Wow, Daniel...
Did I touch a nerve?
Here's another view of life in Slick's Washington through the eyes of Wesley Pruden... one of your favorite editorialists. <gg>
The Washington Times
Published in Washington, D.C.
5am -- November 27, 1998
Copyright © 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
washtimes.com
Pruden on Politics
The perfect match of Bill and Janet
If Janet Reno will forgive the analogy, she and Bill Clinton
were a match made, if not in heaven, at least on another
planet. They certainly seem to have been made to satisfy
each other's wants and needs.
The attorney general is the administration's last line of
defense, its Maginot Line against all those rascally chickens
flying low over the White House, looking for a place to roost.
She has to save Al Gore to save Bill Clinton, and if she doesn't
save Bill Clinton, she can't save herself.
Miss Reno does not suffer skinned knees; no comparison to
Monica Lewinsky is implied here. But she has certainly done
more for the Arkansas flasher than anyone short of Monica.
The hear-no-evil, see-no-evil attorney general is a dim bulb in
the notably undistinguished Clinton solar system. If anyone has
argued otherwise over the Clinton years, he mumbled it so softly
no one remembers hearing him say it. But she has been the
president's greatest success, his most reliably pliant accomplice.
Unlike a lot of Clinton accomplices, she has managed to stay out
of the criminal-justice system herself, and she has shown a
remarkable ability to overlook suspicious behavior in the really
important others.
Anyone with a recollection of those dim days of yesteryear
will recall that Mr. Clinton barely got an attorney general. He
insisted on finding a woman for the position. Everyone he tried to
appoint -- first, Zoe Baird; then, Kimba Wood --turned out to
have something shady in her past, like hiring low-rent aliens to
care for her children. Mzz Baird had not bothered even to pay
her domestic's Social Security taxes, and Mzz Wood, a federal
judge and a one-time Playboy bunny (the prez knows what to
look for), found an alien nanny who satisfied the letter, but not
the spirit, of the law.
But she was the personal choice of Hillary Rodham Clinton,
who is always willing to overlook a lot. The more trouble the
president had in finding someone suitably female, if not
necessarily suitably distinguished, the more desperate he became
to find anyone with a law degree who could fill out a frock.
He promised to stock his administration so that it would "look
like America" -- we didn't know then how indelibly his idea of
what America looked like was formed by the lawless, mob-riven
Hot Springs of his youth -- and when his panicked head-hunters
ran across Miss Reno in Miami, where she had established a
reputation as a decent, competent enough federal D.A., his
prayers seemed answered. He didn't know then just how
abundantly those prayers had been answered.
But he learned quickly just how reliable Miss Reno could be,
and when she gave the FBI permission to fry the children at
Waco it never occurred to him that decency demanded that she
be sacked as a gesture to the honor that seemed to have
departed the capital with the arrival of the Clinton gang. Miss
Reno has been paying him back since.
The attorney general thinks like the president, so you can't
blame Mr. Clinton for keeping her around. When Louis Freeh,
who was appointed by Mr. Clinton to be the director of the FBI,
told Miss Reno that the evidence against Al Gore demanded the
undivided attention of an independent counsel, she went to
someone else for advice. Charles LaBella, a distinguished
prosecutor in San Diego, was appointed to look at the evidence.
He, too, told her to get an independent prosecutor.
The lady is nothing if not persistent, and she finally found
someone in her own Justice Department, the career bureaucrat
David Vicinanzo, who would tell her what she wanted to hear.
So on Tuesday, she said, "Nah, Al's O.K., let's forget about it.
Washington ain't perfect, but it beats going back to Miami."
This has been a lousy month for the law, and we're only
beginning to see the worst of it. The Clinton gang is determined
to drain the law of its strength and dignity, and when the Clintons
finally succeed, the law will no longer command respect or
authority. Frying children in Waco is not a crime punishable by
anything more than demanding mild regrets, nothing more serious
than an after-dinner burp, so how can lying about the sexual
exploitation of children in the Oval Office be a crime? And if
none of that is a crime, how can shilling for illegal campaign
contributions be a crime? Doesn't everybody do it, or wish he
could? Miss Reno's job is safe for a while longer, her health
insurance and her pension are intact, and the jungle out there is
made a little safer for Al Gore's pursuit of the presidency, so
crucial to the survival of Bill and Hillary.
Maybe no further harm is done. Having done with respect
for the office of the presidency, having done with solemn regard
for the law, maybe we've done with respect for ourselves, too.
We have met the Clintons, and they are us.
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times. |
