Wojtek writes: >2. Who knows, maybe all that impeachment brouhaha was a Kisingeresque ploy >devised by the said hawks and bigwigs to ascertain Clinton compliance? The >standard liberal-democrat line that the impeachment ploy has been cooked >only by a handlful of right wing characters is not very credible. In general, I'd say that this is how Washington DC works. The GOPsters and other right-wing forces (including many Democrats) put pressure on the President in order to push him (or, in the future, her) to comply with their general program. The hawks have been on Clinton's case from the beginning, even before the current impeachment brouhaha, pushing him to comply with the party line. Like chickens, they peck at every sore in order to induce agreement. They exploited the "gays in the military" business to the max... Of course, Clinton _wanted_ to comply on foreign policy issues all along. He was a governor of Arkansas, with little or no experience in foreign policy and only a few vague memories of the antiwar movement (which to him mostly consisted of getting out of the draft). If he had favored a deviant foreign policy, he never would have made it through the primaries and never would have reaped all of those campaign contributions. The Monicagate business seems unique in that it represents the emotion combination of various issues that are not strictly military in nature. The "cultural right" that lambasted McGovern's presidential campaign over the three As (abortion, acid, amnesty for draft evaders) has a similar campaign against Clinton (abortion, not inhaling, draft evasion). These are the people who really _hate_ Clinton. It's more than simply a ploy to force him to comply. However, the cultural right's campaign (led by Starr and Mr. Hyde) meshes well with the military and foreign-policy right's campaign (which has less hatred involved) and the economic right's campaign (that of the Wall Street bunch, including the secretary of the Treasury and the head of the Fed). All of these forces have pushed Clinton to become the person we revile today. As noted, he's been more than willing to comply. The exception, I feel, is that he does have a core constituency that he can't abandon completely. Thus he has made fewer compromises on abortion rights and a few other issues (I wouldn't include the environment in that list). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html
