Enigma-anti..is more entertaining than pro...Telegraph appear to be conservative, but fair next to Ambrose they posted following...
. . . but adultery is not a crime
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Boris Johnson deplores the way in which conservatives have adopted the rhetoric of 'gender' politics and political correctness as a means of attacking the President
<Picture>Clinton is a certified liar. . .
COR, did you see that episode of Clinton last night? Woar! Phwoar! It was the best so far. In case you missed the latest developments in the world's number one soap opera, we saw some amazing scenes.
The commander-in-chief of the world's greatest country was flailed, humiliated, backed sweating into all sorts of corners, sometimes seeming to be on the point of blubbing, raving about the definition of the word "is" and asserting that "oral sex performed upon the deponent is not sexual relations".
Didja see his face when they mentioned the cigar? Didja see the most powerful man in the world being forced to ask whether he can go "to the rest room"? Never can a leader have been so wonderfully degraded, and if anyone really took pleasure from his weaselling, they must be out of their minds.
The more I watched Clinton Agonistes, the more worked up I became about the triviality of the whole thing. So what if he dead-batted these impertinent, sly, clever-clever lawyers, with their gossamer traps and arch hypotheticals. I bet if I shoved my foot in your door and a camera in your face and asked for some details about your sex life, you'd send me packing.
William Jefferson Clinton is guilty of lying, perjury, narcissistic wallowing in his own misfortune and, above all, making a staggering cock-up. Just read that sentence again and you see the problem. Every word seems to take on a leer. The very word "impeachment" sounds obscene. Think of footnote 237.
He probably deserves to leave office for the sheer fatuity of his performance; not for abuse of power, but dismal incompetence in self-defence. He was mad to lie to the grand jury and, having lied, it is hard to see how he can stay. What makes the blood boil is that this was the issue on which he was forced to lie, because in any other circumstances apart from the elaborate trap they created - forcing him to go on oath, on television, and the rest of it - there were powerful reasons for lying about having an affair with an intern. Yes, he wanted to save himself from embarrassment. He wanted to stop the (totally irrelevant) Lewinsky business being used to further the (utterly nugatory) Paula Jones sexual harassment case, and it was wrong to lie on oath. But just imagine for one second, per impossibile, my dear fellow, madam, that you were in Bill's shoes. You might also be actuated by a desire to protect your family from the terrible hot-nostril-breath of the media.
You might want, who knows, even if you were married to a gorgon such as Hillary, to save your marriage. Isn't marriage a thing so-called conservative so-called moralists are supposed to care about? And then there is a final consideration. In another age, it would have been out of the question to answer these questions truthfully - for the sake of Monica.
God knows, the big-haired, small-brained California goodtime girl had it coming. She may have had the good taste and sense of sexual decorum of Empress Theodora of Byzantium. She went after Clinton like a rat up a drain pipe. But her life now is turned into a kind of hell, made worse by the knowledge that she has destroyed, politically, the man she thought she loved.
I am not saying Clinton was actuated, in his lies, by any of these finer motives - though he was fairly convincing when he said, "It breaks my heart that she was ever involved in this". The point is that, in any other age, that consideration, the reputation of the lady, might have weighed with a man in his position. In any other age, too, it would have been recognised that the conduct of Kenneth Starr has been repulsive.
He has manoeuvred both Bill and Monica into a legalistic killing-field in which they are damned if they answer truthfully about their relations, and damned if they don't. Starr might be justified in this torture, if this affair were germane to some serious crime. But can you remember why the leader of the free world is being catechised about the details of his consensual relations with an adult woman other than his wife? Is it Whitewater, or the suspicious suicide of Vince Foster? No.
The Lewinsky affair supposedly goes to his character in the Paula Jones case. This case was thrown out by a judge as footling, which it was. It is a good joke that Clinton has been brought low by the kind of spurious harassment case that has been promoted by his fellow feminists. But there is something nauseating in the humbug of his "conservative" assailants.
Under normal circumstances, these conservatives would argue that his priapic conduct towards Paula was nothing more than a friendly southern greeting, but, because there is the chance of dishing a political opponent, they harrumph that he has "preyed on" Monica and "abused" her. What tosh. Can they not see what needless concessions they are making to the rhetoric of political correctness?
The ghastly reality is that many of those who want Clinton out are driven not just by a desire to vindicate the law - with which I have sympathy - but to punish an adulterer. The American public senses that this is what they are being asked to adjudicate on: not lying by the supreme upholder of the law, but sexual mores; and that is why the polls are so ambiguous, why the people seem able to make a distinction between Clinton's "morals" and his performance as president.
There are several reasons why one might think Starr has done the world a service. On one argument, snaring Clinton for lying about adultery is like snaring Al Capone for tax evasion. But even if you believe that Bill and Hillary are the Bonnie and Clyde of Little Rock, the analogy doesn't quite work. Tax evasion is a crime. Adultery isn't, no matter how tasteless.
You might rejoice that Starr has proved Clinton a liar, and so he has, dismally; which is why he ought to go. Yet he has proved him a liar in respect of the one area of our lives where most of us would say lying was most venial. The final reason for glee is the worst. You might think Starr has done well to humiliate Clinton, not for his lying, but for his sexual conduct.
One Republican congressman said the other day that he saw the whole business as a chance to repudiate the "sexual freedom" of the 1960s. Let us leave on one side the question of whether the 1960s were a good thing, though many of my generation regret we were not around to see them.
This whole sanctimonious campaign rests on a bizarre paradox. The only reason we have been treated to this ludicrous spectacle, of the President humiliated, is because of the way sex has become politicised in America. Without the sexual revolution, the rise of "gender" politics, the relentless advance of feminist paranoia, which means some American universities have a code about what a guy can do on a date, the President would have no case to answer. Starr is himself using a hideous, functionalist way of thinking about sexual transactions that sensible conservatives should surely deplore. In any other age, before sex became politics, Clinton's "inappropriate behaviour" would have been ignored, and the Starr report would not exist
telegraph.co.uk |
