Larry, interesting article...
The Bill Clinton Show
Filed September 21, 1998
It is too early to predict what effect broadcasting the President's grand jury testimony will have on the nation, but having just finished watching the four-plus hours, I'm ready to tell what effect it had on me. I feel decidedly stupider -- as though a few thousand brain cells died in trying to follow the President's attempts to redefine, among other things, the meaning of ''is,'' ''alone,'' and ''sex.''
Above all ''sex.'' It was as if at some point in early August the President's cornered army -- pinned down by the DNA-stained dress -- decided that ''if we go forward we die, if we go backward we die'' and so determined to go sideways and live.
Going sideways necessitated not only redefining sex but asserting ''that is the definition that ordinary Americans would give it.'' ''If you said, 'Jane and Harry had a sexual relationship','' the President declared, ''I'll bet the grand jurors, if they were talking about two people they know ... they meant they were sleeping together; they meant they were having intercourse together.''
Back in the palmy January days when Clinton stalwarts either believed the President or believed he would never have to change his story, his communications director Ann Lewis did, in fact, voice the opinion of most ''ordinary'' Americans. ''Sex is sex,'' she said in response to a question whether the President considered oral sex sex. ''Maybe only in Washington is this considered something we ought to spend a lot of time on.'' Well, during his grand jury testimony -- which, as it happens, took place in Washington -- the President did, indeed, spend a lot of time on it.
The wise men of the Democratic Party, including Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt, have publicly pleaded with the President to stop his legal quibbling about just what constitutes sex.
It is now all too clear that the President's hair-splitting is not mere legal quibbling. It is his entire case. This, plus the fact that touching another person's breasts or genitalia is apparently not sex either, so long as there is no ''specific intent to arouse or gratify.''
My head is still swimming from the effort to follow all these rambling, confused and untenable arguments.
It was, all told, painful to watch this master manipulator of words humbled by facts that he could just not stretch to fit on the Procrustean bed of his story line. When, for example, he was questioned about his Dec. 28 meeting with Monica Lewinsky -- which followed Lewinsky's subpoena to testify in the Paula Jones case -- the President was suddenly reduced to mumbling inarticulateness: ''She -- well -- she -- we -- she didn't -- we didn't talk about the subpoena.'' So the President wanted the grand jury to believe that he and Lewinsky discussed ''her desire to avoid testifying'' and her affidavit, but not her subpoena.
It was like watching a master juggler use all the same tricks that had so brilliantly worked in the past, but this time, the bowling pins would just not stay in the air. Here was a stupendously lucky man whose luck had finally run out -- to such an extent that any Democrats caught in the thunderstorm of a tight race would be ill-advised to stand anywhere near him.
Long before the testimony comes to an end, it is clear that the President had chosen a losing strategy. And from his body language, his voice and his demeanor, it's obvious that at least part of him knows it, too. He still struggles for the pat, pert comment which will sustain the fading illusion that his answers, now and forever, have been ''legally accurate.'' Instead, we are left with a merciless depiction of chicanery, duplicity and an almost insane manipulation of words and facts.
Rattling through the President's testimony in a dozen different guises is also his assertion that his once formidable memory has been eroded by the stresses of high office, compounded by the pressures of the Independent Counsel's investigations. So not content to stick with the patently ridiculous lie that oral sex is not sex, the President had to throw in this doozie. The only words damning enough to characterize these defenses were spoken by Pope Innocent X to describe the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648: ''Null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane and empty of meaning for all time.''
There will be plenty of time during the week to discuss the President's political fate. For the time being, my conclusion is that Sen. Bob Kerrey was wrong in 1995 when he said, ''Clinton's an unusually good liar, unusually good.'' And that Jesse Jackson was right when he said in 1992: ''There is nothing this man won't do. He is immune to shame. Move past all the nice posturing and get really down in there in him, you find absolutely nothing ... nothing but an appetite.''
Perhaps, there is nothing wrong with this poor soul that cannot be cured by standing him upside down and shaking him gently until whatever is inside his head -- all the bloodless, calculating, truth-twisting equivocations that have worked for him in the past -- falls out.
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