PIG VS. PRIG -- A right-on-target piece in today's (Wednesday's) New York Times explaining Why the Naughty Public Prefers the Pig to the Prigs. (Italics are mine.)
JOURNAL / By FRANK RICH
Pig vs. Prig
It's not only our President who has a certain genius for, as the Starr report puts it, refusing to achieve "completion" in sex. Look at the media. From the moment the All Monica bell went
off in January -- with Sam Donaldson's immortal prediction that "If he's not telling the truth,I think his Presidency is numbered in days" -- the press has been promising a national orgasm in the form of the resignation, impeachment or tarring-and-feathering of Bill Clinton.
But, in the eternal Groundhog Day that is Monicagate, the
consummation, however devoutly wished, never arrives.
The teasingly orgiastic buildup is always the same. The Paula
Jones case document dump, the Kathleen Willey "60 Minutes"
interview, the Aug. 17 Presidential "apology," the Starr report, and
now the televised grand jury inquisition were all hyped like the Super Bowl -- only to come and go, leaving the essential civic equation unchanged. Most Americans suspected early on that the
President had had sex with Monica Lewinsky and most long ago concluded he lied about it,under oath and not. And yet two-thirds of the country doesn't want him to leave office.
Why? It's certainly not that anyone loves Bill Clinton or believes he's capable of honesty. His personal approval numbers are in the toilet. Nor is his Presidency more than an empty shell,
even for those who agree with his politics; an unfocused lame duck before the Lewinsky story broke, he has been stripped of the moral and political authority to accomplish anything, at least
in the domestic arena, in what months he has left.
Looking for a theory to explain a self-stained and humiliated President's illogical hammerlock on his office, the Clinton lynch mob, talking heads and politicians alike, blames the public. The
American people, we're repeatedly told, are whores who will not only sell out their principles to the Dow Jones average (never mind its recent decline) but who may have abandoned moral judgments entirely (if we are to believe William Bennett's new screed, "The Death of Outrage"). Last week an exasperated James Dobson, head of the G.O.P.'s powerful family-values auxiliary, Focus on the Family, went so far as to declare "that our greatest problem is not in the Oval
Office -- it is with the people of this land."
But the people of this land whom he sees as the "problem" are also, as it happens, an American majority that sees people like Mr. Dobson as the problem: preacher-politicians who want to legislate the most intimate acts of human life -- sex and religion. And Kenneth Starr, by his own actions, not those of his political foes, has signaled that he is one of those politicians -- by speaking under Pat Robertson's auspices while serving as Independent Counsel, by dropping all
the other Clinton scandals to fixate on Monica, and finally by producing both a report and a grand jury interrogation that chill the rest of us not so much with their salacious detail as with
their vision of what America might be like if the Starrs, Robertsons and Dobsons were in power beyond this one investigation.
Americans sense that the government prosecutor who uses his office not merely to catalogue repetitive sex acts but to gratuitously determine if (and how) they reached "completion" is an avatar for the political movement that wishes to revive punitive divorce laws, enforce state
sodomy statutes (especially against homosexuals), roll back Roe v. Wade and police libraries, TV, movies and the Internet for smut (unless it's state-sanctioned, like the Starr report). The
two-thirds of the people in this land who reject such invasive politics, many of them far more honorable than Bill Clinton, would rather have a piggish President they don't admire, and perhaps actively deplore, in the White House than lend any vindication to the crusade of a zealous prig out of "The Crucible."
Monicagate will yield more Super Bowl events -- the tainted Linda Tripp tapes, further bimbo eruptions and perhaps even impeachment hearings in which the mob is treated to the spectacle
of Congress interrogating Ms. Lewinsky to nail the President on his sworn lies about his contact with her breasts and genitalia. But Mr. Starr was and is Mr. Clinton's best insurance policy. No
matter how many doomsdays the media predict, the only way the public is likely to give the President the boot is if the Independent Counsel abdicates first.
THE END
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