I promise, this will be my last copy n paste on Clinton (until something new and wonderfully juicy appears). I thought a raspberry from the Left would be a fitting farewell.

Christopher Hitchens, a legitament Leftist, has had the Clinton's number for some time. Last year he published No One Left to Lie To--the values of America's worst family.

Hitchens in The Nation

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March 5, 2001

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

The Embarrassment of the Riches

Are the Clintons better off than they were eight years ago? The evidence appears to point to a resounding yes. So why do they seem to resent the question? Probably because only a full-dress Congressional investigation could establish quite how this came to be and exactly how much better off they are. And are we all better off as well? It depends, as Bill Cosby's grandmother famously said while solving the half-full, half-empty distinction, on whether you're pouring or drinking.

In Korea this past fall, after the visit of Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang, expectation was high that a presidential visit would follow and that perhaps the long and lethal confrontation on the peninsula would begin to dissipate somewhat. This would have had an importance well beyond the local: North Korea is the central exhibit in the Rumsfeldian worldview and the main pretext for the "Star Wars" fantasy incubated by Reagan, preserved by Clinton and Gore, and now approaching consummation with Bush. To defuse this and, incidentally, to begin the emancipation of the North Koreans from their petrified party-state, would have been a "legacy" action worthy of the name. But Clinton, with several weeks still to go, announced that he just could not find the time.

Now we know what was keeping him so busy in his closing months. He was working like a beaver on arranging his own immunity, on trading pardons for kickbacks and on asset-stripping the White House. He was also working on the lying cover stories that would justify these things. Only in the latter respect has his usual luck failed him, and I suppose that this is because he no longer has the bodyguard of hacks and spinners who were retained at public expense to defend him on previous occasions. Sidney Blumenthal--whose own defenders once accused me of denouncing him in order to sell a small book I hadn't even written--is too busy justifying his own $650,000 advance to spare much time to put a nice gloss on the embarrassment of the Riches. And so Clinton was reduced to red-faced and pathetic spluttering before an audience of bond traders in Boca Raton, unable to face the simplest questions and unable any longer to hide behind ludicrous claims, such as that he was our first black President, still less the friend of those who "work hard and play by the rules." He sucks up to the fat cats; they wrinkle their noses and hand him the check using a pair of tongs. Perfect.

To anyone with eyes to see, the Clinton presidency always had the look and feel of a shakedown enterprise--the transfer of the Arkansas racketeering style to the more lush and lucrative terrain of Washington, DC. "Nice to see you," the eventually discovered video has him saying to Roger Tamraz, a man who raises eyebrows in the Beirut "business community," when this choice person appears at a White House coffee morning. We don't know what he said to James Riady, front man for Suharto, when Riady gave him a very thick and sleek envelope in the back of a limousine, because although he admits to the meeting and to the money, the master of the briefing book and the king of detail has no real-time recall of the actual conversation. Other influence-peddlers for the Chinese had virtual passes to the Executive Mansion; Dick Morris was employed there under a code name while helping to concert a fantastic circumvention of all known laws on campaign finance.

The "privacy" defense was a very ingenious way of fending off inquiries into this, and it worked, too, when Clinton was accused of using campaign-finance cupcakes as personal comfort women. How nice it was to see that Walter Kaye, the New York moneyman who bought Miss Lewinsky her internship, also contributed some furniture and even paid for Mrs. Clinton's victory ball at the Mayflower in January. (No hard feelings, eh Walter?)

The First Lady has taken to the privacy tactic like a duck to water, first saying that what happened in the publicly owned Oval Office and Lincoln Bedroom was confidential, and nobody's business, and then agreeing to write about it herself at the rate of $1 million per year of occupancy. Obviously, it became tiring to the Clintons to raise money from sleazebags only for their own re-election. The time comes, as come it has, when you weary of public-spirited effort and want a little pot of dough for your own pretty needs.

In much the same way, Jesse Jackson feels entitled to use the pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow to succor the unintended and inconvenient results of his own safe-sex "ministry"; hell, a preacher can't be expected to live for others all the damn time. (What I like about the Reverend is his lack of hypocrisy; he told Clinton to keep lying, to make a pious and prayerful face, and to pay off the inconvenient chick with other people's money. At last--a Christian who really practices what he preaches!)

A proper investigation of the Lewinsky matter, and of the Revlon money that was used to try and help condition the testimony of Lewinsky and of Webster Hubbell, would have exposed the nature of this lawless and corrupt White House several years before it exposed itself, and in time to do something about it. But a majority of the American left decided that it really did not want to know, and that the "privacy" defense was a valid one. Some things, indeed, were so "private" that they justified the invocation of "executive privilege." Not even that flagrant contradiction was enough to unsettle the loyalists. By the time Al Gore had his tear-stained confrontation with Clinton last November, it was all too late. And he, like everyone else, was calmly told that if he didn't like it, it was just too bad. Clinton already had, as LBJ used to relish saying, the man's pecker in his pocket. For good measure, the Democratic National Committee is turned over to Terry McAuliffe, the President's ex-mansion hunter, who brings the fresh, breezy atmosphere of Teamsters Union ethics to this already rather raddled outfit. So it seems that the Clinton legacy is secure, and that most liberals can safely claim to have been a part of it.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), February 20, 2001

Answers

No One Left to Lie to

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Editorial Review-No One Left to Lie To

Amazon.com

The most vocal critics of Bill Clinton's presidency tend to be conservatives--think, for example, of William J. Bennett's The Death of Outrage--but there are those on the Left who are fed up with Clinton as well. Among them is journalist Christopher Hitchens (most prominently associated with The Nation and Vanity Fair), who has produced a slim but vehement volume outlining how "Clinton's private vileness meshes exactly with his brutal and opportunistic public style." No One Left to Lie To is the story of a man who took the Democratic presidential nomination and, having achieved office, began enacting welfare reform and anticrime legislation that surpassed the ambitions of all but the most ideologically loyal Republicans--and routinely plundered the GOP platform for other policy ideas as well.

Hitchens is particularly damning on Clinton's tendency to resort to divisive racial politics when it suits his purposes, as when, in the course of the 1992 presidential campaign, he refused to lift a finger to save a mentally retarded African American from state execution so he could appear tough on crime, then shortly afterwards hijacked a Rainbow Coalition conference to criticize rap artist Sister Souljah for the benefit of the attendant press. When he needs the black vote, though, Clinton will allow himself to be trumpeted as the most racially sensitive president in American history--if not, in Toni Morrison's memorably ludicrous phrase, "our first black president." Furthermore, the man who once connived his way out of the draft has become a chief executive so willing to use military air strikes as a means of foreign policy that, in the author's view, the United States is now a "potential banana republic."

Of course, there is plenty of vitriol directed at Clinton's conduct with regard to Monica Lewinsky (the woman with whom he admitted, under duress, to having had an "inappropriate relationship" consisting of multiple incidences of oral sex) and Kathleen Willey (who alleges that the leader of the free world merely fondled her breasts and forced her to touch--albeit shielded under some layers of clothing--his tumescent penis). In Hitchens's view, however, the sexual controversies are only the most prominent aspect of Clinton's shameful character, a moral condition that must be considered in toto. The book is short, with an argument that runs only about a hundred pages, but that's still more than enough room for Hitchens to serve up a comprehensive, blistering indictment suffused throughout by his dark wit. He sums up the failure of those fixated on Clinton's adultery to fully investigate his cronyism and financial shenanigans: "It's not the lipstick traces, stupid," Hitchens warns, "it's the Revlon Connection."

--Ron Hogan

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), February 20, 2001.

"It's not the lipstick traces, stupid," Hitchens warns, "it's the Revlon Connection."

This statement addresses the real essence of the sordid darkside of the Clinton years. The slobbering liberal fools that still fawn and support this ‘trailer trash’ from Hope just refuse to believe the evil that is Bill Clinton. No matter. Like all of the charlatans before him, the cloak of decency is being removed and his deceitful soul will be bared for all to see. Those who continue to align themselves with Clinton will confirm their own deficiencies as decent Americans.

So, have a great day!

-- Barry (bchbear863@cs.com), February 20, 2001.

When a commie journalist calls another commie a traitor, what's left to say?

-- KoFE (your@towm.USA), February 20, 2001.