Time mag: Clinton is Satan's best bud:
LIBERTIES / By MAUREEN DOWD
Sympathy for the Devil
WASHINGTON -- Time's cover story this week on "Primary Colors"
offers an incendiary hypothesis about the movie's Bill Clinton clone, Jack
Stanton.
"He shows up occasionally to bring fear, awe or happiness to the mortals who are
at the center of the story," Time's Richard Corliss writes. "He asks them to
slaughter their first principles, hurls plagues of tabloid headlines their way, gives
their lives meaning and hope with his captious majesty. Except, of course, that
Jack isn't God. In luring his team toward corruption, twisting their idealism into
Realpolitik, Stanton is Satan."
Well, Mr. President, this is a case of you know you're in trouble when . . . You
know you're in trouble when all the Hollywood liberals and Scientologists do their
best to soften Joe Klein's mordant novel and give you a valentine -- and the
sweetened version depicts you as Lucifer.
It had occurred to me that Bill Clinton's swelling popularity could be explained by
America's love of bad boys and anti-heroes. He's the charming Butch Cassidy to
Kenneth Starr's relentless Pinkerton man. Hillary and Bill are the joyriding Bonnie
and Clyde to Kenneth Starr's killjoy Texas Ranger.
It had even occurred to me that Bill Clinton was so preternaturally lucky he
seemed to have cut a deal with the Devil. Given the carnage that always
surrounds Mr. Clinton, and given the fact that he always smilingly walks away
stronger than ever, I could easily see him as Faust or Dorian Gray or Joe Hardy
in "Damn Yankees."
But in light of the latest triumphs of the President -- in public opinion, at least, he
has vanquished the hymn-singing, holy-rolling Starr, as well as Paula Jones,
Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and the Nosy Parkers of the press -- Time is
right. We must think cosmically about this.
Perhaps Bill Clinton is the Devil. It would explain a lot. Certainly, Hillary Clinton
is condemned to her own little hell. Certainly, the voters have closed their eyes
and made their pact with the Devil: Keep us prosperous and we won't hold you
to any special moral or ethical standards.
The Mephistophelean scenario has a wonderful logic. It would explain the
extraordinary level of human sacrifice around Bill Clinton -- why so many people
around him end up dead, jailed, betrayed, shackled, exiled, subpoenaed,
depressed, humiliated, broke, ruined and smeared. (And, in the case of poor
Buddy, neutered.)
James McDougal dies abruptly, a broken, crazy man, in solitary confinement in
Federal prison while his ex-business partner has more political lives than a black
cat.
It explains why our moral universe has turned upside down. It's fine if Mr. Clinton
preaches against tobacco one day, and the next goes to a fund-raiser given by a
lawyer trying to reap a tobacco windfall.
And it explains all the diabolical behavior of late, people saying things so bizarre
they could have come out of Linda Blair in "The Exorcist."
Even the angelic seem possessed. Billy Graham telling Katie Couric that the
President should be forgiven all because "the ladies just go wild over him"? Why
should Mr. Clinton have to show any responsibility when he is deemed an
innocent victim of his own sex appeal by the nation's most respected preacher?
You expect the feminists' heads to start rotating on their necks any moment now.
They've abandoned everything they've fought for all these years to join the
let-devils-be-devils chorus -- as long as the sex is consensual or the President at
some point, sooner or later, eventually takes no for an answer.
Instead of racing to the White House and beating the stuffing out of Bill Clinton,
Monica's father waits a month and gives an interview to Barbara Walters. Dr.
Bernard Lewinsky ignored the fact that Clintonites were trashing his daughter as a
troubled temptress, and said he couldn't imagine this scandal would erode
confidence in the President. In loco parentis fades into the loco parent.
And what is the green goo spewing out of David Brock's mouth? Suddenly, the
right-wing hatchet man who posed as a journalist is full of repentance. But his
belated and self-serving apologia doesn't make up for the scummy innuendo he
hurled at Anita Hill and the Clintons before he decided that shredding someone's
reputation might not be such a good idea.
Americans seem to have decided that the Devil you know is better than the Devil
you don't know. Literally.
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