THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT IMPERATIVE TO "GET CLINTON"
(From WE HAS MET THE ENEMY, AND THEY IS US" )
"And now a third and more important factor presented itself: as a result of the Democratic Party's disastrous rout in the 1994 elections, Clinton began to successfully re-position the party back to the center and away from the liberal, special interest group politics of the 1980s, which had made the Democrats unable to win the White House. In doing so, he was shamelessly poaching Republican issues. If he succeeded - as the results of the 1998 presidential election seemed to indicate that he was doing - Republicans could lose both the House and the Senate in 2000 and be shut out of the presidency for another eight years by Vice President Al Gore, the man who Clinton was grooming to take over the new centrist Democratic Party. To Republicans who thought long-term, this meant the Supreme Court would be gone along with the entire federal judiciary, and it also meant a resurgence of the hated federal bureaucracy and its related regulatory agencies. To anti-abortionists, anti-feminists, anti-homosexuals, free marketeers, etc., this meant the devastation of all the dreams of the right - especially, the Religious Right, the dreams of people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Tim LaHaye, etc. By the time the Al Gore presidency finished - in the year 2009 - all of them would very probably be dead and buried, or at least close to it.
It was precisely these people who refused to let Starr give up - and thus was born the determination to "get Clinton" at all costs. All this, of course, has tended to reveal what the Religious and Secular Right were really up to: to prevent at whatever cost Clinton's re-positioning of the Democratic Party in the center. They were not interested in the specifics of the charges against Clinton; they weren't even interested in necessarily finding out the truth of the charges against the president. They wouldn't even have been pleased (or relieved) to find out that the president was genuinely innocent of the charges. Their purpose was to remove him from office or to so cripple him (and the Democratic Party) politically that they could successfully install themselves in power in the year 2000 - and by their control of the presidency and both houses of Congress re-institute America as a "Christian nation." A president who was innocent of the charges against him would be of no use to them. They had to make at least one of the charges stick! - and they didn't much care which one it was. Hardly the attitude that real Christians would be expected to display. These men - all of them - seem quite unconcerned that in order to save the United States as a "Christian nation," they are killing Christianity as a spiritual reality.
Enter Paula Jones, Richard Scaife, the Rutherford Institute and the Religious Right in all their pompous regalia and at full gallop. |
