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

To: DMaA who wrote (4335)	2/3/1998 9:29:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20981

Vulgarity at Home . . . By George F. Will Tuesday, February 3, 1998 Some Clinton supporters defend him with a masterpiece of political minimalism: "Watergate was worse." Which is true. Watergate involved attempted corruption of institutions to punish a president's enemies and aggrandize his power. However, Clinton's crisis is in one aspect more menacing to the civic culture than Nixon's was because he must make the public a participant in his corruption. Call this the Queen of Hearts factor. Having vulgarians like the Clintons conspicuous in government must further coarsen American life. This is already apparent in the emergence of a significant portion of the public that almost preens about supporting the Clintons because of the vulgarity beneath their pantomime of domesticity. Call this portion of the public the Europhile constituency. Watergate divided Americans between those who believed Nixon guilty of abuses and of lying about them, and those who did not. However, no significant group said he was guilty but that they did not care because they approved of, say, his China policy. Clinton today has an "even if" majority -- a soft, perishable majority that answers "no" to a hypothetical question: Should Clinton resign even if he lied? But what happens when that hypothetical becomes actual -- when "even if" becomes "even though"? Already few can manage the willful suspension of disbelief necessary to believe that: Gennifer Flowers's assertions and the contents of the Flowers-Clinton tapes are lies; Clinton had Paula Jones brought to his hotel room for decent reasons and she is lying about what happened there; Kathleen Willey is lying about Clinton groping her, placing her hand on his crotch and saying "I've always wanted to do that"; Monica Lewinski spent 20 hours lying to Linda Tripp; the intense activity by Clinton, Vernon Jordan, the ambassador to the United Nations and others on behalf of Lewinsky's career coincided with, but was unrelated to, her deposition concerning her relations with Clinton; and so on, and on. More and more Americans are exclaiming, as Alice did in "Through the Looking Glass," that "one can't believe impossible things." Clinton and his hirelings (who really must need the money) increasingly resemble the Queen of Hearts: "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Clinton's tenure depends on corrupting the public by nurturing a constituency of Queens of Hearts. Since his one emphatic denial of sexual relations with Lewinsky (as emphatic as Alger Hiss's denial about espionage, Nixon's about Watergate, O. J. Simpson's about murder), Clinton has been guided by the rule that silence is a difficult argument to refute. Staying silent, like invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, is his right, but invites an invidious inference. For example, if reports that he met with Lewinsky on the evening of Dec. 28 were wrong, the White House would have exuberantly refuted them. His silence about them justifies the surmise that the meeting occurred and the explanation would harm him. His silence is a more portentous indicator of this crisis's long-term trajectory than are the lawyers' maneuverings or Hillary Clinton's smarmy accusations. For example, when she says North Carolina's Sens. Helms and Faircloth "appointed" the judge who heads the three-judge panel that selected Starr -- Faircloth was not even in the Senate when the judge was confirmed -- she smears all three judges as participants in the vast conspiracy. Some of those who say "he lied but so what?" are proudly affirming a particular notion of cultural maturity. These Americans -- Clinton's Europhile constituency -- endorse the European condescension that recurs when Americans worry about whether politicians should be exemplary individuals. Europe, and Americans who to take their intellectual bearings therefrom, say: Grow up, Americans. It is immature to judge politicians by other than quantifiable public consequences, such as the growth of GDP. Your quaint, ridiculous political sensibility, reflecting residual puritanism, prevents mature acceptance of this fallen world's naughtiness. To which, this riposte is apposite: Europe's political sensibility, sometimes called "realism" and accurately called the de-moralization of politics (politics in which the only important questions are, Do the trains run on time? Do the autobahns get built?), has been no impediment to the emergence of Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco and Hitler. So spare us your tutorials on political sophistication. Clinton's longest-lasting legacy will be a short-term recasting of Americans' political interest. He has caused a pain he does not feel: the sense millions of Americans have that something precious has been vandalized. The question is, Who should come next, to scrub from a revered institution the stain of the vulgarians? washingtonpost.com