From an enemy of the religious right, about Broaddrick :
President's Sycophants Are Blaming the Victim
The New York Observer
March 8 edition by Ron Rosenbaum
For educational and discussion purposes only. Not for commercial use.
No, Juanita Broaddrick is not dead, but she might as well be for Bill Clinton's defenders. For the Friends of
Bill like Lanny Davis, her story just doesn't matter. Doesn't give them pause. It was so long ago it might
have been in another country. She might as well be dead for all they seem to care about whether or not she
was raped by their friend our President. After all his other lies they don't have time to look into this one. It's
"too late in the day." It's hard, perhaps impossible, to know the truth, so why care? It's time to move on. We
have scandal fatigue. Let's talk about saving Social Security.
I don't know whether it's true. I hope it's not. Nobody knows for sure except Juanita Broaddrick and Bill
Clinton. But the Friends of Bill don't know either. And the difference is that they just don't seem to care.
They don't care enough to hesitate for a nanosecond before going on the talk shows and telling us it doesn't
really matter, it was all so long ago, it was in another country-and besides the wench is probably lying.
I think the time has come for the Friends of Bill like Lanny Davis to be held to account. Their Bill has come
due. Three issues ago in these pages [Feb. 15], when the Juanita Broaddrick story was still being held by
NBC, I suggested the Friends of Bill were making themselves hostages to fortune. That their disingenuous
claims that their boy was being persecuted only for "consensual sex" ignored the more serious charges of
nonconsensual sex from Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Jane Doe No. 5. I dislike Bill's puritanical
inquisitors as much as they do, but attacking them, attacking the charges of sexual harassment and rape as
"immaterial" to his impeachment, isn't going to cut it anymore. That's avoiding the real question, to which
these charges of nonconsensual sex are material-the question of who Bill Clinton really is.
But they still don't seem to care. The Friends of Bill who so pathetically, obsequiously vouched for him until
the stained dress of his lies was virtually rubbed in their faces, didn't even seem to blink when faced with this
latest unproven but serious charge. You wonder: In their heart of hearts, when the MSNBC and CNBC
cameras go off, don't the Friends of Bill entertain just the slightest doubt, after all the lies, after all the false
denials, that this latest denial might not be the full truth? Or would such a doubt, even a tiny one, be fatal to
their entire belief structure? Their perk and status life. Could the Renaissance Weekends be that great?
Could the beds in the Lincoln bedroom be that soft?
I think about Lanny Davis, former chief of staff and now chief cable-news talking-head Friend of Bill.
"Friend" in the sense Bill Clinton has friends: People he can lie to shamelessly, whose lives and reputations
he can ruin callously and still count on to go on TV and defend him. I think about Lanny Davis attacking
Juanita Broaddrick before he even got to see her tell her story. "How do we know she didn't lie to all her
friends?" Lanny Davis asked in The Washington Post before the Lisa Myers interview aired.
Amazing! An absolutely astonishing revelation of the mindset of the terminal sycophant Friend of Bill. We
don't know whether she didn't "lie to all her friends," he suggests. But we do know someone with a proven
record of lying to all his friends. A proven record of lying to Lanny Davis, lying about Gennifer, lying about
Paula (remember his first response: never heard of her, never in a room with her?), lying about Monica.
But now, without knowing the facts, without pausing for a moment to wonder "Gee, he's lied to me so many
times before and I've looked like such a fool so many times before for defending him, wouldn't it be a good
idea to hesitate for just a moment before smearing a woman who says she's been raped and calling her the
liar? Don't I have any responsibility to think twice before mouthing off, just this once?" Even if he
(apparently) doesn't care whether Bill Clinton screwed Juanita Broaddrick, he knows Bill Clinton's screwed
him repeatedly. But there he is lining up, assuming the position so eagerly, so readily, once again.
In some ways the case of Lanny Davis is special, more egregious, but perhaps more explicable. I blame
Yale. Well not Yale University, precisely, but the Yale Daily News and the culture of Establishment
suck-uppery it cultivates. When I arrived, an alienated outsider at Yale, Lanny Davis was already on his way
to becoming the ultimate Insider, the chairman of the Yale Daily News, an exalted position that is not
attained without strenuous sucking upward to the upperclassmen who hold the striving Yale Daily
candidate's fate in their hands. I think it is not insignificant that the initial heated competition for a coveted
place on the ladder to the chairmanship of the Yale Daily was, appropriately enough, called "Heeling." It is,
you will notice, a term adopted from dog training. And not for nothing. Good dogs, compliant dogs, go far,
although that may be Lanny's tragedy: so much heeling, so little to show for it on his own-until, relatively late
in his career, his being a Friend of Bill, chief sycophant to the Commander in Chief, gave him a shot at the
gold ring.
Yes, I think it must have something to do with the heeling process and the enormous sense of
self-importance and entitlement the Yale Daily chairmanship inculcates; debasing oneself so profoundly
demands profound recompense. And there is profound recompense: the coddling and cuddling by the silvery
patriarchs of the Eastern establishment, the shining future assured by the old-boy network, the unspoken
blandishments of promised power that waft through the nostrils of the triumphant heeler like fragrant incense
so that an exaggerated sense of self-importance grows to proportions vast and fathomless, like the caverns
of Kubla Khan, "measureless to man."
Even when an exalted News chairman would gesture at dissent from the Establishment, write a mild editorial
questioning the War in Vietnam, say, the embrace by the silvery patriarchs would just grow warmer, more
passionate. There would be the special little off-the-record chats with the Bundy brothers, who raced up to
New Haven to reassure the exalted heeler that his voice was heard in the very highest circles, that his
opinion was respected, that off the record, they even sympathized, but, even more off the record, there were
very serious plans afoot to end the war in an honorable way and vulgar public protest was only helping the
troglodytes dig in their feet. Better to leave it to the enlightened insiders. They all shared the same values,
didn't they? It was just a difference over tactics. It was so flattering to be taken so seriously, if one didn't
trouble oneself to look too closely at the lies of powerful people. And so one learned not to look too closely at
the lies of very powerful people. An important lesson in getting ahead. You could call it self-heeling. Curbing
the instinct to question those with White House passes, to bite the hand that pets you.
But the heady days of triumphant heeling didn't seem to pay off as well for Lanny Davis as they did for
other Newsies. Henry Luce, founder of a global media empire; Potter Stewart, Supreme Court Justice;
William F. Buckley, influential ideologue; Joseph Lieberman, influential senator; Strobe Talbott,
Secretary-of-State-in-waiting. And then there was Lanny Davis, Beltway lawyer, lobbyist, mid-level
Democratic Party functionary and failed candidate for Congress. As it turned out, his only ticket to the
exalted entitlement his heeling seemed to promise was the friendship he cultivated with Hillary and Bill that
began at Yale Law School.
That really paid off, didn't it? You know I feel a bit bad talking this way. I wish I hadn't read Lanny's ugly
quote in The Washington Post. I know friends of Lanny Davis think that there's at least a semblance of
principle in his slavish defense of Bill and Hill. That it grows from a genuine antipathy to the Christian right
who've fueled the anti-Clinton crusades. But as someone at least as distrustful of the Christian right as he, I
can't help wondering: Just how long can the liberal Friends of Bill use that as a fig leaf to dismiss in a
knee-jerk way any charge without examining it, even if it's rape? They risk destroying liberalism by making it
mainly about the defense of Bill Clinton. I thought liberalism was about standing up for the powerless, rather
than sucking up to the powerful. (And speaking of sucking up to the powerful, Senator Chuck Schumer
should spend less time holding Hillary's coat and respond to repeated requests that he co-sponsor a resolution
condemning the racist Council of Conservative Citizens. As the estimable Stanley Crouch reported in his
Daily News column recently, such a resolution has been introduced in the House, and I've gotten Henry
Hyde on record in support of it. If Henry Hyde is on board, where's Chuck? Too busy being a Friend of
Bill?)
But being a Friend of Bill has been berry berry good to Lanny Davis, why start questioning it now? Why let
the irritating claim of a woman like Juanita Broaddrick get in the way of savoring the impeachment acquittal
triumph? It's so inconvenient, her coming forward. It's so over, so five minutes ago, to care about it-after all,
it was in another country and maybe "she lied to all her friends," as Lanny Davis suggested to The
Washington Post. After all, if you're deciding who's a liar about illicit sex, why look in Bill Clinton's direction?
Why not smear a woman you've never met who can't help you get passes to White House dinners?
But if he had hesitated when The Washington Post asked for a comment, if he had declined the limelight of
MSNBC to give the matter a moment's independent reflection, what would Lanny Davis have left? Being a
Friend of Bill had given him a certain cachet as a Beltway lawyer, but being Defender in Chief had made
him a virtual celebrity in his own right. An object of curiosity, yes; was there anything he wouldn't defend in
a knee-jerk way? Now we know: No. But still a celebrity. He wasn't Commander in Chief, but sycophant in
chief is something.
But it's unfair to pick on Lanny alone; I focus on him because he didn't even wait to see Juanita Broaddrick
tell her story on TV before smearing her as a possible serial liar. But if Lanny's effusion was the most
premature and egregious, what about the silence of some of the other, more conspicuous Friends of Bill?
What about his rich Hollywood friends? Will they continue to bankroll him-and the First Lady if she
runs-unquestioningly, without bothering to know or to care whether the Juanita Broaddrick rape allegation is
true? Will they hide behind,
Well-it-was-20-years-ago-and-we-really-can't-know-so-we-won't-bother-to-think-about-it? That was in
another country, wasn't it, that alleged rape, a country far from Hollywood with its self-congratulatory,
unquestioning, indiscriminate Friends-of-Bill mentality. Where mental giants like the Baldwin brothers are
elevated to statesman stature for their sycophancy.
And what about all the liberal defenders of Bill who opposed, say, Clarence Thomas? Consider a
counterfactual situation for a moment: What if it had been Clarence Thomas? Let's imagine the bruising
confirmation fight is over. Despite Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations (which, by the way, I believed)
the Senate has confirmed Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. But late in the process, while the
debate is still raging on the Senate floor, word leaks out that a major network was sitting on a far more
explosive story than Anita Hill's. An interview with a woman who claims that 20 years earlier Clarence
Thomas raped her in a hotel room.
But the network keeps the story in the can until the confirmation vote is over. Most of America doesn't
know about it until a week after Clarence Thomas dons the robes of the nation's highest court. Then the
woman's story comes out; she seems credible, but it's hard to prove one way or the other. So much time has
gone by. She didn't report it at the time, she even denied it at one point because she didn't want her life
further traumatized. How would Bill Clinton's liberal defenders have acted in that situation, how would they
have treated an old rape allegation against Clarence Thomas? Would they have said, well it's so old we don't
care, we're not going to look further into it, we're tired, we're fatigued by all the controversy, let's just
pretend the allegation isn't there. Let's move on.
I don't think so. I don't think the liberal defenders of Bill Clinton would have given Clarence Thomas a pass.
Would have dismissed a rape charge as irrelevant without looking into it just because it was old. But Bill
Clinton, it seems, gets a pass on a rape allegation because, unlike Justice Thomas, he's good on the issues.
(Good on the issues for those who don't care too much about the plight of the welfare mothers whose
difficult lives he's made more desperate.) How comfortable can they feel, the Clinton defenders, telling us to
chill, cool out, it was all so long ago, when they are, in effect, miming in their unthinking sycophancy the
chilling phrase attributed by Juanita to Bill Clinton: You ought to put some ice on that.
Must we look upon the most brilliant skeptical minds among liberal democrats through the lens of the "beaten
dog" metaphor I wrote about three weeks ago? The phrase was suggested by The Washington Post's
Michael Powell when speaking to me for a story he was doing on liberals like myself who don't trust Bill
Clinton. He suggested that many liberals are acting like "beaten dogs," losers kicked around so long they will
continue to fawn over Bill Clinton no matter what he does because he's given them some moderate electoral
success. Are they so grateful that they'll continue to heel when he gives a silent whistle, no matter what the
charge is?
And what about the Vice President: Will he continue to avert his eyes in fawning fidelity without even
asking? Doesn't Al Gore, in some deep recess of his mind, wonder at least who's the real liar in the Juanita
Broaddrick case? Doesn't he have a responsibility to ask? Or does he just accept Bill's word on faith? Has
he, like the other Friends of Bill, adopted a policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell?
And finally, what about the ultimate Friend of Bill, the Ultimate Voucher in Chief whose support for the
President, no matter what the charge, has enabled and empowered her supporters to defend her husband, no
matter what he does? Doesn't she, at this point, with a charge as serious as this, however unproven, have a
responsibility to look into it a little more deeply? Just so she won't be shocked, shocked, if it turns out to be
true, the way she was so shocked, shocked, when she found out the Monica story was true. At what point,
after so many lies on lesser charges, after so many violations of her trust, of her privacy, of her dignity and
faith, does she finally say: I'm not going to take his word on faith this time. I'm actually going to take it
seriously. I'm actually going to look him in the eyes and see what I can see when I ask him if it's true. He no
longer has the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to get to the bottom of this. She's so smart, so wise in many
ways (except thus far when it comes to him), I have a feeling she could get the truth out of him. After so
much vouching, so much enabling, so much standing by her man, she owes it to herself, she owes it to us. All
the Friends of Bill do.
This column ran on page 1 in the 3/8/99 edition of The New York Observer. THE NEW YORK
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