Enjoy the unstoppable rise of Cisco and the unstoppable denouement
of Clinton. What a world, what a world, what a wonderful world!
Speaking here as a non-partisan: I predict this will blow over, and Clinton will last out his term. I've read the Starr report, and the evidence supporting a perjury conviction is pretty skimpy. (Obviously, Clinton lied, to the American people and to his Cabinet; perjury is another matter. Clinton chose his words carefully, and probably stayed just on the right side of perjury.) More to the point, I think the perception is justifiably growing that Clinton has been the subject of a long-term, politically motivated legal assault that, to add insult to injury, has been funded by us taxpayers. I am hearing people who had been reserving judgment on these matters increasingly inclined to forgive the President for his obvious character flaws, and to see Starr and his cohort as out of control and biased -- the heavy emphasis on lurid sexual detail in the report being the last straw.
There has always been a hard-core cadre of Clinton haters who seem obsessed with the man. These are the same people who thought it was a hoot to deride the President's then 13-year-old daughter as "the White House dog." Now they are beating the drums for a legally absolutist definition of perjury (was their moral outrage as great when Oliver North was frantically wiping incriminating email off his hard disks?) that few DA's in the nation would support. And they say things like "What a wonderful world" at the prospect of a government preoccupied for a year or more with a sordid scandal whose flames they will fan as hard as they can.
Most of us Americans are pragmatists and moderates, who distrust and dislike hype, cant, and posturing, from either the left or the right. Personally, I was pleased to see the Republicans' Contract with America (remember that?); I didn't agree with all of it, but some of it was pretty good, and it certainly injected fresh ideas and fresh life into the political debate. How far they have fallen in four short years: reduced to dragging the pathetic details of a flawed, but adequate, President's sex life down the public boulevards. This is bad leadership, bad morality, and bad advocacy. We, the American people, deserve better than that from you. |
