would affect only three cars out of 8,500, they sent letters to every owner and recalled all of the cars in order to fix it.

Are you still waiting for your letter from Microsoft? Me too. Did you realize that the entire Internet can be brought down by hackers breaking into Windows NT computers? Is that a defect?

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She’s a Femme Fatale: Raging Hypocrites

It was sort of inevitable, don’t you think?

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Henry Hyde’s “indiscretion”.

It has just been revealed that the Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Henry Hyde, had an affair with a woman named Cherie Snodgrass, about thirty years ago. She was married, and so was he. We have also been informed that Dan Burton, one of Clinton’s harshest critics, fessed up that he has fathered a child in an extramarital affair. And Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho has also confessed to an illicit liaison. Well, let’s not be disingenuous here: they didn’t voluntarily fess up– they were caught. Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, of course, are not with their first spouses anymore. Any details, Newt? Come one, Bob, let’s get this out into the open.

Ah, you say. But isn’t the issue perjury?

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The trouble is, for the Republicans, that they have had to justify Kenneth Starr’s report on the basis of the argument that Clinton’s personal sexual behaviour is relevant. And whenever these clowns appear on TV to argue for impeachment, they don’t talk much about legalities: they talk about trust and morality and values and leadership. Besides, Clinton’s perjury occurred during testimony which was eventually ruled “immaterial” by a judge in the Paula Jones case. That’s a pretty thin case for impeachment. But you understand the two-track strategy of the Republicans. They know that the public will not be outraged by the perjury which gives them the legal pretense to impeach, but they think the public might be outraged by the sexual relationship, which, however, cannot be the basis for an impeachment. So they are trying to blur the distinction. You are supposed to be so outraged at Clinton’s personal conduct, that you will consent to impeach him on a trivial legal issue Well, that’s how they got Al Capone. The well-known gang-meister was finally indicted for…. yes, tax evasion!

There is only one solution: Henry Hyde, Dan Burton, Helen Chenoweth, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and whoever else comes out of hiding soon enough, should all be impeached.

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If I were Henry Hyde, who is in charge of the committee for impeaching adulterers, I’d do the honorable thing and impeach myself first, just to show the American Public that the judicial system doesn’t play politics, and that the Clinton thing is not just a partisan Republican pogrom against a Democratic President, but a reflection of the Republican Party’s earnest devotion to purity and decency in government. So long Henry. Nice knowing you Dan. May you find healing and fulfillment Helen. I hope something comes along for you Newt.

The Republicans, by the way, have demanded that the FBI investigate whether the White House had a hand in getting these stories to the public. Think about this. The Republicans, who have just insisted on publishing extremely intimate details about the President’s sexual liaison with a 21-year-old intern, are outraged, I say, outraged, that someone should expose, with no detail whatsoever, the adulteries of some of their own. Who do they think is buying this? It’s too much! It’s insane! It’s a crazy world!

One last piece of craziness: the Republicans are arguing that the public needs to know these details, and that the impeachment proceedings should hear the evidence in public, and that all the information Kenneth Starr has gathered should be released, because it is important that justice been seen to be done publicly.

All of these decisions were made in a closed session of the Judiciary Committee Meeting.

* * *

While the Republicans were busy rationalizing themselves, Lou Reed, former leader of the Velvet Underground, was putting on a performance of his own. Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground was quite possibly the most aesthetically progressive rock band of the 1960’s. Listen to their stuff: you can’t believe it was recorded thirty years ago. It has a visceral rawness to it, the kind of edgy authenticity so-called alternative bands would die for. Nico, the lead singer on some of their most haunting ballads, is now dead, destroyed by years of drug abuse… not. She died in a bicycle accident. Lou Reed has found a second career walking the border between revision and nostalgia.

So where do you think they performed? At some dark night-club in New York? No, in the White House. President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia was Bill Clinton’s guest this weekend. I wonder if Reed performed one of his better tunes, “Femme Fatale”:

Cause everybody knows (she’s a femme fatale)
The things she does to please (she’s a femme fatale)
She’s just a little tease (she’s a femme fatale)

If you would have told me, thirty years ago, that some day the Velvet Underground would be playing the White House!

Well, … actually, that is kind of what I thought thirty years ago. After all, we knew that we were all going to be fifty some day, and none of us really believed we were going to start listening to Frank Sinatra or Perry Como after we turned 40.

Now if you would have told me that Congress, in solemn session, would be listening in rapt devotion to intimate details about the President’s affair with a young intern– I would have thought you were mad.

Anyway, it’s happened. The most anti-establishment rock artist of the 60’s has played the White House. This has cosmic significance. As soon as I can think of what that is, I’ll try to write about it.

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Pity the Republicans

Let’s see. There was an election for President in 1992. George Bush ran against Bill Clinton and lost. Then there was another election in 1996. The Republicans trotted out Bob Dole and once again, Clinton was victorious. The Republican’s had a majority in Congress though, so they tried to thwart Mr. Clinton at every opportunity. Still, the nation, in poll after poll, told everyone that they liked Clinton, they thought he was doing a great job, and Newt Gingrich should go suck a lemon.

Kenneth Starr, you might not remember, was appointed to investigate Whitewater. He spared no effort or expense, but found nothing. He asked for permission, from a judge, to investigate other things, while he was at it. Again sparing no effort or expense, he could find nothing. Clinton may well, to that point, have been the cleanest President the U.S. has had in 90 years. As friends and acquaintances of the Clintons have been saying, consistently, for years, the Clinton’s really don’t care much about money.

Finally, Kenneth Starr stumbled into Monica Lewinsky, through the good offices of the despicable Linda Tripp.

Monica Lewinsky was a young, naïve, White House intern. Starr had the FBI seize her, without necessarily following correct legal procedure, and threatened to lock her and her mother up if they didn’t come clean. Lewinsky was terrified. Finally, she agreed to testify in exchange for immunity. It is now obvious that Starr asked her incredibly intrusive and mostly legally irrelevant questions about the details of the sexual encounters. And now he has made them public for everyone to drool over.

Let’s keep this straight so that no one has an excuse for not knowing this:  Kenneth Starr arrested and bullied the victim (allegedly) of a politicians sexual “abuse”.  Because otherwise, he knew that she would not play the role he needed her to play to justify the Republican Inquisition into Bill Clinton’s sex life.

I don’t know if Starr really thinks what Monica and Bill did is an impeachable offense. They had consensual sex and lied to prevent people from finding out about it. If he does, he is a fool. More likely, he, like the rest of the Republicans, despises Bill Clinton for political and cultural reasons, and finally found something he thought could make a lot of trouble for him. Unlike the members of Congress, Starr is virtually answerable to no one. With impunity, he is able to dig up the most intimate details about this sexual relationship and make them public. When Clinton attacked Starr’s tactics, the Republicans rose up as one, an enormous repressed Greek Chorus, and screamed bloody murder. They have the advantage of not being personally accountable for the disclosures, while hoping to cash in the on the political fall-out. The general public is not fooled: given a choice between impeaching Starr or Clinton, there is no doubt, at this point, that they’d rather impeach Starr.

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Lies and More Lies

Everyone seems very upset because Bill Clinton hasn’t apologized for ….

Well, what? For his affair with Monica Lewinsky? He owes her an apology, not me. For breaking his marital vows? He owes that one to Hillary. For lying under oath in the Paula Jones case? A judge decided that his testimony on Lewinsky was immaterial, so that offence doesn’t legally exist. But if it did exist, he did try to conceal a sexual relationship from a grand jury investigating a frivolous lawsuit brought about by a disgruntled employee and funded by a right-wing hate tank. So, maybe he should apologize to the right wing hate-tank for helping them waste their money.

Well, he shouldn’t apologize to the public. His relationship with Monica Lewinsky, so long as they were both consenting adults, is not now nor ever was the nation’s business. Kenneth Starr is a Republican flunkey out to destroy the Democratic Administration. When people say stupid things like “Clinton should have admitted it months ago and spared the nation this long ordeal…” they don’t seem to realize that it is Kenneth Starr and his Republican Henchmen in Congress who have decided that all the affairs of state and the general interest of the public is secondary to their own devious political agenda.

I wish Clinton had admitted it sooner. Are we a nation of adults? He could have said, “Yes, I’ve had affairs. And I might have other affairs, if I meet someone I like. But it’s none of your business, so buzz off.” Then the Republicans could have gone around making grim faces and talking about the moral decline of American presidents and all that bs and we could have been spared, at least, Kenneth Starr.

For the record, what is moral decline? America abides by this paradox: sexual sins represent moral decline, even though the people affected are consenting adults. On the other hand, actions that cause death and destruction and misery to millions of people as a side effect of ruthless materialism and greed are representative of moral progress. We get all lathered and upset and teary-eyed because the President had consenting sex with a 21-year-old gold-digger, but we all yawn when we hear about thousands of children and young women slaving away in sub-human sweat-shops to produce running shoes or sports wear for fat American arm-chair athletes to wear while they cheer millionaire athletes on television playing baseball or basketball in some far away city.

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What a Karacter!

Robert Sibley, a columnist with the Ottawa Citizen, tries, as many Republican and conservative Christian leaders have tried, to argue that President Clinton has significant character flaws that make him unfit to govern.

Aside from this rather brazen snub of the electoral process– the voters have consistently indicated that they approve of his job performance– his argument is seriously flawed in one other significant respect: the greatest presidents of the 20th century all possessed character flaws similar to those of Bill Clinton. If you asked most American voters, and most American historians, who the most effective presidents of the 20th century were, they would almost certainly include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy (though his term was cut short). They might also include Ronald Reagan, though he left the office after quadrupling the deficit, and Lyndon Johnson, who, in spite of his unpopularity in 1968, had the most aggressive and successful legislative agenda since FDR. All of these five are known to have been unfaithful to their wives.

Who were the worst presidents? Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and George Bush. Unfortunately for Mr. Sibley’s argument, these four were probably, by his definition, the ones with the most “character”, and are believed to have honored their marital vows. Too bad they couldn’t lead.

Sibley goes on to blame Clinton for the nightly news reports on stained dresses and adulterous liaisons. The fact is that the media in Canada rightly regard such activities by Canadian politicians as outside of the public interest and do not report them. It is Kenneth Starr who has decided that the President’s private life should be invaded, and the U.S. media, especially CNN, dutifully– and gleefully– report the salacious details. The Canadian media, rightly and honorably, respects the fact that even politicians are entitled to private lives.

And by the way, isn’t righteous CNN host Larry King working on wife #5?

Neither Newt Gingrich nor Bob Dole, the leaders of the Republican Party, are married to their first wives. But hey, Mr. Sibley, Dan Quayle is! And he is reportedly optimistic that a Republican candidate can defeat Bill Clinton in the year 2000. That would be remarkable indeed, since Bill Clinton can’t run in 2000, having already served two terms.

Nobody likes what Clinton did, but most Americans at least have the good sense to tell pollsters over and over again that they don’t believe they need to hear about it. Maybe they believe that real character includes other attributes, such as respect for privacy, concern for the environment, sound fiscal management (Clinton has the deficit under control), and respect for the expressed wishes of the electorate. Rome is burning while Starr and his Republican satyrs play their twisted fiddles, hoping and praying that what they could not achieve in a fair election or honest discourse can be won with devious snitches and brazen hypocrisy.

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A Coup’d’etat

I haven’t hear the phrase “coup d’etat” used in a headline since the 1960’s, in connection with Greece, Chile, and other Latin American countries. It’s time to bring it back into popular usage. What we are seeing in the U.S. right now is either a coup d’etat, or mass lunacy on an unimaginable scale.

Ask yourself this: does the American public have the right to know details about the sex lives of political leaders? Yes? No? Only if the sex includes criminal behaviour? How do we know if the behavior is criminal? If there is a victim, a plaintiff. Is there a plaintiff in the Lewinsky scandal? Not that we know of.

The Republican’s argue that… well, their arguments are so absurd they don’t bear repeating. They always turn the discussion towards the salacious, without offering any details of what exactly the President has done that is so evil that the entire mechanism of government must be brought to a halt in order to confront it. That’s because no such issue exists.

Ask yourself this: do you want the President of the world’s most powerful country to spend his time dealing with the economy, international affairs, and national security, or explaining to a bunch of partisan Republican pit bulls the details of his sex life? This is not as trivial a question as the media would have you believe right now. In fact, this question is an insane question. If you feel that this is a legitimate question, with all due respect, I think you are insane.

I think most people think that this issue really is important because the national media spend all their time and resources covering the story, instead of, say, the fact that Saddam Hussein once again is defying the United Nations arms inspectors. The media cover the story with preposterous obsessiveness because, well, how often do you have a pretense to discuss the President’s sex life on TV? Almost never. But here you have an Independent Prosecutor actually investigating the President’s sexual behaviour and leaking it all over the place– it’s a tabloid’s dream come true. Even Dan Rather came rushing back from Cuba to breathlessly report on the semen-stained dress. Is he insane? Has he lost all perspective? Is he an idiot? I’m beginning to think so.

Yet, most Americans continue to insist that they don’t think it’s important. They’re not sure why it’s in their face every day, but they watch, and then, again, wonder why it is so important? Every time CNN does a “town hall” on the issue, most of the “average” citizens say they don’t care, and the polls confirm that the vast majority of Americans continue to feel that way. Maybe the vast majority of Americans are smarter than you think.

The essential dynamic is this: through the existence of the Independent Prosecutor and their majority in the House and the Senate, partisan Republicans are able to keep the investigation going no matter how utterly, incomprehensibly absurd the whole thing becomes. This is a classic example of what Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, called “the big lie”. You take an absurd proposition, that the President of the United States should be prevented from exercising the functions of his office because an idiot independent prosecutor thinks he may have had consensual sex in the White House, and you simply stand around for seven months and act as if it is unimaginable to think otherwise.

Orin Hatch is now a stand-up comedian. He looks like Buster Keaton with his deadpan face, solemnly intoning into the camera, “Yes, we may have to impeach the leader of the free world if it appears that he has lied about having sex.” I can’t watch him without imagining that the minute the camera goes away, he’s going to collapse into hysterical laughter.

What the Lewinsky scandal and Kenneth Starr’s investigation really means is that the Republicans care so little for the legitimate governance of the state and have so little respect for the electoral process that they are willing to go to almost any lengths to sabotage the Clinton administration. Having lost the election fair and square, they refuse to accept or respect the results. They are using any means at their disposal to destroy the presidency. This is the real story, and the press should be exploring the profound political implications of what is happening here. When is the last time anyone on CNN discussed the following issues:

1. Will the electorate lash out at the Republicans this fall and give the Democrats a majority in both houses of Congress?

2. Will the Democrats take revenge when they do get control of Congress, and thereby chairmanship (and agenda) of the committees that investigate these matters?

3. Will the Democrats bring down the next Republican President the same way? Have you thought about that? The Republicans have established a new benchmark of political brutality. The Democrats are not likely to forgive and forget, and one almost wishes they wouldn’t. Do you think it would be any harder for the Democrats to find a pretense to cripple the presidency of, say, (ha ha) a Dan Quayle?

4. Will the next Presidential campaign focus almost entirely on the sexual behaviour of the candidates?

5. Do you really want a president who can survive this kind of microscopic examination of his personal life?

6. Of the presidents who served in this century, here are the probable or definite philanderers: Franklin Roosevelt,  Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton.

Here’s the “pure” non-philanderers (as far as we know):  Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Walker Bush.

Well? Who do you prefer?

One last absurdist note from the irrepressible Dan Quayle. He thinks that the Republicans should be able to find a candidate in 2000 who can beat Bill Clinton. Well, yes, they might: Clinton can’t run in 2000– he’s already served two terms.

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Our Enemy, Iraq, Straddles the Globe

And we shall have a mighty victory which the world will celebrate with trumpets and cake.

Here is the map of Iraq published recently in Time Magazine, to get you all excited about the coming victory:

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And here is a more objective rendering of the same area:

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Notice something?

Yes, Time Magazine has made Iraq much, much bigger than it should be.  That is Time Magazine, my friend, tireless cheerleader for the American military.