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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (59562)	9/8/1999 7:59:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

September 8, 1999 The Clemency Backfire Fumbling with an unfamiliar power screwdriver on Labor Day, President Clinton said, "Now that I'm a homeowner, I better get one of these. I've never seen one." Yup, and now that he and Hillary are homeowners just outside New York City, it looks like someone better give them a how-to video on the city's power politics. That clemency for 16 Puerto Rican terrorists is looking pretty screwed up just now. The day after he issued the clemency, we editorialized that it was intended to get the city's mostly left-wing Hispanic political leadership up and running after Mrs. Clinton's Senate kite. No other explanation materialized in the days afterward, even from a Clinton camp that is normally unusually good at alternative realities. But this was only the President's fourth clemency grant out of thousands requested, and all relevant federal authorities were opposed. In fact, the Puerto Ricans hadn't even submitted a clemency request. Maybe the Clintons have been living in Washington too long, where their gaffes have often been reported by carrier pigeons lost deep inside thick newspapers. Welcome to New York; when the President pardons 16 people from a group that carried more than 100 bombings, the tabloids report it in headlines measured in inches, for days on end. So by last Monday, New Yorkers were reading, "FALN'ers who'd be pardoned taped talking violence." And two days later: "Moynihan joins chorus denouncing FALN deal." And so before the end of the week, Mrs. Clinton did what she had to do: She denounced the deal, too. Various Clinton spokesmen put out accounts of what Bill or Hillary had told whom what and when about the clemencies, but we couldn't follow it. By the next morning various city Puerto Rican leaders, following the classic New York political text, had "withdrawn their support" for Hillary's candidacy. The New York City Democratic establishment then spent the Labor Day weekend trying to grab any branch below the big one Hillary had just sawed off behind them. We can't imagine that Senator Chuck Schumer, having finally scrambled to the top of the New York Democratic heap, enjoyed going on ABC Sunday morning to sweep up after this mess: "If those documents show, as there have been reports, that these people would be a danger to society or that they are unwilling to renounce violence, then they should not be released. Period." Rep. Michael Forbes, the former GOP Congressman who decided this summer that he'd rather be in Hillary's party, pushed out: "We simply cannot be tough enough on those who introduce fear and havoc into the fabric of our society." Come the campaign, they'll all be back. They have nowhere else to go. Whether gays upset over don't ask, don't tell or lifelong liberals upset over the President signing welfare reform, Bill Clinton and the First Lady know from experience that liberalism's co-dependency on them is limitless. Once you've gotten away with transforming a $1,000 commodities-futures investment into $100,000, you're bound to think your chosen constituency includes a famous bridge that New York Democrats will buy from you. The candidacy of course is still "unofficial," and by now more Democrats may be going to bed at night hoping that come the dawn, they'll read she's withdrawn in the face of political reality (as Christine Whitman did in New Jersey yesterday). Dream on. Last week also brought news that Clinton fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe had come up with $1.35 million somewhere to buy them a house in once-quiet Chappaqua. New York's experience with the Clintons' opportunism is bound to continue. At the least, the clemency-for-terrorists story looks good for another week. The White House said yesterday that 12 of the 16 terrorists would sign an anti-violence pledge, which is enough apparently to get them out of jail. Two are thinking it over until Friday, and two told the President to get lost. While it's normal in clemency cases to require the prisoner to renounce violence, Newsweek reported last week that the Bureau of Prisons had taped prisoners' phone calls (this is routine by the way; only calls to lawyers are confidential) in which they said they planned to return to violence. Rep. Dan Burton's committee has subpoenaed the information the Bureau of Prisons supplied the Justice Department on the terrorists. Meanwhile, there are very sincere people who argue that the sentences for some of these people are disproportionate to their individual acts and that this clemency effort has been ongoing for years. Could be. But they all belong to the Clintons' politics now. That's their problem. interactive.wsj.com