Now on this one the problem is blamed on lack of sex by Billie...I hope someone sneaks in Monica into the White House when Hillary takes off in another trip again!<VBG>
The day after President Clinton ordered airstrikes on Yugoslav targets,
Serbian protesters took to the streets.
"Go Back to Monica," some of them chanted, in defiance of the U.S. war
machine and the president who turned it against them.
The insults were an expression of blind Serbian rage, not the product of any
well-thought-out analysis about the motives behind the man who had just
ordered B-2 stealth bombers into their backyard. It's even doubtful those
demonstrators had considered the fact that in just the last seven months
Clinton has launched air attacks on four sovereign nations -- an
unprecedented collection of random military assaults against enemies real
and imagined.
On Aug. 20 of last year, just three days after Clinton told the nation he
had lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the cruise missiles
flew into Afghanistan and Sudan. The "emerging national security threat"
touted by the White House press office that day turned out to be, in part, a
Sudanese aspirin factory.
Then came the Impeachment War, declared in December against Iraq on the eve
of the House Monicagate vote, which ended at almost the precise moment the
Clinton indictment was handed up.
And now the United States is at war with Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian
strongman known stateside as "the Balkan Butcher," whose years-long campaign
of ethnic cleansing is said to be responsible for 250,000 Yugoslav deaths.
The first two military adventures were widely perceived as attempts by the
White House to distract the nation's attention from Clinton's scandal woes.
And, while many suspect the same thing may be happening now, there are
puzzling differences that beg the question: Why has our peacemaker president
suddenly become the most prolific military aggressor since Gen. William
Tecumseh Sherman burned his way through the Civil War South?
On the eve of ancient battles, Roman generals forbade sexual activity among
the troops to keep their aggression levels up. Could it be that a
Monica-deprived president, denied the physical release she and others in the
rumored White House harem once provided, has traded cruising interns for
cruise missiles?
It's a bizarre motivational theory, to be sure. But, on the other hand,
where in this latest miniwar are the political payoffs that make almost
every act of Clintonian "statesmanship" so transparent?
Our Balkan bombardment is hardly more popular at home than it is abroad.
There's no longer any need to distract from impeachment. Post-Senate-trial
media interest in even a credible rape allegation against Clinton has been
muted at best. And, short of World War III, the Chinagate espionage scandal
isn't going away anytime soon.
Having slipped the impeachment noose and slithered away from the latest
charge of sexual assault, perhaps Hillary, or Al Gore, or nervous Democrats
on the Hill have finally put their foot down. If one more high heel tumbles
out of Bubba's closet, he may be on his own -- all the way back to Little
Rock.
Consider, as well, that at this point in the Clinton marriage, monogamy is
probably not a very attractive option for either spouse. And so the man who,
according to Monica Lewinsky and others, has gone through literally hundreds
of women over the years, may be down to a sexual starvation diet.
Picture a smoker with a 30-year, four-pack-a-day habit trying to quit cold
turkey while coping with the pressures of the presidency, and you may have
an explanation for why we're suddenly bombing the daylights out of everybody
in sight. Call it cigar-sex withdrawal.
NewsMax.com put this theory to Dr. Paul Fick, noted psychologist and author
of 1995's all-too-prescient mega-selling book The Dysfunctional President.
"In the president's case, my whole contention has been that as a result of
his childhood he developed a tremendous amount of anger," Fick explained.
"On the one hand, he had the need to overachieve, and on the other he had
the need, because of his anger, to self-destruct. He developed a sexual
compulsion at a relatively young age as a way to avoid the emotional
problems and all the hostility that was taking place in his home."
The turmoil of Clinton's boyhood emanated from his alcoholic stepfather,
Roger Clinton Sr., who verbally and physically abused Clinton's mother.
Young Bill was the prototypical "good son" who worked hard to put a normal
veneer on a shaky family life that featured several visits from the police
and an on-again, off-again divorce.
Once, while in his teens, the boy who would be president actually threatened
to beat up his stepfather if he didn't stop hitting his mother.
Clinton's sexual compulsion became central to his "coping strategy," says
Fick. "And if somebody is deprived of their coping strategy -- and if they
do not develop another way to handle things through therapy or something
else -- obviously their anger is going to escalate, because the whole intent
of the compulsion is to quell the anger."
But has that anger seeped into public-policy-making decisions like waging
war on Serbia? Fick doesn't think so, but not because Clinton has found a
different way of coping:
"I don't believe he ever stopped acting out his sexual compulsion," Fick
says, "and there's no evidence he's sought therapeutic help. Granted, this
is just my suspicion. But when I first wrote The Dysfunctional President, I
suggested he was going to do what he did with Lewinsky and people thought I
was absolutely wacko to predict he would do that. But he did."
Oddly enough, Fick's suspicion was echoed recently by none other than Linda
Tripp, whose tape recorder helped prove Fick right about his Monicagate
premonition. Tripp concluded a February interview with CNN's Larry King by
noting that "I have reason to believe the behavior is still ongoing."
King failed to follow up. But Tripp left no doubt that the behavior in
question was post-Monica White House womanizing.
Fick suggested another possible link between our Kosovo adventure and
Clinton's troubled boyhood:
"The genesis of Clinton's problem is his experience as an adult child of an
alcoholic. He grew up in this violent alcoholic home with the stepfather,
and he has never resolved that problem. He has a tremendous amount of rage
against that person who is an elder alcoholic. And Boris Yeltsin, an elder
alcoholic in Russia, may subconsciously remind him of that."
The Russian president, a notoriously heavy drinker, has reacted harshly to
U.S. airstrikes on Yugoslavia. Yeltsin has reportedly readied theater
tactical nukes and made public comments hinting at World War III. Many
believe Clinton's war on Serbia, a longtime Russian ally, isn't worth the
risks to worldwide stability.
It's impossible to gauge how much Clinton's sexual-addiction coping strategy
or the traumas of his abusive childhood factor into presidential
decision-making. Still, as Fick notes in his book, the president himself has
linked some of his White House behavior to old psychological wounds.
In a November 1995 interview with Good Housekeeping magazine, Clinton told
interviewer Nancy Collins:
"The violence and dysfunction in our home made me a loner, which is contrary
to the way people view me, because I'm gregarious, happy, all of that. But I
had to construct a whole life inside my own mind, my own space.
"When you grow up in a disruptive home, inadvertently you send mixed signals
to people. You learn that other people, in the outside world, didn't live in
this same context as you. I see this as president."
Then, in an amazing admission, Clinton described how the habits born of his
own dysfunctional background actually impacted on U.S. military strategy:
"When you are president, and go the extra mile, others will interpret it as
weakness. In Haiti, I pretty much had to invade the country because people
didn't believe me. When I finally had the planes in the air, they believed
me and got out of there. That's happened all my life from the time I was in
school. People underestimate your resolve because you go out of your way to
accommodate them before you drop the hammer."
Clinton's bluff over the skies of Haiti worked in 1994. But five years
later, even carrying out the threat of military action hasn't deterred
Slobodan Milosevic. Despite the heaviest European bombardment since World
War II, the "Butcher of the Balkans" shows no sign of backing down.
In a revealing comment on his own development, Clinton told Collins, "I grew
up as a peacemaker, always trying to minimize disruption."
Does Clinton now see himself as global peacemaker in a world resembling the
chaotic home of his youth, with Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Boris
Yeltsin playing the role of his own violent stepfather? What happens when
they fail to yield as Roger Clinton Sr. did when young Clinton threatened to
strike back? And has the president's own failure to seek psychological help
left him without a workable post-Monica coping strategy?
As country after country finds itself targeted by U.S. military might, those
are questions that Americans may well want to ponder.
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