Category: Sexual Politics

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What the Media Won’t tell you About Bill Clinton

According to Robert Bennett, Bill Clinton’s lawyer, Kathleen Willey is in the process of negotiating a $300,000 book deal. Coincidentally, she decided that “enough people have suffered” so it was time for her to tell the truth, on national television.

Well, why shouldn’t she? Everyone else is cashing in: Tripp, Kenneth Star, Orrin Hatch….. And no one is cashing in more than the media. The media have made the Clinton scandal the #1 story of the decade. They act as if this story is more important than Cuba, more important than Kosovo, more important than Bill Gates, more important than Iraq. Heavens, I think they might even believe it is more important than Princess Diana!

There is a paradox at the heart of the Clinton Scandal. I haven’t seen any hard numbers yet, but obviously people are tuning in to see the story and buying the newspapers and magazines that feature it prominently on the front page. (Or are they? Only 10 million tuned in to the 60 Minutes interview with Willey: that’s not an impressive number.) Yet poll after poll shows that Clinton’s approval ratings are actually rising. In other words, the average voter loves to read the lurid tales of sex and infidelity (fess up: don’t you?), but when Oral Hatch (don’t you just wish that really was his name?) goes on television and declares that the Willey allegations, if true, should lead to impeachment… they are laughing their heads off. No way!

As I watch some of the television reports on the scandal, and the discussion of the media’s coverage of the scandal, and coverage of the media’s discussion of their coverage of the scandal, I get the sense that some crucial issue at the core of all this is missing. Of course it is. The one thing the media cannot and will not admit to you is that this story is really a tabloid story, a cheap, tawdry scandal of absolutely no importance whatsoever, and not worthy of a serious national media. Picture Dan Rather saying: “And now, we will depart from our usual practice of informing you about wars, economics, and politics, to give you a blow by blow description of the President groping a woman with big breasts.” The question, contrary to what the media say, is not “is it true”. The question is, “is it important, or just juicy?”

How important is this story? How do you measure importance? There is a strong evidence to indicate that the average American voter rates “importance” on a scale based on the answer to the question: how does this affect me?

We have to be careful to exclude self-fulfilling prophecy. To say the story is important because the media are giving it a lot of coverage, is an Alice in Wonderland argument– “the story is important because I say it is important.” In the same way, if the Republicans ever dared to try to impeach Clinton on the basis of these allegations, the real story would be the coup d’état, not the Clinton scandal.

So how does this story affect you? Will it make your taxes go up? Are you more likely to lose your job? Will your children get a better education? Will the world be at peace? Will your access to the Internet be controlled by the government, or Microsoft, or nobody as a result? Will it cause your parents be more likely to end up in a nursing home? Will it improve television? (Not so far.) Will your insurance company be more likely to tell your doctor which treatments he is allowed to give you, because Monica Lewinsky cleaned her dress? Who will lead the Soviet Union after Monica testifies? Should we grant “most favoured nation” trading status to any country that will accept Linda Tripp as ambassador?

The answer to all of the above, of course, is no, unless, as I suggested, the Republicans dare to proceed with impeachment hearings. But those issues are what the people elect a government to deal with, and the voters have loudly proclaimed, again and again, that they feel Bill Clinton is doing the job they elected him to do.

Let’s get one thing clear: the public is not indicating that they don’t care about crimes committed by the president. I don’t think they have heard of anything yet that they would consider a crime, in the substantive sense of the word. Paula Jones has no case, and she knows it, and her lawyers know it. Lewinsky has never complained about her treatment. Kathleen Willey made no complaint. If there was a crime, who was the victim? Who is the plaintive?

The other great omission: last I heard, there were congressional elections coming up this year. The House of Representatives is currently controlled by the Republicans, by a small margin; the Senate, by a slightly larger margin. I have not heard a single newscaster yet remark on the fact that if the Republicans aggressively pursued impeachment, given the current attitude of the electorate, they might just get quashed in November. If I were a betting man, I’d bet you that people like Newt Gingrich and John McCain have given this a lot of thought. Furthermore, impeachment or no impeachment, if I were a Republican, I would be a little worried about the November elections. What if the voters decide to send a real message to Congress?

What does Clinton’s 67% approval really mean?

Most people believe Clinton did it. The media knows the public believes the stories so they think that the public doesn’t care, or that the public shares Bill’s amoral attitudes, and that’s why they continue to approve.

I don’t believe it. I think the public are disgusted with Clinton, but I think they are even more disgusted with the intrusive, harassing, jackal mentality of the media. I think that it means the public is disgusted with Kenneth Starr and Oral Hatch, even as they enjoy reading the lurid details of the scandal.

This is a junk food story: yes, if it’s on the table in front of me, I’ll nibble, but it’s still junk food and if you continue to stick it into my face, I’m going to get very, very angry with you.

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Nixon vs Clinton

Many Republicans in the U.S. have publicly compared the Monica Lewinsky scandal with the Watergate scandal of the Nixon Administration. Some of these same Republicans used to say that Watergate was nothing more than politics and Nixon should never have been forced to resign. Nixon used to say so himself. So if the Lewinsky scandal is similar to Watergate, then I guess they are saying that Clinton shouldn’t resign either.

Just to set the record straight, I thought I would render a public service by offering a short refresher on Watergate.

In the early planning stages of the 1972 election campaign, a night watchman at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. spotted some masking tape over a lock on a door leading to the National Headquarters of the Democratic Party. He called the police and several men were arrested and charged with burglary. At the hearing before a District Court, one of the men admitted that he had been an employee of the CIA. A reporter for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, got curious about this connection and started investigating the case more thoroughly.

So Watergate began with a criminal act. A criminal act is a violation of the public laws of the land. The Lewinsky affair, of course, began with a case of adultery. And because Lewinsky was a consenting partner to the offense, there was no criminal act involved (though the Republicans made more than a passing attempt to characterize Clinton’s actions as “sexual harassment”, because it involved an employee. Republican House Leader, Newt Gingrich, at precisely the same time, was having an affair with one of his own office employees, while his wife was ill with cancer!)

A few months later, Bob Haldeman, one of Richard Nixon’s top aides, informed the President that the FBI was investigating the burglary. Nixon instructed Haldeman to tell the FBI to stop their investigation, and he agreed to a payment of “hush money” to the burglars. This is called “Obstruction of Justice” in legal terms and is a serious criminal offense, especially when it is committed by a public official entrusted with the authority to enforce the law.

There is no evidence that Clinton attempted to use his office to influence the investigation of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Even if you believe the worst case scenario, that Clinton asked Lewinsky to lie to the Special Prosecutor, no sane person would regard such activity as being in any way comparable to authorizing the disbursement of bribes or attempting to interfere with the criminal investigation of a burglary of a political party’s national headquarters. We should add that the burglars were attempting to plant listening devices on the phones in the offices of the Chairman of the Democratic Party. This certainly goes beyond what Nixon liked to characterize as “dirty tricks” when discussing other acts of sabotage conducted by his underlings during the election campaigns. At the core of the Watergate scandal, there were a number of discrete criminal acts, and the cover-up was intended to prevent the men who committed these acts from being caught. As much as the Republicans would like to suggest that Clinton’s attempts to conceal his affair with Monica constituted a similar act of malfeasance, it is absurd to say that because both Nixon and Clinton tried to conceal that they were concealing actions that were substantively similar.

Nixon’s legal advisor, Charles Colson, was instructed to keep a list of “enemies”. This list included political commentators like CBS’s Daniel Schorr, liberal activist performers like Paul Newman, and other public figures and journalists. The Internal Revenue Service was instructed to conduct thorough audits of the tax returns of many of the people on the list. This is a rather serious abuse of authority.

Nixon’s staff hired former CIA employees to break into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in a coordinated attempt to discredit the well-known source of “The Pentagon Papers”. This, of course, again, was a criminal act. We don’t know if Nixon knew about it before it was carried out, but he definitely knew about it afterwards and again authorized a cover-up.

Nixon ordered secret bombings of Cambodia despite legislation which clearly required him to inform Congress promptly of such measures. He ordered his staff to lie about the bombings before a Congressional Committee. As a result of these bombings, the government of Cambodia was destabilized and subsequently over-thrown by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge conducted wholesale massacres afterwards, leading to the deaths of millions of Cambodians. The U.S. was already in a state of undeclared war with North Viet Nam (no official declaration was ever made). The bombing of Cambodia was a very serious violation of the rights of a sovereign nation.

Nixon’s personal choice for Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was charged with influence peddling and extortion and forced to resign. I suppose it’s not a crime to select a criminal to be second-in-line to the office of President of the United States, but it ought to be. Al Gore, on the other hand, is squeaky clean.

Nixon fired the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, after the Supreme Court ruled that the President must accede to his request to turn over the secret tapes of conversations held in the Oval Office shortly after the Watergate break-in. Had he not resigned, this action alone, which was in defiance and contempt of the highest court in the nation, would have been almost certain grounds for impeachment. When Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, refused to fire Cox, Richardson was fired. When Richardson’s deputy refused to do it, he too was fired. FBI agents were then ordered to seize the offices of the Special Prosecutor.

The move backfired, and alienated even some of Nixon’s staunchest supporters. He was forced to back down and appoint a new Special Prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who promptly renewed the demand for the tapes.

Having exhausted his legal options, Nixon finally turned over some of the tapes, after announcing that several were missing and that one of the key tapes had an 18-minute gap. Nixon denied that he had ordered the destruction of evidence, but it stretches credulity to believe that he was unaware of the gaps or missing tapes until the day he finally turned them over to the Special Prosecutor.

The tapes revealed that Nixon had in fact participated in the cover-up, ordered the destruction of evidence, ordered his staff to lie to Congress and the Special Prosecutor, ordered hush money to be paid out to informers out of a secret fund controlled by the White House, and had openly suggested that intimidation and extortion could be used to obstruct the investigation. More significantly, the tapes demonstrated that Richard Nixon believed that he was above and outside of the law. The conversations reveal a petty, insecure, vindictive little man who thought nothing of using the privileges of his office to lash out at political enemies and intimidate those who thwarted his plans. When he tried to use “Executive Privilege” to hide evidence of his wrong-doing, he became a genuine threat to the rule of law and the democratic process and to the institutions of accountable government. His crimes were very serious and, had he not resigned, he deserved to be impeached, and he would certainly have been impeached, and a large number of Republicans, (including present Secretary of Defense, William Cohen), would have joined the Democrats in voting for impeachment.

To compare the Lewinsky affair to Watergate is ludicrous.

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We are Shocked: Clinton vs Nixon

Of course we’re all shocked. The President may have had sex with an attractive young intern. He was the President. He was twice her age. He was in a position of power and authority. He shouldn’t have done it.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a clear-headed look at what’s going on. The controversy started when a woman known to be hostile to Bill Clinton (she was a holdover from the Bush administration) secretly and apparently illegally taped conversations with Monica Lewinsky about the alleged affair. The Special Prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, accepted this evidence even though it was acquired illegally, but not before Ms. Tripp had given a copy of some of the tapes to her agent, who once spied on George McGovern’s presidential campaign on behalf of the Republicans and is also known as a Clinton-hater. The information on the tapes, like everything else from Kenneth Starr’s office, is leaked all over the place, but not to anybody with the guts, courage, or integrity to go “on-record”. For three days, we have had nothing but hysterical innuendo without any of the normal checks and balances required of professional journalism. For example, CNN reports that the President’s version of events contradicts Ms. Lewinsky’s. That’s a hoot: Ms. Lewinski has not made any official statement other than the one which insisted that there was no affair. The contradiction is with what the anonymous sources say Ms. Lewinsky said on tape to Ms. Tripp, who is the Benedict Arnold of this scandal.

Anyway, the details are already pretty tired. Most Americans, apparently, continue to approve of the Clinton administration (he lost 2 percentage points!).

What we have is one of the ugliest political scenes since the Profumo scandal in Britain in the 1960’s. And the ugliest aspect of it all is the lurid fascination of watching a nation throw itself into paroxysms of righteous indignation over a petty consensual relationship between the President and a young admirer. Even if it is proven that Clinton advised her to lie to the Special Prosecutor, the idea of impeaching the “leader of the free world” because of a sexual indiscretion is bizarre.

Don’t even mention comparisons to Watergate. Nixon conspired with his senior staff, including the Attorney-General, to cover-up numerous serious criminal acts, including misuse of the FBI and the IRS to harass and spy on political opponents. He maintained an illegal “slush” fund. He accepted illegal, under-the-table campaign contributions. He destroyed evidence and fired the Attorney General when the investigation drew too near to the Oval Office. The list of offenses was so long and detailed that the Democrats didn’t even bother to pursue the charge that he cheated on his income taxes. His staff committed real crimes, including burglary and bribery, and tried to obstruct the investigation of those crimes.

Clinton had an affair. He may be a jerk, but he is not a criminal. Whitewater, you say? The Republicans have tried desperately for five years to find evidence of any kind to indicate that Clinton committed a crime. In spite of all their efforts, no such evidence has surfaced.

The Republicans, in what appears to me to be a highly coordinated strategy, are laying low, hoping to downplay the suspicion that all of these charges are politically inspired. Having learned their lesson from the highly negative reaction to the government shut-down last year– a result of their stubborn determination to sabotage the Clinton administration–they are trying very hard to convey the impression that they are taking the “high road”. Don’t be fooled: they know exactly what they’re doing. When the time comes, if the public can be swayed against Clinton, they’ll demand their pound of flesh. It’s been more than 25 years, but they won’t think it’s too late to retaliate for Watergate.

The question any alert observer would have to ask is, do they really want to give Al Gore a two-year head start on the next election? Maybe, maybe not. It might be easier to fight an incumbent who can be blamed for just about anything that happens in the country, than a fresh-face with creditable experience and political savvy. I’m not sure of the read on this one, but I do know one thing: we’re not getting the whole story.

More and more citizens appear to be adopting the view that this is all politics as usual in Washington D.C. Generally, they feel Clinton is doing a good job– the economy is booming–and don’t want to see a change.

I’ll go out on a limb and make a forecast: a reaction will set in shortly. The media will do some self-analysis and conclude that they may have gotten carried away. Clinton will go on the attack. The American public will perceive this attack as being an indictment of the media that splashes stories about semen-stained dresses on the nightly news, and they will quietly approve. Gore will be president… in 2000.