Clinton & Me
Page 14
Let’s have another pop quiz: A nation elects a president who is wildly popular in the north but so unpopular in the south that, despite the fact that his election was completely legal, southern partisans decide that the only way to preserve their culture is to secede. The supporters of the president, mostly in the north, find the south’s way of life repugnant, and they also believe they have the right to uphold their democratic elections through force. When southerners begin shooting and announce their intentions to leave the republic, the north responds with violent, overwhelming force and preserves the union.
Who is right? If you sided with the north and its battle to save the republic, congratulations! You’ve just joined the Serbian army.
The north in this story is the Serbian majority in the northern portion of Yugoslavia. The south is the province of Kosovo, where the Kosovo Liberation Army (think the Confederate States of America converted to Islam) has been shooting police officers and duly appointed federal agents for years.
I’m not arguing that the Kosovo conflict is the American Civil War, or that we should never get involved in intranational conflicts, or any of the dozens of other legitimate arguments that could be made by legitimately concerned citizens regarding our policy of blowing up busloads of Slavic civilians.
I am making the much more modest and obvious observation that the constant propaganda coming out of the Clinton spin machine is just that—political pooge. It cannot be trusted.
Slobodan Milosevic is a pig, sure. But he is in a war, a war to capture territory. Unlike Saddam in Iraq, Slobo is fighting for territory within his nation’s own borders. He was elected, in fact, because of his pledge to forever keep Kosovo part of his republic, to defend this mythic, ancestral home of the Serbs.
Milosevic is fighting this war not against caravans of children, but against a real army—an army so real, in fact, that just last year our own U.S. State Department declared the KLA a terrorist organization. The KLA is well known for running drugs and using the profits from that and from prostitution to buy guns for their war for a “Greater Albania.”
So why are we so outraged when people get shot and territory gets taken during a war? Because it’s “ethnic cleansing”? May I remind you that American forces “cleansed” many an island in the Pacific of its Japanese populations not too long ago. By definition, taking territory in a war means getting rid of all the other people already there who want to keep it.
None of this is a defense of the Serbs. They are fighting a dirty, ugly war based on the notion that people should be grouped by their skin color and ethnicity. Unfortunately, they are being aided by the philosophies of our own Democratic National Committee—who also advocate group rights and overvalue the importance of race.
But the Serbs are fighting an enemy who feel the same way. It’s Greater Serbia versus Greater Albania in a final battle to the death . . . the same battle they fought in 1389.
And into this mess we wander, led by the most inept foreign-policy president since Jimmy Carter. We have chosen a side in this war, the terrorist KLA, and we are going to spend American lives and treasure to “liberate” Kosovo (or a big chunk of it, at least) from the popularly elected government of Yugoslavia and kill a few thousand Serb civilians along the way.
But keep in mind that the Albanians also claim parts of Greece, Montenegro and Macedonia, as well as Kosovo and southern Serbia. Now that President Clinton has made us their allies, what do we do when the KLA starts shooting cops in Athens? If the Greeks are smart enough not to shoot back, to just give in, to allow the ethnic Albanians in their country to secede, then I suppose we do nothing.
But if the Greeks defy the will of the American government, if they turn into “genocidal butchers” by actually defending their own territory, then we will be forced to bomb them into the Stone Age, too.
Alas, that is the price of American leadership, Clinton-style: lots of dead foreigners.
President Clarence
* * *
March 1999
Defenders of the president note that Broaddrick attended a political fund-raiser for Mr. Clinton just three months after the alleged rape.
—Associated Press, 1999
Too often, targets of harassment are forced to defend their behavior. Instead of talking about what she did, what she wore, what she said, did she complain . . . we need to talk about why he abused the power that he had in this situation.
—Anita Hill, 1992
Maybe Toni Morrison is right. Maybe Bill Clinton is America’s first black president.
Since February 1998, our commander in chief has been known in these pages as “President O.J.” because we all knew what he did; we just wanted to see if he would get away with it.
And as Johnnie Cochran might say, “When the Senate acquitted, the name fitted.”
Now that the president has been accused of raping a former friend and political supporter, the Clintonistas want to transform him from the O.J. of American politics into an updated version of America’s second most resonant black political icon of the 1990s: Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.
It’s not quite a perfect fit, but it’s close.
While both Clinton and Thomas grew up in poor, troubled families in the South, the similarities that leap out at me are largely political. Clarence Thomas was a weak candidate for the Supreme Court who was selected solely because George Bush needed a black nominee to replace Thurgood Marshall and Thomas was his best shot at winning a Senate confirmation.
Bill Clinton—an unimpressive governor of a small state, a draft dodger with no foreign-policy experience—was a weak candidate for president, but his party needed a nonliberal nominee who wouldn’t scare away every white male voter in the United States. The left reluctantly accepted Bill Clinton as their best chance to win the White House.
Interestingly, they both survived scandals thanks to the weaknesses of their opponents and the unashamed partisanship of their supporters. Republicans such as Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch took on Anita Hill, and while it wasn’t pretty, they did convince 50 percent of American women that her story wasn’t credible. Likewise, President Clinton’s partisans happily trashed the reputations of Jones, Willey, Flowers, Lewinsky et alia, to great effect.
In the end, one-third of the American people—mostly white women—loathed Clarence Thomas, but the Senate ducked its head and gave Judge Thomas the votes he needed. Less than a decade later, with one-third of America—mostly white men—screaming for his head, President Clinton was acquitted by many of those same senators.
And there is one other similarity between Clinton and Thomas that cannot be ignored: They were both lying.
Clarence Thomas almost certainly did some of the things Anita Hill charged him with. Then again, in the Clinton era, the charges now seem almost quaint: He hit on her at work, talked dirty, made a few off-color wisecracks. It’s hard to believe that, way back in 1990, such behavior would put a man’s job at risk.
In Clinton’s America, Clarence Thomas’ once-reprehensible behavior now represents the height of sexual propriety.
But Thomas (“I was a sexual harasser when harassin’ wasn’t cool”) denied every single charge: no pubic hair, no Long Dong Silver, no penile conversations. It was all part of the high-tech lynchin’.
And it is at this point that the similarities abruptly end. For polling at the time showed that most Americans believed Clarence Thomas, while virtually no one today believes Bill Clinton.
President Clinton is the only public person in America whose denial of a crime is viewed as a confession. “Any allegation that the president assaulted Ms. Broaddrick more than twenty years ago is absolutely false,” David Kendall, Clinton’s attorney, said in a statement. And America hears, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
During his Senate confirmation hearings, seventeen women who worked with Thomas appeared at a Capitol Hill news conference in a show of support for their former colleague. Nine took the microphone to sa
y they had never seen any improper behavior on Judge Thomas’ part nor heard rumors of it. Not only have President Clinton’s feminist allies been hiding under their beds as the Broaddrick story unfolds, but there probably aren’t nine women in the entire country who would claim they did not know of any improper behavior by our pants-free president.
Thus the key difference between President Clinton and Clarence Thomas is not the nature of their accusers but the nature of the accused. There was a perception, due in part to the presence of her liberal handlers, that Anita Hill might be lying to promote a partisan, political cause.
In the case of Bill Clinton, we have the reverse. Americans fear that his accusers, in pursuit of a partisan, political cause, might actually be telling the truth.
In honor of her largely uncorroborated, unproven accusations against a conservative Supreme Court nominee, Anita Hill was named “our Supreme Court justice” by Gloria Steinem. In honor of her corroborated, credible accusation of rape against the president of the United States, Juanita Broaddrick has been ignored by Gloria Steinem, Patricia Ireland and every other feminist/liberal leader in America.
What does this prove? That liberal supporters of the president are just as interested in justice today as they were when they called for Judge Thomas’ rejection in 1990.
The similarities really are amazing.
Contempt!
* * *
April 1999
Well, whaddaya know: Someone else finds President Clinton contemptible.
I cannot think of a better phrase to be forever linked to the Clinton presidency than the words “found in contempt,” although “semen-stained” runs a close second.
Only this is not just a matter of opinion. This is now a matter of law.
In February, the Clinton administration earned the distinction of being the first to have two of its cabinet officials cited for contempt of court at the same time. Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury secretary Robert Rubin were slapped with contempt citations for repeatedly failing to hand over documents related to trust funds.
At one point, a Clinton administration attorney said the reason these likely embarrassing documents couldn’t be delivered was because they were stored in warehouses “infested with dangerous rodent droppings.”
Dateline Washington: “Rats Bring American Justice System to Standstill!” Yep, that’s the Clintons, all right.
Speaking of rats, Susan McDougal also got out of her cage this week after spending two years in prison, in part for her dealings in the droppings-infested Arkansas banking system. Previously convicted of bank fraud, McDougal was acquitted of charges that she obstructed justice by refusing to testify whether or not the Clintons knew about her scams.
On the issue of contempt, the jury deadlocked, so McDougal is now free to appear five nights a week on Larry King Live and spew her semiliterate brand of paranoia and self-pity . . . and without an armed escort.
But there is one last tale to tell: In her trial, prosecutors showed McDougal a check for $5,081.82 with a note in her handwriting that read “Payoff Clinton.” This is a problem, since a payoff from Whitewater to Bill Clinton would be direct evidence of his involvement in the fraud. After foaming at the mouth and calling Ken Starr a minion of Satan, Susan McDougal explained that this check was not a payoff, no, no, no. It was part of a completely unrelated land transaction in the town of Clinton, Arkansas.
Oh, okay: Then what about the list of loans noting a person named “B. Clinton” and a sheet of interest calculations totaling up to the amount of—you guessed it—$5,081.82?
This testimony, disregarded by a Little Rock jury that is itself under investigation, resonates with contempt: contempt for the truth, contempt for the facts, contempt for the law.
Contempt has become one truly distinguishing characteristic, as Paula Jones might say, of the Clinton era.
How appropriate, then, for the most self-righteous of politicians, the former law school professor himself, to be found in contempt by a federal judge. Judge Susan Webber Wright is from Arkansas; she knows the Clintons personally and is hardly a right-wing ideologue. How does she describe the president’s behavior?
“Given the president’s admission that he was misleading . . . and the clarity with which his falsehoods are revealed by record, there is no need to engage in extended analysis. Simply put, the president’s testimony was intentionally false.”
From a contempt standpoint, this is key. Remember that the president, his defenders and every lamebrain on CNN argued tirelessly that the president wasn’t lying when he denied having sex with Monica and said he was never alone with her. He might have been misleading, but he did not intend to testify falsely.
To which Judge Wright responded, in the arcane, technical language of the law, “Yank, yank.”
She notes in her order, “It appears that the president is asserting that Ms. Lewinsky could have been having sex with him while, at the same time, he was not having sex with her.” Her head-shaking astonishment is the rational reaction to such an assertion. And yet the president gave us this nonsense for a year, aided and abetted by Lanny Davis et alia, and a majority of right-thinking reporters happily accepted it.
This is the core of the contempt. The insult is not found in the act of serving us citizens this drivel day after day, but in the expectation that we will eat it.
Day after day, the White House sends out trays of indigestible nonsense: “We knew when we declared war the Serbs would kill all the Albanians. . . . Why, we planned it that way!” or “Why would anyone tell me I was having coffee with a Communist Chinese agent? I’m just the president!”
The Clintonistas contemptuously offer it to us as though we will accept it, as though we are so blind, so stupid, so forgetful that we will believe anything.
And that’s when their poll numbers go up.
The only president in history to be cited for contempt, the only president who has been the subject of a credible charge of rape, the only president who we know has sexually harassed and shamelessly groped subordinate employees in the White House, the only president to have subpoenaed documents appear in his bedroom, to have built campaign databases out of his enemies’ FBI files, to have changed public policy in a manner that allowed our enemies to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, to have taken millions of dollars from that same enemy to fund his campaign—this is the president who today has the highest poll numbers in the history of a second-term president.
Contempt? You bet.
And if Bill Clinton feels contempt for the American people today, looking down upon us from atop his record-high poll numbers and record-low personal integrity, I’m certain it’s for the same reason I do: We’ve earned it.
Bad Boys, Bad Boys
* * *
June 1999
The text of a handwritten note dated May 5 of this year:
Dear Susie,
I like you. Do you like me?
Please check one:
___ Yes ___ No ___ Mabee
Love (?), Johnny.
PS—I think you are the prettyist girl in the whole 4th grade!
The text of a letter dated June 15, 1999, from the offices of Cochran, Dershowitz and Hyatt, attorneys at law, to John B. “Johnny” Smith Jr.
Dear Mr. Smith
Pursuant to Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States, John B. “Johnny” Smith Jr. (henceforth referred to as “Defendant”) is hereby ordered and remanded to cease and desist all communications, conversations and interactions with Susan B. Anthony “Susie” Johnson (henceforth referred as “Plaintiff”) until a thorough and complete investigation of the incident of alleged sexual harassment has been concluded.
Further note that Defendant is hereby under order not to destroy or tamper with any evidence which might be a relevant part of the investigation into your alleged actionable behavior. This covers all written correspondence, including (but not limited to):
Defendant is also prohibited from discussing this matter further with classmates who may be called upon as witnesses. Any actions which may be viewed as attempts to modify or amend a classmate’s truthful testimony—such as offers of Pokémon toys or Star Wars: Episode One collectibles—will be viewed as obstructing justice and could be punishable under the law.
Further, it is our duty to advise Defendant of the gravity of the charges which have been brought. Defendant’s alleged behavior, if true, is in clear violation of Plaintiff’s rights to a quality education, unencumbered by the oppressive atmosphere of sexual intimidation which Defendant created at Derwin L. Davis Elementary School.
While we are not seeking damages against the Defendant’s family (we have completed our review of your father’s tax returns through 1994), the $500,000,000 lawsuit we have filed against Defendant’s school district is a direct result of Defendant’s alleged behavior. We believe that the court will find that it is the duty of our public schools to protect young women such as Ms. Johnson from sexual predators such as the Defendant.
We have read the testimony of your teacher, Ms. Brown, who claims that she was unaware of Defendant’s behavior on the date alleged because, in her words, “I was too busy trying to teach these brats how to read to keep track of who was passing love notes.” We find her comments, as well as Defendant’s apparent lack of remorse, disturbing. We believe they indicate that Derwin L. Davis Elementary School is permeated with an atmosphere conducive to discrimination and harassment.
We would furthermore like to note for the record a preponderance of evidence that Defendant, joined by other students, engaged in discriminatory activity both on a regular basis and without interference from the school administration, including: