Tag: Clinton

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The Curious and Unfortunate Fate of Wen Ho Lee.

Without the big bad Russians to kick around any more, what is the U.S. military-industrial establishment to do? There must be somebody out there scary enough to drum up another $300 billion or so for preposterous defense schemes. Cuba? Pretty scary, you must admit, but with Castro getting a little long in the tooth and a population of only about 4 million of which 3.999 million are more interested in baseball and mariachi bands, there’s not much to muster there.

Well, hey, you don’t have to look too far. There’s the red devil himself, China, just sitting there with about two billion people, and a communist government.

Of course, China hasn’t even been able to scare Taiwan into submission yet, so first you’ve got to puff them up a little. What if they had nuclear bombs? Oh dear! Oh my! The Chinese with nuclear weapons! But how did they get nuclear weapons? They already had them? They must have stolen them from us! They must have been spying on us. They probably have spies everywhere. Just look around you. Just look at those scientists working at the Los Alamos Nuclear Research Laboratory. Hey… look at that guy....

This week, a U.S. District Judge, James Parker, apologized to Wen Ho Lee for the idiotic persecution of the 60-year-old Taiwan-born scientist for allegedly selling nuclear secrets to the Chinese. Attorney General Janet Reno– possibly the worst attorney general in the recent history of the United States– refused to say she was sorry. She said, in essence, that if only Mr. Lee had cooperated as he should have he never would have been in so much trouble. How nice to know that the chief law enforcement officer of the United States has officially pronounced that innocent citizens have no need to fear incarceration as long as they “cooperate”.

Not much is known any more about what really happened to start this mess, but it is clear that there was never any significant reason to believe that Lee had sold vital nuclear secrets to the Chinese. But prosecutors claimed that Lee had downloaded thousands of megabytes of information about nuclear weapons onto his laptop computer without permission. They figured he was ready to pack them all off to China.

Lee, and others who work in the field, immediately insisted that though downloading the files was technically against the rules at the Los Alamos Research Laboratory, “everybody did it”. Everybody did it, but not everybody looked Chinese.

Wen Ho Lee was the victim of a right-wing paranoid fantasy. Prosecutors and politicians chose Lee to bear the brunt of their irrational hysteria that somehow the Chinese were getting ready to take over the world. Chances are that many of the individuals involved in persecuting Mr. Lee actually thought he was born Chinese. After all, he had slanty eyes, didn’t he? I’d love to be able to lay this exclusively at the feet of the Republicans but the truth is that high officials at the Department of Energy and the Executive– eager to be more paranoid than thou when it came to military security– were at least equally responsible. Clinton, playing the centrist, did nothing to help Lee even though most sane observers were very quick to point out the absurdities in the prosecution’s case. Al Gore hasn’t said a single decent, respectable thing about the case. Bush would like to have you believe that he is so smart that all spies will be caught under his administration.

The Republicans, meanwhile, after encouraging the prosecution with their paranoid hysteria, are now trying to politicize the case by demanding an inquiry into the investigation!

Lee was held for 278 days in solitary confinement after being charged with 59 counts of espionage. The prosecution’s case fell apart when an FBI official named Robert Messemer admitted that he had distorted an interview he had with Lee. In other words, he lied— to a judge– about Lee’s responses to questions he had asked him before last December.

But even before Messemer’s confessions, reputable experts and analysts were insisting that none of the “secrets” Mr. Lee is alleged to have copied to his laptop computer were actually “secret”. In fact, virtually all of the information was already available in trade documents and on the internet.

As usual, grossly incompetent lawyers know how to protect themselves. They argue that Lee probably really is guilty, but they just can’t prove it. So while asserting, on the one hand, that he really did intend to sell “the crown jewels” of U.S. nuclear research to some other country– a capital offense– they admit that they have such a weak case that they will release him after time served already.

There is an ugly dynamic here. The prosecutors, possibly dimly aware of looking like idiots, are now desperate for any kind of vindication, no matter how meager. They got it with this perverse deal with Lee: he pleads guilty to a very minor charge, and they call off the hounds. This is called bullying, harassment, extortion, when it is performed by anyone but the police or the government or lawyers.

You can’t have it both ways. Either he’s guilty and you’re incompetent and you bungled the investigation, or he’s innocent and you are cold-blooded liars, as well as incompetent.

Clinton should do the right thing for a change. All the persons involved in persecuting Mr. Lee should be summarily dismissed. Mr. Lee’s good name should be cleared and he should be restored to his position at Los Alamos.

Last minute note: I just read that President Clinton did at least part of the right thing. He has chastised the Department of Justice for the way they handled the investigation and indicated that he believes Mr. Lee’s rights were violated. Meanwhile, Attorney-General Janet Reno continues to insist her department did nothing wrong. But then, Janet Reno’s initial claim to fame (and stepping stone into a political career) came from the dubious prosecution of a Satanic Ritual Abuse case in Florida in the 1980’s. And we all know what THAT was about….

More on Janet Reno’s colourful past.

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The So-Called Left Wing Media

Where is the Liberal Media?

I was discussing the long dead Clinton scandal the other day with someone. When she insisted that he really did deserve impeachment, I pointed out that the vast majority of Americans didn’t agree with her. She said, “Oh well, that’s the liberal media…”

The liberal media? What liberal media?

I didn’t want to embarrass this person, but I wanted to ask her to identify a single specific example of “liberal media”. Who can she possibly mean? The New York Times? The Wall Street Journal? The Washington Post? The Chicago Tribune? Who? CBS news? ABC news? CNN? U.S. News and World Report? The New Republic? Who?

The media represent one point of view: profit. The media are, almost without exception, owned by corporations, and most of the owners of these corporations are extremely conservative. (The only exceptions, really, are the CBC in Canada and, to a limited extent, PBS in the U.S. However, PBS has lately adopted a far more conservative slant thanks to threats from the Republican majority in Congress, who constantly whine about the mythical “liberal” bias of the network. Look at how often Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak get their ugly mugs onto the air.)

The objective of most news organizations nowadays is very simple: get as many readers/viewers/listeners as possible in order to generate as much advertising revenue as possible. Most of the media thus merely reflect popular opinion. Right now, it is quite trendy, in the U.S., to give harsh sentences to petty criminals. Can you name a single media outlet, newspaper, or television editorialist in the U.S. that advocates the contrary?

How many news outlets in the U.S., editorially or through the selective rendering of news stories, advocate the following:

  • legalization of marijuana
  • cuts to the defense budget
  • the passing of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, for women
  • more sex education in public schools
  • more spending on welfare or other programs that help the poor
  • forgiveness of those debilitating loans which impoverish the third world
  • elimination of capital punishment
  • more regulation of the chemical industry
  • liberalization of the copyright laws

Where is this so-called liberal media?

If there was a liberal media, why didn’t it come out in force during the Clinton impeachment hearings and denounce the scurrilous allegations made by Henry Hyde and his fellow hale hypocrites? Where were the stalwart defenders of Clinton’s wildly progressive, activist government?

You must realize that the bias of the media is reflected primarily in the decision of which story to report and how to report it, rather than in overt editorial content. Thus, when Dan Rather, with his monumental ego, raced back from Cuba and the papal visit–the first to that communist country ever–to report on the semen-stained dress, a momentous indicator of media bias was at hand: the important story is a scandal with elements of lurid sex. Why? Because sex sells. That is the “media” bias. And this bias dominated all branches of U.S. media, from radio talk shows to the Washington Post to the New York Times and CNN. All of them made the scandal their headline stories. You could make an excellent case for the argument that the media was exceedingly biased in favor of the conservative point of view on the scandal, except that the truth is that the media simply wanted to sell advertising dollars.

Even so, after watching CNN on a regular basis for a few weeks, I found it astonishing that most Americans continued to resist this overwhelming drive to convince them that Clinton’s “monstrous” act of consensual groping should result in impeachment.

What is even more preposterous is the idea that a defender of Bill Clinton would be a “liberal” because Bill Clinton is a liberal. Bill Clinton is pro-capital punishment, pro-free enterprise, pro-GTO, and his idea of “reforming” welfare consists of booting people off it. This is a “liberal”? Could someone please point out to me a single “liberal” policy of the Clinton administration? Well, he balanced the budget. Judging from the performances of Bush and Reagan, I guess you would now have to regard balanced budgets as a “liberal” value.

Still, it must be confessed, that real liberals generally thought the whole Lewinsky scandal was a cynical plot by the Republicans to oust a president they never believed was legitimately elected in the first place. But they certainly didn’t get any comfort from a “liberal” media (whom the Republicans also blame for Clinton’s election in the first place).

In Canada, I suppose you could argue that, in addition to the CBC, the Toronto Star is “liberal”. That leaves the Globe and Mail and the Post, in Toronto as bastions of conservatism. As for every other major community in Ontario…The London Free Press? The Hamilton Spectator? The Niagara Falls Review? The St. Catharines Standard? Read their editorials. All of them are fundamentally conservative.

Most newspapers in Ontario are owned by Southam, which is owned by Conrad Black (the owner of the Post), an arch-conservative who wants to be a British Peer when he isn’t busy clearing up editorial space for his wife, Buffy. The Post is rather extreme, even for Conrad Black. Every story is selectively presented to emphasize a conservative axiom. Every headline invites reactionary scorn for Liberal policy. Editorials hammer at our decadently tolerant society.

The Globe and Mail is reliably conservative, but with good taste. It respects some diversity in point of view. To paraphrase the man who finally stood up to Joseph McCarthy, it has some “decency”.

The CBC certainly leans to the left, but hands the pulpit over to reactionaries on a regular basis, if for no other reason than to prove they are tolerant of all points of view—a bedrock liberal value. In television, that leaves Global and CTV and everyone else—all conservative (especially CTV).

So why, if there really isn’t a liberal media, do conservatives persist in blaming it for Clinton’s success? Well, because, to believe otherwise, is to admit that your arguments have been fairly presented and argued before the public and were not convincing to large numbers of people. Better to argue that they were tricked and deceived than that they believe you were wrong.

Or that the circulation of “The Nation” is a lot bigger than is widely believed.

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Clinton’s Welfare Mothers

If you have read some of my rants on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, you would quickly realize that I don’t like most of the Republican leaders. You might even think that I do like President Clinton. Well, I don’t. Much. Never have and never will.

Bill Clinton is a gutless pragmatist who got himself elected by out-flanking the Republicans on issues like welfare reform and balanced budgets. I don’t think he is a bad president. He may well be regarded, some day, as a successful administrator who was bitterly harassed by a bunch of Lilliputian partisans. He is certainly a better president than Reagan was: he is more competent, more astute, and a better leader. But he is also in favour of capital punishment, and he signed legislation dumping hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients into the dustbin of economic Darwinism.

Whatever happened to those welfare mothers? They all found jobs, right? Well, some of them probably did, but not because of welfare reform. Has anybody noticed that this problem is waiting for the next recession to explode? And it will explode. If (or when) the economy finally does go into even a minor recession, and unemployment rises, we will see poverty on a scale unimagined since the Great Depression. And Clinton, and the Republicans who drafted the legislation, won’t even get blamed. You know who will get blamed? President Dole or President Quayle or President Gore, or whomever.

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Cry Me a River

I just watched Bill Clinton’s State of the Union Address. Coming as it does, in the middle of impeachment hearings, it was extraordinary. It may well be the best political speech I have seen in the past ten years. You could not have guessed that the man delivering it was living his life under a cloud.

The Republicans are playing a peculiar game. The State of the Union Address was a no-win situation for them. Sit and growl and you look like sore losers. Stand and applaud, and you have to answer the question: why are you trying to impeach him? Conservatives say that the Republicans are showing a lot of principle here– they are willing to buck a year’s worth of polls that show, with uncanny consistency, that the voters utterly reject impeachment.

Is this really “principle”? I don’t believe it. Remember, we’re talking about politicians here who routinely accept large donations from big corporations in exchange for altering or creating legislation that favours their interests. Remember, we’re talking about politicians who want to rely on chemical companies to tell us if they think some of their products might be doing harm to the environment. Remember, we’re talking about politicians who not only give away our forests to the lumber companies, but also charge the taxpayers for the cost of building logging roads, and who think that “global warming” is a left-wing hoax. Remember, we’re talking Jesse Helms, and Bob Barr, and Henry Hyde here. They ask us to believe that nothing matters more to them than “principle”.

I suspect that many of the hardcore conservatives in the Republican Party have come to believe that polls reflect the effects of some kind of magical spell woven by the Clinton administration and the media, which will evaporate like moon-dust the minute Clinton is actually removed from office. They firmly believe that in two years, the voters will not care who impeached whom, and will once again vote for the “righteous” party, the party of self-interest, the party of guns, the party of big military bands, the party of Star Wars, the party of Kenneth Starr.

* * *

If anyone needed any further convincing that Kenneth Starr is a modern day Grand Inquisitor, consider the case of Julie Hiatt Steele. (If you haven’t already been convinced by his treatment–harassment, rather– of Webster Hubbell and Susan McDougall).

Julie Hiatt Steele got a phone call from Kathleen Wiley one day. Kathleen Wiley was going to tell the media that President Clinton had groped her on a visit to the Oval Office. She didn’t want anyone to think she had made up this story after hearing about all the other scandals involving Bill Clinton so she asked Julie Hiatt Steele to tell a reporter that Wiley had told her about the groping long before the headlines about Monica Lewinsky. Long before the book deal.

Julie Hiatt Steele agreed to do so. She called a reporter and confirmed the story.

A few days later, she called the reporter for whom she had confirmed Wiley’s story and told him that she had lied, and that Wiley had asked her to lie. The story wasn’t true.

I don’t think any of us will ever know why exactly.

Julie Hiatt Steele has now been charged, by Grand Inquisitor Kenneth Starr, with perjury and obstruction of justice. Her tax, bank and telephone records have been seized by Starr’s office. Her brother, accountant, and former attorney have been called in to testify. She could receive up to 54 years in jail. Julie Hiatt Steele has no other involvement in this case. She has never been to the White House. She has never had any contact with any person from the White House. She has recently adopted a Romanian orphan. She is a single mother. Her sin was to dispute Kathleen Wiley’s account of what happened after her meeting with President Clinton, testimony that Starr wanted very badly in order to persuade the Senate to impeach Clinton.

Kenneth Starr, beneath that smug, pious exterior, is a fanatic with unlimited power who is out of control. If the Republicans really believe that he has been impartial, they should sign a pledge that they will renew the Independent Prosecutor’s position when it comes up again even if there is a Republican President.

Kenneth Starr believes that Julie Hiatt Steele conspired with the Clinton White House to sabotage Kathleen Wiley’s allegations. This is kind of a strange idea, because, until the reporter called on Ms. Steele, nobody even knew who she was. It’s hard to imagine how the White House could have gotten to her before anybody in the media knew her name.

It is also hard to imagine an act more cynical, unscrupulous, and devious, than to indict this woman for perjury on the day of the State of the Union Address.

If you get a chance, watch Julie Steele in interviews. She seems like a very bright, articulate, decent person. She answers questions directly, quickly, with apparent candor. She is frightened and astounded that this indictment could happen to her in the United States of America, under the statute that gives Kenneth Starr almost unlimited power. We’re talking about a single mother here who has never committed a crime in her life being threatened with 54 years in prison. Even Marlin Fitzwater, the press secretary for George Bush, said he was appalled.

It appears that Kenneth Starr is punishing Ms. Steele for failing to collaborate his increasingly hysterical views of the Clinton White House.

Remember we all laughed when Hillary Clinton alleged a right wing conspiracy. Well, I sort of laughed. I thought it was a cheap shot, a political statement, not meant to be taken seriously. It’s smart to be skeptical of both sides on this issue.

Now I’m beginning to wonder. You have to keep in mind that the Jones case itself only survived judicial scorn through the efforts of wealthy Clinton foe Richard Scaife.

I suppose it is possible that Ms. Steele is an amazing liar. Either that, or Kenneth Starr is one amazing little fascist.

* * *

If the Senate does call witnesses, as everyone says they will, it becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend the Republican “strategy”. It is said that they favour calling Monica Lewinsky, Vernon Jordan, and Betty Currie.

I can’t imagine what they expect to gain. Monica is likely to repeat her statement that nobody promised her a job in exchange for her silence, or asked her to lie. If the managers from the House hope to intimidate her or shake her testimony, they will have to resort to some rather ham-fisted tactics, which don’t play very well on tv. I would expect the Republicans will try to have these hearings closed to the public, but, like I said, Republican strategy here is baffling.

How will it look on TV, to have frisky little Monica Lewinsky testify in front of 91 white men who are all old enough to be her father, and 9 women?

Betty Currie is another dangerous witness for the Republicans. Picture the svelte, sensitive Bob Barr, or Henry Hyde questioning this middle-age black secretary about who really arranged for the gifts to Monica Lewinsky to be returned. If she says, “I don’t really remember”, will one of the Inquisitors really go, “Come now, Mrs. Currie!” In front of the nation? Will William McCollum crack his whip or his wit? Will Trent Lott offer her a smoke, courtesy of the Tobacco Industry he has served so well in exchange for generous contributions, or invite her to a meeting of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist group to which he has given fawning keynote addresses?

How many people, besides myself, will glance around the Senate at that moment to determine who many black members are sitting? Take a guess.

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Trent Lott (2nd from left) with CCC members.

Then there is Vernon Jordan, the real bogey-man for the Falwell-inspired conspiracy buffs. Who is this mysterious man, operating in the shadows, elusive and silent in the face of all this cacophony? Well, by all accounts, he is a very shrewd, very intelligent man, who might just slice the Republican inquisitors to ribbons with his replies. The Republicans want to play with this witness?

And what if the Democrats call Linda Tripp? What if they call that slime-ball book agent from New York who first advised Linda to tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky– Lucianne Goldberg? One could not imagine more appealing witnesses favourable to the prosecution other than Dracula and Frankenstein. What if they highlight Linda Tripps’ perjury, when she declared that she had no interest in writing a book on the subject to a Grand Jury— while tapes show that she was discussing with Ms. Goldberg how much information to hold back from Newsweek so she would still be able to command big bucks for an exclusive book contract?

* * *

Perhaps one of the most hysterically absurd myths about the Clinton scandal is that the media is in cahoots with the Democrats. I am in cahoots with the Democrats, and I have never been as infuriated with the media as I have been for the past year. I have watched endless hours of CNN– the 24-hour impeachment channel– and ABC and NBC and CBS. I’ve seen Dan Rather summoned back from Cuba to analyze the profound social and political implications of a semen-stained dress. I’ve seen reporters stare into a camera with a straight face and tell the world about the gravity of a situation which I found utterly hysterical and ridiculous. I’ve seen Larry King–divorced and re-married five times himself– solemnly pronounce that the entire nation was disgraced by Clinton’s sexual behavior.

And these are Clinton’s allies?

Well, lately, maybe they are. CNN has taken a more sober perspective. Jeff Greenfield now finds the impeachment somewhat bizarre. Greta Vansusteran now concedes that no reputable prosecutor would have proceeded with the case. Larry King arches his eyebrows and frowns while interviewing the indicted Julie Hiatt Steele. Bernard Shaw appears to grimace just a little while interviewing Bob Barr.

But Sam Donaldson still looks pretty solemn as he interviews Larry Flynt.

For the record, I would defy these people to name a single commentator in a major American television news department or news magazine who has given a “liberal” view of things, which is, that this has never been and never will be anything else but a desperate attempt by the Republicans to sabotage and destroy a Democratic administration. Yes, some of them may genuinely believe that Clinton’s offenses were serious. Most of them have simply been absorbed into the hysteria. They have no idea of what is up or down, left or right, rational or hysterical. They are simply in the middle of a political vortex that continues to spin out of control.

The real truth was accidentally revealed by Henry Hyde on Saturday. He said, “you may disagree with us, but at least we believe in something”. In other words, we arch-conservatives can’t believe that we are wrong. We refuse to accept. We can not admit it. We can’t tolerate those who disagree with us because their values are not real. We are the only arbiters of truth and justice. If we only had an army….

* * *

What made Clinton’s “State of the Union” speech so good? He struck a tone of non-partisanship. He showed no sour grapes. He touched upon all of the current hot-button issues for voters and took the “correct” position. He pre-empted the Republicans on every issue except tax cuts. He laid out a clear, specific agenda, with realistic goals and achievable results. He reminded America that times are very good, indeed, knowing that most Americans will identify the current levels of prosperity and growth with his administration.

The Republicans keep parroting that history will remember Clinton as the first President, since Andrew Johnson, to be tried for impeachment. To the contrary, I believe history will remember this era as “the good old days”, and exciting period of change and innovation–and prosperity– and it may well become known as the Clinton era.

On the other hand, some politicians may be remembered for voting to impeach the most popular president of the past fifty years. Or they may be forgotten as voters cast them aside.

When people look back today to assess presidents, what do they remember? Who is currently the most popular?

John F. Kennedy, who really accomplished very little, but looked like he had a lot of potential. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who carried on an affair for many years. Why is Roosevelt remembered so fondly? Because he communicated very well. He led the country through a decade of prosperity and continued growth. He made sane, rational decisions that seem, in retrospect, to have been the right ones to make.

Ronald Reagan? He was liked on a personal basis, but a lot of people have not forgotten that, thanks to his fantastical “trickle down” economic theory, he took the budget from a $45 billion deficit to a $540 billion deficit. I’m not kidding. You can look it up. How is it that the Republicans continue to pass themselves off as the “fiscally responsible” party?

Clinton has taken the budget from hundreds of billions in the red to about $80 billion in the black. The Republicans like to say they did it, all by themselves. But they also want you to believe that Ronald Reagan was a great president. But he couldn’t have done without the Democratic Congress. I guess we remember what we want to remember.

Think about it. This is a fact, confirmed by the most extensive scientific polling ever conducted– and the November elections: Bill Clinton is the most popular president in forty years.

The bottom line, for many Americans, is really quite intuitive. Two ships are in the harbour. Both are going to the same destination. One of them is captained by Kenneth Starr, and he introduces his officers to you: Bob Barr, Lindsey Graham, Asa Hutchinson, Newt Gingrich (hey– he got this ball rolling), and the rest of the gang. They explain that there is going to be lots of rules and they will be enforced strictly. Homosexuals are not allowed on board. No smoking or drinking, or rock’n’roll. Rich people get all the big cabins. They have to pay more for them, but only rich people get to dine with captain or use the pool. Religious services are held every Sunday and attendance is obligatory. Let’s pray first. And you’all be sure and have lots of fun.

The other ship is captained by Bill Clinton. He introduces his officers. Vernon Jordan, Betty Currie, William Cohen, Al Gore, and Hillary. You notice there are lots of buxom maids with big teeth. Can’t afford a ticket? You can work your way across the ocean in the kitchen.

Which ship will you choose?

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Denmark: Copenhagen, City of Dreams

Copenhagen is a city of about 1.6 million people. It is the capital of Denmark. It is the capital of the country that gave us the charming women’s curling team that finished second at the Nagano Winter Olympics.

During the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, you might have heard the following argument, in one form or another:

Liberal: “In Europe, an affair like this would been regarded as ridiculously unimportant.”
Conservative: “That’s because European morality is lower than ours. If we don’t impeach Clinton, it will show that we are just as perverted as the Dutch, or Danes, or French.”

Gee. Who’s right? Well, Danish women sometimes leave their offices at lunch time to sunbathe topless in the city parks. I guess that’s pretty bad behaviour.

On the other hand, Copenhagen has about seven murders a year. New York City has about 1500. Of course, New York is ten times the size of Copenhagen, so let’s make it a fair comparison. Copenhagen would have 60 murders a year, if it were the size of New York.

Which leaves you with a puzzle. If the Danes are so decadent, and so unchristian, why aren’t they out stabbing, robbing, shooting, raping, and bombing each other into oblivion, like all evil people do? And if America is the last bastion of Christian morality in the so-called civilized west, why are American cities so violent and lawless?

I’ll try to argue like a conservative for a minute.
1. Just because the Danes don’t rob, murder, rape, or beat each other doesn’t mean they’re not leading lives of pernicious debauchery, and, therefore, actually leading more sinful lives than Americans do. They probably have more illicit sex than we do.
2. The population of Denmark is fairly uniform ethnically and socially. They don’t have the class divisions that America has.
3. What do we care? We’re bigger and stronger, so we’re right.

Besides, we don’t believe you. You’re probably playing a statistical trick on us. We can’t prove you’re wrong, because we don’t know anything about Denmark and we’ll never care enough to know anything about Denmark, but we’re Americans, so we can be as stupid as we want to be.

Argument 1 implies, of course, that illicit sex is just as bad as robbery and murder, so can we dismiss that one as silly? The only argument that makes any sense, of course, is argument number 2. The trouble is, you have to ask yourself whether a nation that prides itself on its Christian heritage should go around bragging about it’s class divisions and its inability to resolve them. So when Americans say, “You Europeans— the reason you find our obsession with the Clinton scandal so laughable is because you are morally inferior to us!” the accusation rings a little hollow.

Conservative churches in the U.S. never tire of reminding us of how God blesses those who obey Him and follow His commandments. If America really is more faithful to Christian morality than continental Europe is, then why is its prison population bulging at the seams? Why does it have the highest infant mortality rate of the developed world? Why does it vote the same way on international treaties as China and Libya do? Why does it have so many more poor people, as a percentage of the population, than any other G7 nation?

Americans are generally a likeable people. They are generous, on a personal level, to a fault. They can be moved by compassion when disaster or misfortune strikes. They seem to have a strong sense of fair play.

And on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, they (the people, not the Republicans) consistently see things the way Europeans do. They don’t believe that what Clinton did is worth all the trouble of impeachment. And they’re right.

The funny thing is, if this really was an issue of Christian morality, why is it that Christian “leaders”, like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson, are so utterly devoid of the quality of mercy? Why are they so unwilling to forgive? Why did Jerry Falwell sponsor a video “documentary” on Clinton that is filled with lies, exaggeration, half-truths, and distortions, including ridiculous allegations that Vince Foster was murdered? (You have to ask yourself what kind of resources Jerry Falwell would have that Kenneth Starr didn’t have?) Why are these leaders filled with so much hatred for the Clintons, especially Hillary?

 

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Pants on Fire: Analysis of a Scandal

Pants on Fire

After six months of debate, personal attacks, screaming, hollering, and fits of hysteria, there’s really nothing new to add the Clinton debate. The biggest, most flatulent paradox of the whole thing is when all these Republicans line up with their phony serious faces and insist that this is “painful” for them and they didn’t really want to do it but they have to impeach the leader of the free world for lying. They even claim– and this is an outrage– that Nixon had similarly high approval ratings on the day he was impeached.

Let’s get this straight. On the day of the Watergate break-in, Nixon’s approval ratings were, in fact, decent– around 60%. But as the Watergate scandal unfolded, and as testimony revealed more and more about the criminal activities (not merely immoral: criminal) of the White House, Nixon’s approval ratings plummeted, down to a low of 27% on the day he resigned.

So those Republicans who claim that Nixon’s approval ratings were the same as Clinton’s are, of course lying. They are also lying when they claim that they are paying a political price for their “principled” stand. Almost all of the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee face no serious opposition for re-election in their own ridings. The truth is, they could go around wearing a dress and throwing custard pies at Vernon Jordan and still be re-elected in their solidly Republican districts. The truth is that they receive so much money from the corporations that benefit from their corrupt legislative agendas that they will be re-elected until, like Strom Thurmond, they are pretty well senile.

They give all these interviews where they say they have to see the evidence first, and they haven’t made up their minds. Then every last single one of them votes “guilty”, like we all thought they would.

There has never been so much lying in any single repository of political deliberation since the Nixon White House.

The bottom line is very simple. If Clinton had clearly committed “high crimes and misdemeanors”, as Nixon did, there would have been at least five or six Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee voting for impeachment, and at least 30-45 Democrats in the House voting for impeachment. That’s all it would take to establish that there really are objective criteria at work here and that they are really being applied fairly, and that this is not a partisan political attack. Unless you seriously believe that every single member of the Democratic Party is a lying weasel.

Well, the Republicans want you to believe that every single Republican Representative is voting their conscience.. That is what they are saying. They ask you to believe this. Do you believe they believe it themselves? If they don’t believe it themselves, they are lying. If they do believe it themselves, they either fanatic or clinically insane or both. If they believed itself, there would be no backroom dealing, no arm-twisting, no secret meetings, no closed-door caucuses….. Come on… do you believe it?

What does this remind you of? The old Soviet Union? The Communist government would declare that this writer or that dissident was a threat to the state and must be expelled or imprisoned or whatever. And every single member of the government would vote for this measure. The vote would be something like 350-10. Just as the Republicans now vote 220-5 in favour of impeachment. Nobody doubted then that the vote was farce, just as no one should doubt it now.

The Republicans keep insisting that it’s up to the Democrats to break the partisan logjam. In other words, we can be bipartisan as long as you vote the way I tell you to.

That is the prosecution–and they clearly are the prosecution– insisting that the defense prove that their client is innocent. “If he really didn’t do it, prove it.” No such burden in law exists. It is the Republicans who want to impeach. It is their job to convince at least some Democrats and the majority of Americans that Clinton should be impeached. They have utterly failed. And if they had any respect for the democratic system of government, they would admit that they simply cannot carry out an impeachment along purely partisan lines, and therefore must stop.

But they don’t care. The most frightening thing about this debacle is the way it has laid bare the Republicans bald contempt for democratic values whenever it stands in the way of their partisan agenda. They literally do not care what anyone thinks. They have the muscle– just barely– to impeach, and a legal technicality to hang it on, and so they will. It is very troubling that so very few Republicans–about five–have the integrity to admit that, no matter what they believe personally, they simply cannot carry out such a momentous process without some bipartisan support. You simply can’t do it, without doing serious damage to the institution of government. No matter how convinced you are that you are right, if you have any integrity or respect for democracy, you can’t go forward. You admit that you failed. You say, “well, if the American people really want him, and we can’t persuade anybody else that he’s guilty, so be it.” Instead, the Republicans say, “what do we care what the voters want or whether the process is credible. Look at CNN? Analysis is about as deep as Tupperware. Everyone will forget this within six months.”

The moment of truth in this debate was the moment that Henry Hyde said, “You may disagree with us, but at least we believe in something.” In other words, this is really a religious battle. We are God’s chosen, and you are the apostates. We know we are right, because God told us the truth, and it is our duty to enlighten you. Why should we consider other points of view, when we’re right? Debate is utterly useless. This, spoken by a man who, when he was Clinton’s age, also had an adulterous affair.

Reagan got off very lightly with the Iran-Contra scandal, largely because most Democrats, as much as they disagreed with Reagan, respected the fact that he had commanding support (almost as good as Bill Clinton’s) from the voters. And they didn’t think it would be worth turning the government upside down just to shove their own views down the throat of the body politic. Unlike the Republicans, they realized they could not proceed without wide public consensus that the offenses committed were serious enough to warrant impeachment. The Republicans have no such compunction.

The extremism of the Republicans has forced moderates too far to the right. Not only were Clinton’s offenses not worthy of impeachment, they are not even worthy of censure. They are not worthy of a hiccup. Unlike Watergate and Iran-Contra, they had nothing to do with the exercise of power. The real question to ask yourself– and most American voters appear to have asked it– is what harm was done. The affair was consensual. Paula Jones’ case, by all credible accounts, would have died in any court room (she could never prove that she had suffered any harm, even if the incident in the hotel room really happened). The initial Paula Jones lawsuit, and the now-repudiated testimony of the state troopers, has well-documented links to multi-millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, an arch-foe of President Clinton. Jerry Falwell has links to the film company “Jerimiah Productions” which created “The Clinton Chronicles”, a farcical video that alleges murder and mayhem in the Clinton White House and gives new meaning to the word “paranoid”. Several “witnesses” who provided derogatory stories to the Financial Post and other newspapers were paid by “Citizens for Honest Government”, an anti-Clinton organization with links, again, to Falwell.

On the other hand, Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully traded weapons to an enemy of the U.S. (Iran) in return for the release of hostages in Lebanon. He broke the law. He showed poor judgement. And to any but the most gullible, he lied about it.

It looks like a big mess now. The country has been tied up for months with this insane investigation. Character assassination and invasion of privacy is now accepted as political stratagems. Perhaps the most cynical development in the whole scandal is the party line of the Republicans: “See what Bill Clinton hath wrought!” This is, without a doubt, what Kenneth Starr and the Republicans have wrought. It is only due to their incredibly stubborn and devious machinations that this affair continues to dominate the headlines.

The media have performed about as badly as Republicans, and continue to make the insane assertion that Clinton’s presidency is now permanently “tainted” with this scandal. CNN is the 24-hour Impeachment channel, with music and graphics that make it seem like a great sporting event, complete with colour commentators and sponsors.

I firmly believe that within five years, this scandal will be rightly regarded as one of the ugliest examples of partisan political muckraking in the history of the U.S., and the blame will be squarely laid on the shoulders of Newt Gingrich, Kenneth Starr, Bob Livingston, Henry Hyde, and their fellow raving hypocrites.

Finally, I have to express my utter astonishment at the resilient good sense of the average American voter. I did not believe that public opinion would withstand the onslaught of six months of raving lunacy, by the Republicans, by CNN, by NBC, ABC, and CBS (who recalled Dan Rather from Cuba to cover the stained dress), and even so-called “liberal” papers, like the New York Times.

Why did the media treat the story the way they did, if Clinton’s actions did not justify impeachment? There are three basic reasons. (1) it was a cheap story: all talking heads and free interviews. Very few mobile-cams, travel expenses, research, or paid experts. The profit margin is enormous. (2) The Republicans made it a story by releasing all the scandalous details from Grand Jury testimony when they should not have, and holding press conferences, and calling for Clinton to resign. (3) because sex sells.

Consider, as an alternative, the cost of providing in-depth coverage of the Kosovo crisis: you have reporters travelling and staying in hotels. You have research into the history of the area and its peoples and culture. You have related developments at the U.N. and Moscow and European capitals. It takes longer than five seconds to explain.

But if people didn’t buy the story why did they tune in to CNN to watch it unfold? The outrage effect. Even people who hated the story probably tuned in regularly to see just how outrageous and contemptible it had become. It was, indeed, spectacular. It was ridiculous to the degree of absurdity. It was, at times, insane. But it was always a spectacle, and people will watch a spectacle, no matter how horrifying.

Have the Republicans done permanent damage to their party? Do the voters realize how utterly cynical and contemptuous of them this party is? The Republicans seriously believe that the voters will either change their minds about Clinton, eventually, or they will completely forget, in two years or less, that they did everything they could to obstruct, marginalize, and remove a popular president.

They may be right. Maybe not. The Republicans may have underestimated the effect that this debacle has had on the people who really do shape opinion. Once the vampires in the media have sucked all the blood out of this story, they will need a new one. The reporters and editors who help shape public opinion are always looking for an “angle” to a story. The primary angle of the Lewinsky scandal is Clinton’s immorality. The secondary angle is the intolerance and puritanical zeal of the Republicans.

Clinton will be gone in two years, at the latest. But the Republicans running for re-election in two years, are going to have the same pinched faces, and editors and reporters are going to remember the fanatic intolerance and hypocrisy they introduced into political discourse. Reporters may remember how immune the Republicans were to common sense, decency, and public will. They may be inclined to colour their coverage of Republican candidates with those factors. For example, if future presidential candidate (God help us) Dan Quayle attacks sex education programs for promoting promiscuity, reporters and editors may add a sly comment or two about how Republicans always seem concerned about personal sexual ethics.

Future generations will not remember this scandal for the disgrace it brought upon Bill Clinton. They know that Kennedy fooled around, and Rooseveldt fooled around, and Reagan was divorced and remarried (which means he probably fooled around), and even Dole and Gingrich were not faithful to their first wives. What’s the big deal? What was so different about this case?

They will remember that a fanatic corps of self-righteous Republicans use the flimsiest of pretexts to embark on a holy jihad to remove a popular president from office, and that they never succeeded in convincing anyone other than themselves that there was any reason for it.

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Liars

You ever tell a lie? Me neither.

According to some theologians, the Bible itself does not condemn lying. The Good Lord knows that in some situations, lying is the correct thing to do.

“Does this dress make me look fat?”
“Are there any Jews in this house?”
“I’m slow and stupid and nobody will ever love me.”
“This won’t hurt a bit.”
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

With all the talk about impeachment, an astonishingly absurd myth is being foisted upon all of us: that there is an established standard of moral decency to which almost all politicians adhere and that whenever anyone departs from this standard, they must be impeached.

The discussion is so absurd, it is mind-boggling. We have those Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee with a collective straight-face, proclaiming that they are going to punish the politician who lied.

They will tell you, of course, that Mr. Clinton lied under oath. In other words, it’s one thing to lie in the course of your normal day-to-day activities as a congressional representative, but to lie under oath!

Egads!

Shriek!

Sob!

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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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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.