-Caveat Lector-
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: The Embarrassment of the Riches:CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 22:28:55 -0500
From: Nurev Ind Research <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: Nurev Independent Research
BCC: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
March 5, 2001
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The Embarrassment of the Riches:
Minority Report
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.
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