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

To: Marty who wrote (5540)	9/26/1998 4:35:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

You know whats even wierder? They dont seem to understand that a vote can be many things beyond a personal affirmation of that politicians individual lifestyle. Example a protest vote, or voting for the lesser of two evils etc. is a completely foreign concept to these right wing people. It keeps coming back to this. They dont understand that Clinton could do a fair amount of wrongs - even now - and not lose his support. Clintons support is actually a vote against Starr, the RR and McCarthyism etc. How can people not get this, I dont know.

To: Marty who wrote (5540)	9/26/1998 4:41:00 PM
From: dougjn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

Yep. You might like this, from Salon. (Which I just started reading yesterday, and had never heard of until they became somewhat famous through their Henry Hyde tit for tat revleation. BTW, I certainly don't find them to follow the DNC or Clinton line. Though the slant is undoubtedly irreverant and liberal, overall.) It's particularly rewarding to read Starr's report alongside an essay written in 1963 by the great American historian Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter set out to define once and for all what he called in the essay's title "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Hofstadter's take on the quintessential witch-hunting "paranoid spokesman" immediately conjures Starr's pietistic invocation of "truth" and his relentless inquisition: "He is always manning the barricades of civilization. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to the finish." [sound like any of our fellow posters?] The nemesis envisioned by Hofstadter's archetypal witch-hunter bears a striking resemblance to the Clinton of Starr's "referral": "The enemy is clearly delineated: He is the perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. The sexual freedom often attributed to him, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and freely express unacceptable aspects of their own minds." Over the last few weeks Washington wags have pointed out that the very social conservatives who promulgated the Communications Decency Act rushed to publish Starr's sex-drenched report on the Internet. All this seeming hypocrisy -- even the possible collusion between Jones' lawyers and Starr's conspiracy-hunting prosecution team -- would have made perfect sense to Hofstadter: "A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is imitation of the enemy ... The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation." Or as another historian, David Brion Davis of Yale University, wrote of 19th century nativists, "By censuring the subversive for alleged licentiousness, he engaged in sexual fantasies." (Years ago, a friend of mine joined a marginal quasi-Marxist political sect. Members stayed up all night copying and re-copying documents, telling and re-telling their leader's utterly fictitious autobiography until they became convinced that they were the vanguard in an imminent revolution. From a certain perspective, Starr and his legal team -- in their years of isolated work, their shared commitment to a fairly extreme model of social conservatism, their telling and re-telling of Clinton's sins until the conspiracy seems self-evident to them -- may have come to resemble such a self-ratifying secret society.) All this would amount to idle speculation about Starr's character except for how -- following the classic pattern -- his bizarre report has collided with election-year opportunism by less fanatical Republicans. While survey after survey shows the public suspicious of Starr and anxious to lay the Lewinsky scandal to rest, the media continues its all-Monica-all-the-time obsession, and Democrats, ignoring their own pollsters, retreat into family-values defensiveness. The very language of law and politics has overnight been distorted and debased for partisan and paranoid ends, beginning with the Starr report's loose construction of perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power and extending through the overheated language that has now overtaken Congress. The president, like so-called unfriendly witnesses called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy era, is subjected to a degradation ritual that will end only when Clinton acquiesces to an acceptable confessional script. Of course Clinton, unlike those blacklist victims, holds all the resources of the presidency, and is no selfless social reformer. In both presidency and personal life, he's a putz. And unlike McCarthyism -- which spread irrational fear throughout the country and cost thousands of teachers, actors, defense workers and professors their jobs -- this remains a crisis of the elite, pitting well-funded conservatives against a popular president in the high-wire arena of the electronic media. But it remains a dangerous moment. In the short run, Starr and Capitol Hill Republicans seem intent on pursuing a legal putsch, forcing forward impeachment even though in poll after poll they enjoy the support of no more than a third of citizens. But the longer-term fallout from the precedents being set this week -- the irresponsible and partisan release of grand jury evidence, the very notion of FBI investigation of political reporting, the redefinition of high crimes and misdemeanors, the criminalization of the president's legal appeals -- may be far worse. The past week -- beginning with the Starr report and extending through Friday's House Judiciary Committee vote to release Starr's grand jury records -- represents our generation's triumph of the paranoid style. Historically, it is just such moments -- the intersection of a conspiracy-obsessed personality like Kenneth Starr's with a divided and opportunistic political establishment -- that have proven most destructive to American civil liberties and democratic life. SALON \| Sept. 22, 1998 Doug