Clinton & Me

by Michael Graham

  —A New Mexico high-schooler, sporting spiked hair and a dog collar, sent home for violating a new statewide school dress code

  Once upon a time, the last refuge of the scoundrel was patriotism. Today it is day care.

  Whenever some elected official or self-proclaimed public advocate is about to seize a chunk of my personal liberty or spare change (usually both), they inevitably justify this abuse as a social necessity “for the children.” Like battered wives of a bygone era, we are urged to suffer silently for the sake of the kids.

  Well, with two screaming brats of my own, I prefer to do my suffering at home, thanks just the same. So when the smoking Nazis or the Internet nannies lobby me to join their children’s crusades, I politely tell them: “I gave at the ovum.”

  Pro-child public policy is almost inevitably a disaster. It was the motivating force behind the single most stupid piece of legislation ever passed by the U.S. Congress (and that’s no small feat): Prohibition.

  Believe it or not, youngsters, in 1920 a majority of Americans voted to make it illegal to manufacture or sell alcohol in these United States. How did that happen?

  Historians have many theories (mine being that most people were too drunk at the time to know what they were voting for), but without a doubt one primary motivation was to protect children from the evils of demon rum.

  The American electorate decided it wasn’t fair that some kids had dads who couldn’t hold their liquor, who drank up the milk money and neglected their fatherly duties. To protect these unfortunate offspring, the people of America—never too thrilled with the idea of individual liberty to begin with—took away the freedom to drink from every responsible adult in our land.

  Our nation promptly got hammered by the giddy effects of the law of unintended consequences.

  While alcohol consumption did decline, perhaps by as much as a third, much of the nation was overwhelmed by bootlegging, lawlessness, and gangland violence. A new criminal class was created that was far more dangerous than a drunken dad stumbling home from the local pub.

  Prohibition failed as a policy, but it succeeded in raising a national question that remains unanswered: How bad do you let things get in your neighbor’s house before you kick down the door?

  After all, Prohibition may have been a bad solution, but drunkenness was a very real problem. In communities across America, children with loving fathers who helped them with their schoolwork lived next door to dead-drunk dads who came home every night and kicked anything under three feet tall.

  This inequity in the quality of parents continues today. Take our young friend in New Mexico who was sent home from school because Mom didn’t put her in a regulation dog collar. This spike-haired student probably sits across the aisle from some Mormon classmate dressed in Osmond-Wear, whose mom makes her drink eight glasses of milk a day and sends her to bed before the family viewing hour is over. Is this fair? One kid’s being groomed for great success, and the other’s being checked for fleas—is that right?

  Yes, actually, it is.

  It is only fair that kids with concerned, involved parents have better lives than kids who don’t. If you spend the night before the algebra test reviewing logarithms with your little Einstein and I spend it teaching Junior the drum solo from “Innagaddadavida,” there should be a difference in the outcome. That’s only fair.

  This is the equity of inequity, the justice of injustice. Sure, we all wish every child could have Donna Reed and Mr. Rogers for parents, but all too often they get, well . . . us.

  Dress codes, curfews, taxpayer-funded day care—these are inherently unfair attempts to level the playing field between good parents and bad. Look around at the adults you know and the parents they have, and you’ll agree that most of us get the parents we deserve.

  Most, but not all. I may tend toward libertarianism, but I have no problem with the government taking kids out of homes where they are starved, abused or exposed to Howard Stern. We have to draw the line somewhere.

  For example, there was the horrible death of Christina Corrigan, the seven-hundred-pound thirteen-year-old so obese she couldn’t get up and go to the bathroom. Young Christina spent her days lying on a sheet in front of the television and eating herself to death. “Christina demanded food and I usually gave in”—that’s what her mother told the police after her daughter died of heart failure in the living room.

  “It took six people to roll Christina’s body onto a sheet of canvas and drag it to the coroner’s wagon,” the AP reported. And you have to wonder if any of the six ever turned to the mother and said, “Two words, lady—Jenny Craig!”

  This child didn’t eat herself to death—she was fed to death. If you’re too fat to make it to the bathroom, chances are you won’t be jogging down to the corner grocery, either. If you’re so big you can’t get up and feed yourself, you are, by definition, on a diet—the Somalia diet. And unless you can lure a passing cat onto the hibachi, you’re going to lose weight.

  I believe Christina’s mother is the model for the new child-first movement. As a mom, she was willing to suffer continuously—working full time and taking care of an unnecessarily immobile daughter. But she wasn’t strong enough to put her daughter through the relatively mild pangs of a Big Mac attack.

  Most American children could use a bit more suffering, a bit more social policy neglect.

  And more parents could use a good stiff drink.

  The Life of Riley

  * * *

  September 1997

  President Clinton has been criticized, and rightly so, for the cut-rate quality of his cabinet members. Reno, Shalala, Reich—they all have an off-the-rack quality about them, even in their appearance. The whole bunch looks like they fell out of the irregular bin at T. J. Maxx.

  However, one cabinet member who certainly fits this description has somehow escaped harsh scrutiny: South Carolina’s former governor and the current U.S. Secretary of Education, Dick Riley.

  Given the Palmetto State’s horrible school system, choosing a former South Carolina governor to head the Education Department is like naming Dennis Rodman president of the Southern Baptist Convention. This is doubly true for Dick Riley, whose term began with South Carolina dead last in education and ended with a huge education tax increase . . . and South Carolina dead last in education.

  Whatever it was President Clinton saw in our governor, it managed to escape the poor suckers stuck in South Carolina’s crummy school system.

  A point of personal privilege: Bill Clinton has a thing for failed South Carolina politicos. For example, before Clinton chose him to head the Democratic National Committee and Chinese Money Laundromat, Don Fowler was state chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. When Fowler took over the state party, Democrats controlled eight of the nine constitutional offices and had a 4–2 majority in our congressional delegation. When Fowler left to join Clinton’s team, the Republicans held eight of the nine Constitutional offices and had a 4–2 majority in Congress.

  Speaking for Republicans everywhere: Don Fowler is my kind of Democrat!

  Anyway, the appointment of Dick Riley to the Department of Education has been frequently overlooked, perhaps because the Department of Education is so overlookable. Less than 10 percent of public education spending is federal, and most of that is either for kids of military families or for special education.

  Nevertheless, Secretary Riley loves nothing more than to pontificate on the state of education in America, and he was recently back in the Palmetto State to discuss pedagogy in all its aspects.

  His first, and most surprising, pronunciamento was that “South Carolina is ready for a new renaissance” in education.

  Not to split hairs with America’s top educator, but before one can have a renaissance, don’t you have to have a naissance? If South Carolina ever enjoyed a golden age of intellectual achievement in our public schools, I must have slept in that day. Given my home state’s academic tradition of viewing books as a good way to ge
t the fire nice and hot before you add the cross, what era of enlightenment is Secretary Riley urging us to return to? The invention of the cotton gin? The invention of the wheel?

  Riley made this comment at a meeting of the National Association of State Boards of Education on Kiawah Island, where attending bureaucrats strolled our lovely Low Country beaches thanks to the generosity of taxpayers back home. The bureaucrats running America’s failing education system may have had cushy surroundings, but Riley’s speech contained tough words and harsh criticism.

  Not of them, of course. No, the harsh words were for me.

  Not by name, but I am a proponent of school choice, and as such I apparently have upset the secretary: “I am most distressed by some of the overheated rhetoric some are using to mischaracterize public education today, usually when they are promoting the silver bullet solution of vouchers,” Riley said.

  “When they talk and talk and talk about vouchers, they’re not interested in constructive criticism of our schools, how we can make them better and improve them. They continually demean public education. They belittle our children, our parents and our teachers. I tell you, I am tired of it,” he said.

  Secretary Riley’s comments have caused me to amend one of the world’s most famous maxims: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t tell the difference get to run the schools.”

  As a graduate of South Carolina’s public schools and an observer of its current graduates, I can’t imagine how it is possible to mischaracterize public education in any way that would be worse than the truth. The only way to overheat the rhetoric regarding Riley’s government-run school system would be to accuse teachers of secretly administering lobotomies to unsuspecting students.

  Given the pathetic state of South Carolina schools, why is Secretary Riley angry that parents are looking for alternatives? Riley says that people like me, who believe parents should be able to pick the best school for their individual children, “belittle our children, our parents.” This is clearly backward. The only reason to deny children and parents the right to choose is because you think they are too stupid to pick the right schools.

  Secretary Riley’s logic is sloppy, his arguments flawed, his conclusions disingenuous. If that doesn’t make him an ideal member of the Clinton cabinet, I can’t imagine what would.

  White House Follies

  * * *

  November 1997

  If nothing else, the Clintons certainly keep American politics entertaining. First fund-raising coffees, then sleep-overs, and now home movies! It’s like having Uncle Darryl and Aunt Vergie running our federal government, except that President Clinton rarely wanders into the front yard in his boxers to pick up the morning paper.

  Life in the White House has been so ridiculous for so long, events that once would have stopped the presses are now buried in the back pages of the paper. Months ago, when Hillary Clinton’s long-lost billing records appeared on her nightstand two years after they had been subpoenaed, eyebrows were raised.

  Today, videotapes long sought by the courts miraculously spring from the world’s best-monitored monitoring system, and no one bats an eye. “Uh, we just kinda found ’em under the sofa” is the White House explanation for how videos of presidential fund-raisers remained conveniently undiscovered until well after the 1996 election.

  To which I reply: Are you kidding? Ever since the Oval Office recording system brought Nixon down, you can’t get an unauthorized piece of Scotch tape into the White House. But you couldn’t find a stack of presidential videos?

  This lame excuse turned laughable when paid White House stooge Lanny Davis insisted that the military-run White House Communications Agency, which made the tapes, couldn’t find them in computer archive searches because nobody thought to look under the heading Coffees.

  “Damn! Why didn’t I think of that?” Janet Reno must be saying to herself.

  * * *

  Janet Reno is far more clever at finding ways to avoid prosecuting the president’s friends than she is at finding evidence with which to indict them. President Clinton is also better at demanding stronger campaign finance laws than he is at obeying the ones we have today.

  And, despite what you see on the nightly news, there is an enforceable campaign finance law in place. But don’t take my word for it. Just ask Robert B. Maloney.

  Bob Maloney is a former Smith Barney broker who laundered money for his brother’s 1994 congressional campaign. He did this by asking friends to write checks to his brother and then personally reimbursing them for the money donated. Nineteen people wrote checks for some $39,000, all of which Maloney made good out of his own pocket.

  What happened to Bob Maloney? He was indicted this week and faces a maximum of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine on each of the seventeen misdemeanor counts filed against him.

  But somehow, the same law that reaches Bob Maloney doesn’t quite extend to the leaders of the free world. Al Gore’s famous fund-raiser at a Buddhist monastery in California (motto: “You can turn your vow of poverty into cold, hard cash”) was an identical money-laundering scheme.

  The record is clear and undisputed: Penniless monks handed over thousands of other’s people dollars, and they got checks back from big-dollar donors who were breaking the law. But while Bob Maloney sits in stir, Al Gore is still raising money.

  Interestingly, Gore’s case is actually a stronger one for prosecutors because there is a specific law prohibiting political fund-raising at religious institutions. But these laws didn’t stop the Clinton-Gore money machine.

  And how bizarre is it to watch lefty Hillary-types attacking the Promise Keepers for the mere possibility of mixing religion and politics, while they continue to defend Al Gore and his confirmed political activity at a temple of worship?

  This is what I mean by the complete lack of integrity. Their hypocrisy and self-serving self-righteousness seem to pervade the entire government. The fact that Bill Clinton and Al Gore are, as people, wholly corrupt isn’t as disturbing to me as the corrupting influence they are having on the people around them.

  Even the normal bureaucratic functions of government, which inadvertently promote individual liberty through incompetence and inefficiency, have broken down altogether. It doesn’t necessarily bother me that the FBI is so inefficient that it can’t find home movies of White House fund-raisers. What bothers me is that this same FBI was conveniently just competent enough to hand over their background files on Clinton’s enemies.

  This double standard of justice is the new twist to old-fashioned political corruption added by the Clinton administration. It’s one thing if Janet Reno takes a laissez-faire attitude toward all fund-raising violations. It’s something else altogether when the Bob Maloneys of the world go to jail and the Al Gores go to the Democratic National Convention.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  “I Did Not Have Sex with That Woman”

  End of the Presidency

  * * *

  January 1998

  Writing about a fast-breaking news story such as the Clinton White House intern scandal for a weekly publication is inherently dangerous. In the days between my writing and your reading, virtually anything could happen in this roller-coaster ride of a presidency, and it probably will. However, I can make one statement today with absolute confidence: By the time you read this, the Clinton presidency will be over.

  I can make this assertion because, in fact, the Clinton presidency is already over. Yes, he may still be sitting in the office, trying to inconspicuously sneak peeks into the blouses of mail room staffers, but Bill Clinton’s tenure as president is finished.

  A man who has been caught having sex in the White House with a twenty-one-year-old employee and lying about it under oath simply cannot be president. The media won’t let him, and neither will the people of America.

  “Aha,” Clinton apologists violently assert, “but he hasn’t been caught. Nothing has been proven!” And it may never be
“proven”—the key word in Mrs. Clinton’s Today show hatchet job on Kenneth Starr—because the president’s defenders are not using the usual standard of reasonable doubt. They are instead using the newly developed O.J. Simpson standard of “possible doubt.”

  Is it possible that aliens beamed down to Earth, put on O.J.’s socks and then murdered his wife? Theoretically, yes. But every reasonable person knows that O.J. Simpson is a murderer and that President Clinton had sex with a twenty-one-year-old intern. There is no room for reasonable doubt.

  The clincher for me, by the way, was the revelation that the president had called Lewinsky at home. Do you have any idea how hard it is for the president of the United States to make a phone call? As a general rule, presidents are only allowed to call people who can blow things up or (in a new twist added by this president) write very large checks to the Democratic National Committee. So until someone steps forward with proof that Monica Lewinsky had a sack of cash from Charlie Trie or a thermonuclear device hidden in her sock drawer, we can all rest assured that she and the president had a sexual relationship.

  Why else would a married, middle-aged man call a twenty-one-year-old girl? Phone chess?

  The Clintonistas will no doubt continue to slander Kenneth Starr, Linda Tripp, et cetera, et cetera, but to no avail. By his own actions, the president has ended his service, because there are at least three things a person must be able to do to be president, and Bill Clinton can no longer do them.

  The first is communicate with the nation. A president must have the ability to hold a press conference with other heads of state that doesn’t invoke puns on the phrase “head of state.” He must also be able to make a simple public statement, such as “I never had sexual relations with that woman,” without having every member of the press corps whip out a thesaurus and begin speculating about what he really meant.