"Reality will take care of itself"
Tiger Paw,
Here is a little dose of reality from somebody you probably respect, or should respect :
U.K. Telegraph
February 2, 1999 Hugh Davies
Leading Democrat attacks Clinton By Hugh Davies in Washington
THE scholarly Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan at 71 still considered the Senate's sharpest intellect, issued a withering critique of President Clinton yesterday, ranging from his private life to his policies.
The senator has been a fixture of American politics for five decades, working in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford administrations, as well as teaching at Harvard and acting as ambassador to India.
Expressing disgust at the affair with Monica Lewinsky, Mr Moynihan said Americans had the right to expect that Mr Clinton could have "held off" until 2002.
Then he used an interview in the New Yorker magazine to skewer him for his other Oval Office performance - as President. "There is a sort of absence of character that has been the quality of this administration," he said, and attacked Mr Clinton for what he called "this miniaturisation of the presidency".
He accused him of "doing this little thing and that little thing" when the United States is the only nation "which can do things that need to be done". Mr Moynihan said that he understood Mr Clinton's politics:
the President's former adviser, Dick Morris, had told him "that doing little things is how to get re-elected".
His attack will be taken hard at the White House. Mr Clinton once flew to New York to raise $1 million (£610,000) for the senator's campaign war chest, showering him with praise. He said: "Moynihan's got
an IQ of 300. Before I met him, I actually thought I knew something about government."
Mr Clinton's only solace at the moment is that most Americans think him a poor husband, but good at his job. However, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has just lectured him on the wisdom of pouring billions of dollars in social security reserves into Wall Street investments.
Mr Moynihan, long one of America's spokesmen on welfare reform, sees the whole Clinton health-care project as a sort of New Age affectation. He accused the President of lacking caution and
approaching it with the "language of protest, a rhetoric of crisis, deprivation and suffering".
The senator said that, in the wake of Mr Clinton's health-care fiasco in Congress, his version of reality became whatever his pollsters told him - whatever would achieve the fastest gain possible at the
least political cost.
He said: "What you should mostly care about is: Does this person use the office in terms that are appropriate to the nation at this time?" He heaped scorn on the President's educational initiatives, saying: "We are in a disastrous state with regard to the most important part of American life."
Mr Moynihan is not saying how he will vote in the impeachment trial, but he spoke of a "budding triumphalism among Democrats". |
