FEB. 13, 2004: BIMBO ERUPTIONS
I love Apple computers, but they don’t seem to love me in return. I’ve just had my fourth major computer crash in 18 months – this one on a second iBook that replaced the lemon that suffered the first three crashes. Sorry for the offline absence. I’ve now secured a loaner and will be filing from it over the next few days.
Much has happened in the interval. Among other things, the John Kerry campaign has just been rocked by the scandal that people who knew John Kerry have been quietly predicting for months. Isn’t it curious how after a story like this breaks there turn out to be dozens of people who were in on the secret? And yet it never saw press? That’s a testament I suppose to human decency. And isn’t it curious too how these scandals illuminate old mysteries? Now we know why Teresa Heinz was reluctant to bankroll her husband’s campaign.
How did the silence break? Rush Limbaugh was speculating yesterday that Bill Clinton was somehow involved. Rush’s suspicions were ignited by the way in which the story was broken – a conversation between Wesley Clark and a dozen reporters. “Off the record.” Not even Wesley Clark could be fool enough to think that such a conversation would remain “off the record,” or so Rush suggested. And since the Clark campaign originated as a wholly owned subsidiary of BillandHill.com, it stood to reason that the Clintons were behind it, possibly so as to help defeat the Democrats in 2004 and keep the route open for a Clinton return in 2008.
Well it’s certainly an ingenious theory, and as Rush spells it out, it has a certain plausibility. In the end, though, I don’t believe it.
First, I don’t think we know enough about the Clinton camp’s actual motivations to draw conclusions about their behavior. Are we sure that Bill wants Hill to win in 2008? Really? Are we sure that he wants the Dems to lose in 2004? And why would he want the whole subject of sexual misconduct reintroduced as a legitimate subject of inquiry in presidential politics?
Second, Clark has sufficient motives all his own to let the story loose. Have you seen those interviews Wesley Clark Jr. has been doing about the failure of his father’s campaign? Young Clark expresses intense bitterness about the dirtiness and unfairness of politics – at the refusal of the press to judge his father on his record – and above all on the unspecified dirty tricks that supposedly did his father in.
Isn’t it a better hypothesis that the son is saying what the father is feeling? And that his father succumbed to those emotions on the last day of the campaign and revenged himself on the winner in the most savage way he could? Kery wasn’t going to name Clark secretary of state anyway.
This theory is not as clever as Rush’s. But it may come closer to the sad, squalid truth.
Coming Attractions
An End to Evil has in recent days received four substantial, hostile reviews. Former Clinton National Security official Daniel Benjamin took it on in Canada’s Globe and Mail. Newsweek's international editor Fareed Zakaria went at it in the New York Times Book Review. Michael Lind of the New America Foundation had a long diatribe against the neocon conspiracy in the pages of the Nation; Pat Buchanan took up Lind’s theme and amplified it in the American Conservative . Obviously, these four people speak from radically different points of view. And yet there is a remarkable agreement among them about how the war on terror should be fought. Or rather, since all four quietly doubt that the United States is engaged in a real war, it might more accurately be said that they share a remarkable agreement about how the al Qaeda problem should be dealt with.
For that reason, Richard and I are preparing a reply to all four together. Watch here for more details.
09:51 AM |
