Here's a passage from Frank Rich's column today. I consider this dead on, not only as to how I feel in many respects, but also as to much of the public's mood:
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Looking for a theory to explain a self-stained and humiliated President's illogical hammerlock on his office [and I would add RISING job approval ratings as he is able to accomplish little currently and more details of prior bad behavior comes out], 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."
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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.
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Nope, Starr's "abdicating" is not enough. Because of the priggish Right Wing Republican religious right mob that have become enboldened in Starr's wake. That gang has to be put back in their box.
Doug |
