Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Janice Shell who wrote (3555)	1/30/1998 5:31:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 20981

Conspiracy Theory To the Rescue By George F. Will Thursday, January 29, 1998; Page A19 The increasingly gothic tale that is Bill Clinton's current crisis was missing a savory ingredient until his wife, breathing fresh life into the paranoid style in American politics, blamed his problems on a "vast right-wing conspiracy," washingtonpost.com a phrase with an interesting pedigree. Joseph McCarthy, echoing J. Edgar Hoover's 1919 warning about a communist conspiracy "so vast, so daring," warned in 1951 about "a conspiracy on a scale so immense" that it was everywhere. Anticipating the Oliver Stone movie version of all this, Hillary Clinton supplied the "man on the grassy knoll" culprit. And, lo, the man is . . . Jerry Falwell! Well. Paranoiacs can have real enemies, as does Bill Clinton. But neither he nor his wife is a paranoiac. Her insouciant insincerity in playing the conspiracy card is understandable, given that it is a Clinton habit, and given the alternative, which is to discuss the facts -- those known and those still concealed by her husband. In the taped conversations with Gennifer Flowers, first heard in 1992, Bill Clinton suggested to her that if he became the subject of sexual accusations, "it would be extremely valuable" if she would "have an on-file affidavit explaining that, you know, you were approached by a Republican." (Should you consider those tapes accurate? Clinton did. He called Mario Cuomo to apologize for his taped statement that Cuomo "acts like a mafioso.") Today's controversy has come with uncommon speed to the traditional "vast conspiracy" accusation. Fifty years ago it took Alger Hiss much longer to postulate that the FBI fabricated a perfect duplicate of his Woodstock typewriter in order to link him to stolen State Department documents. It is a lawyers' axiom: If you have the law on your side, argue the law; if you have the facts on your side, argue the facts; if you have neither, pound the table. Hillary Clinton's table-pounding about the vast conspiracy continued yesterday morning when she said on ABC, "I'm interested in what the facts are, and we know very few facts right now." "We"? The man across from her at the breakfast table surely has lots of pertinent facts right now. So Hillary Clinton might begin to slake her thirst for facts by saying: "Pass the marmalade, and by the way, is the New York Times right that Monica Lewinsky met alone with you late last month, two weeks after being subpoenaed by Paula Jones' lawyers and a week before Lewinsky filed her affidavit saying she had not had sexual relations with you? Help yourself to the bacon, dear, and what did you and 'that woman' talk about, other than saving Social Security?" "That woman" is the president's dismissive designation of her to whom he reportedly gave that private December meeting, and an inscribed book of poetry, and he knows what else. (Hillary Clinton is not surprised by all this giving, because "he is an extremely generous person" -- "I mean, I've seen him take his tie off and hand it to somebody.") Lewinsky seems to have had a remarkable interest in the intricacies of the law. She reportedly says on one of the tapes made by Linda Tripp that "perjury is rarely prosecuted in civil cases." Perhaps she got that insight from "Vernon." That apparently is her way of speaking of Vernon Jordan, who Hillary Clinton says is so "outgoing and friendly" that there is just no telling what he will do for little people. On Monday the president took care to seem quite cross about what is being said about him. What else is he angry about? As chief executive he is charged with seeing that the laws are faithfully executed. So presumably he is furious that someone wrote the memo that Lewinsky had, suggesting how Tripp should amend her memory and testify concerning another woman, who supposedly had an unsolicited and unwanted sexual encounter with the chief executive. Is he consumed by curiosity about who wrote it and who gave it to Lewinsky? What steps is he taking to find out? More breakfast table talk for his wife. Twenty-four years after President Nixon said in a State of the Union address that "one year of Watergate is enough," Hillary Clinton, the point of the White House spear, is saying that one week of Monica Lewinsky suffices, and it is time to get on with the agenda the president outlined Tuesday evening. But first he may have to drive a stake through the heart of a right-wing conspiracy on a scale so immense that perhaps it even had Lewinsky as an agent in place. Gosh. washingtonpost.com