It's over.
Washington Post
January 13, 1999 Michael Kelly
The Flynt Standard
By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, January 13, 1999
The lie at the heart of the vast and varied lie that is Bill Clinton's defense is that lying is a victimless crime -- something that properly exists as a moral concern only between the liar and his maker and a few people immediately affected.
But this is not so. Lying corrupts, and an absolute liar corrupts absolutely, and the corruption spread by the lies of the absolutely mendacious Clinton is becoming frightening to behold.
Consider just one Clinton lie. It is a simple one -- but watch its effects, and count its victims. After the Lewinsky matter broke, it soon became clear to the president that his false denial of a sexual relationship with "that woman" could not be long sustained. So, it was necessary to build an argument that could support the president when this first lie collapsed.
A cornerstone of this argument was the assertion that Kenneth Starr's case against Clinton did not concern an offense against the people but was only about a personal failing. It was not about crime; it was about sex, and only sex. This lie was perpetuated most energetically, not to say hysterically, by one James Carville, a character actor who among his credits counted a recent appearance in a film extolling the constitutional virtues of pornographer Larry Flynt.
As lies go, the just-sex canard had the essential virtue in spades. It was very, very big. To believe it meant to believe the unbelievable: That if Linda Tripp had gone to Ken Starr with news that the president had hankied the panky with the office help -- and nothing else, no violations of law, no allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice, no actions intruding into the public sphere -- Starr would have gone to Clinton's attorney general and asked for permission to launch a criminal investigation; Clinton's attorney general would have approved this request and forwarded it to the appellate panel that has jurisdiction over independent counsels; the panel would have given Starr the go-ahead; and, finally, strictly on the basis of private and noncriminal sexual misbehavior, the House of Representatives would have impeached the president.
It was a risible argument, and for Clinton, an essential one. For, if Clinton could get away with the claim that the allegations against him were strictly a case of exposing his private sexual misbehavior, then Clinton's defenders could claim a justification for exposing the sexual misbehavior of his prosecutors and critics, on the grounds of hypocrisy. That would be of immense value, not only in undermining the case against Clinton (Why should he be prosecuted for private failings shared by his prosecutors?) but also in blackmailing those who would pursue the truth.
But surely no president, no matter how desperate, would stoop to countenance the use of such loathsome tactics. Surely, the press and the president's own party would denounce such tactics. Surely, no one would accept that the president's defenders had a right to expose any and all sexual secrets of the president's political opponents under the gossamer-thin cover of combating a nonexistent hypocrisy.
Wrong. It turned out that there was no depth to which this president would not blithely stoop to conquer, or at least to avoid defeat. And it turned out that there were people willing to aid the president in this dirty work. And it turned out that a largely Democratic press corps that was feeling queasy about its role in bringing down a Democratic president would grasp the excuse to broadcast the sexual secrets of Republicans.
So an ethical code that stood, battered and bruised but still surviving, is finally destroyed. The president's pornographer, who has a professional interest in undermining conservatism, openly pays cash for Republicans' sex secrets. And the president stands by, in silent support. Among friends, he laughs about that merry prankster Flynt. And the president's party, eaten to the core by the ravages of Clinton's cowardice and selfishness, stands by too. And the press pretends that because one man committed the public act of lying under oath and the lie happened to concern private acts of sex, it is now somehow appropriate that anyone who stands against this man may fairly be targeted for sexual outing.
Monday night the president's pornographer broke the shocking news that Republican Rep. Bob Barr, a loud Clinton critic, may have committed adultery, years ago, in a marriage that ended in divorce. Tuesday morning, the distinguished Democratic senator from New Jersey, Frank Lautenberg, appeared on television to perform his contemptible duty. Noting approvingly that Barr was the fifth Republican to be outed, Lautenberg praised such efforts. "Larry Flynt," he said, "says his mission is against hypocrisy, and, boy, I think that's a pretty good mission." Thus speaks a once-noble party, as the cancer of Clinton eats on to the bone.
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