BIMBO EXPLOSION He's Got Rockets in His Pockets by Alexander Cockburn [New York Press, August 26-September 1, 1998]
The Vicar of Christ is taking a keen interest in the Lewinsky affair. Returning from Italy, Lally Weymouth reported to her mother, The Washington Posts Katharine Graham, on an audience she had just had with the Pope. His Holiness lost no time in cross-examining Lally in the minutest detail on the precise nature of Bill and Monica's sexual embraces. As a veteran confessor, John Paul would naturally be taking a professional interest in whether seed had been wasted and a potential child lost to God.
On this all-important topic, even as the 75 cruise missiles rained down on Sudan and Afghanistan (with just one or two losing their way and fetching up in Pakistan), Monica was disclosing further details of the President's more intimate targeting strategies to Ken Starr, in a reprise of the famous cross examination of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. 'According to close family friends of Lewinsky, the semen stain is on one of the shoulders ofthe Gap dress, and one of the things Bill liked to have Monica do in her intimate stripteases in the trysting-chamber next to the Oval Office was to put a cigar up her pussy, which could thus end up as an Article of Impeachment. It's the old smoked-but-didn't inhale theme, surfacing once more.
The shoulder stain doesn't rescue the Clinton-Lewinsky embraces from ambiguity. There are at least three primary sexual postures in which the presidential member could have been set on this arc of detonation, and Starr's forensic investigators still have to factor in the notorious kink in Clinton's launcher.
When Clinton knows he's about to be trapped in Martha's Vineyard, let the world beware. Back in June of 1993, knowing that an August vacation in the Vineyard lay in store for him, he ordered the cruise-missile attack on Bagdhad that killed Leila al-Attar, one of Iraq's leading artists. Once on the Vineyard that same year, his bloodlust was unabated. Sitting in the house owned by the Belushi family, formerly in the possession of Robert McNamara, and gazing down on a pride of nudists at the foot of the path leading to Great Beach, Bill Clinton set in motion the Delta Force mission to Somalia, which ended in much unnecessary slaughter of innocents. Trap him in a holiday home with Hillary, feed him a couple of bowls of New England chowder and he's on the line to the Pentagon with murder in his heart.
The politicians and the pundits got it the wrong way round. Given the time it takes to mount these missions, to figure, out which medical facility in Khartoum belongs to Osama bin Laden and which old CIA training base for terrorists in Afghanistan is easiest to target, it's clear that Clinton okayed the raid first, then, on Mon., Aug. 17, testified to the grand jury and addressed the nation, in the full knowledge, that two days later he would be recapturing the Initiative with America's Missions of Vengeance. The dog wagged the tail or at least Clinton can claim it did.
For the press it was the most gloriously satisfactory week since the death of Princess Diana. Nothing excites an editorialist more than the prospect of sustained moral outrage. Hardly had Clinton's Monday night address concluded before the nation's editorial cavalry set spur to their high horses. The preferred tone was that of 19th-Century melodrama. The President, the Manchester Union Leader shouted, "did not even have the decency to pursue his affair in some seedy hotel room... His sheer recklessness and sybaritic lack of self-control Is breathtaking."
"In purely personal terms," hissed the editorial writer for The Boston Globe, "what Clinton apparently did was loathsome. Monica Lewinsky was on the lowest rung of White House staffers." The Inference here seems to be that if Bill had made a pass at some more senior member of his executive entourage or Madeleine Albright, his behavior would have been less contemptible. That same week the Globe had finally abandoned prolonged efforts to protect its popular columnist Mike Barnicle from soundly based charges that for years he had fabricated quotes, stolen material and Invented entire episodes, but this did not prevent the newspaper from shouting angrily that Clinton "had betrayed the with his own bald lie and with a seven-month campaign to defend the lie." Echoing the Union Leader's thought that a more tactful rendezvous with Monica would have set Clinton in a better moral standing, the Globe lamented that "[w]hat is involved here is not a secluded tryst but sex in the workplace..." (which, as a matter of unsurprising fact, is where an increasing number of Infidelities take place).
"Much of the nation is worn out and eager for closure," was the Globes parting thought. This odd idea that the American people are sick of thinking about Monica giving Bill blowjobs is rife among the nation's editorial finger-waggers. "The American public may wish this sordid, boring, demeaning mess could be brought to an end," the Wilmington Morning Star-News mourned, before adding on a muffled note of hope, "But it can't be. It will continue for months...." The Star-New editorial writer got himself badlytied up in his finaal thunderclap: "As long as Bill Clinton remains in office, Americans will bicker on a drifting raft. If he cares more about his country than himself, he will go over the side."
"Weary and repelled by the tawdry Lewinsky scandal., ordinary Americans may be yearning for relief..." This was the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, taking a familiar tack. Even as the Gallup poll, taken post-Monday speech, showed Bill Clinton to have higher approval ratings in his second term than Eisenhower or Reagan, The New York Tunes editorialist stated gravely-though without the slightest foundation in reality-that "there is a tidal feeling of betrayal and embarrassment running across the country today..."
In terms of l9th-Century melodrama the commentators are torn between seeing Monica as the Exploited Innocent ("an intern not much older than his daughter") or as the Slutty Temptress. They certainly never treat her as a sympathetic adult.
Such courtliness was beyond the newspaper moralists, just as It was beyond Bill to tell his fellow Americans, many of them his fellow adulterers, that he lied to protect Monica as well as his wife and daughter. In the words of the press, poor Monica was "pathetic" (Detroit News), "celebrity-struck" (Nebraska's Lincoln Journal), "a subordinate whose discretion could not be relied upon" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).
Even more ungentlemanly was that career Clinton defender, Gene Lyons, in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Ever since Whitewater got off the ground as a slow-buming scandal, Lyons has busied, himself sticking up for the Clintons. Now, as happens with all the Clintons' defenders, he has made himself ridiculous; so one would have thought he would find the modesty to keep his mouth shut. But no. Lewinsky, Lyons cried, is "a less than admirable and credible figure... [S]he Indeed appears close to the 'huge liar' and the 'stalker' of the infamous talking points." In Lyons' view, the fact that Lewinsky was such a creature made Clinton's folly 'worse." Like so many other opinion-mongers, Lyons was essentially saying that Bill's big blunder was to have taken up with the wrong girl.
The more one wades through these editorials and commentaries, the more obvious it is that most of the nation's editorial writers and commentators have absolutely no sense of the preoccupations of their audience, or of their political and social perspectives. So far from being "sordid" or "distracting" the Lewinsky scandal has opened up a fresh and uplifting vantage point to take a look at the American psyche on the edge of the new millennium. It's all been very encouraging. Ordinary Americans don't confuse the political office of the presidency with the personal behavior of the White House Occupant. They don't regard their relationship with the President as one of "devotion," the emotional posture demanded of them by The New York Times. They regard his sexual life and extramarital forays as amusing but unimportant. They've long since accepted that on the character issue Bill carries a discount. They think Ken Starr is wasting money. They reckon that for years now Bill and Hillary have been trudging through a sexual desert. They don't think blowjobs an offense against God and nature.
Listen, by contrast, to the anguished howl of the Manchester Union Leader "Bill Clinton could have told the truth seven months ago and put an end to this long, tawdry mess. America's parents never would have had to explain oral sex to their young children."
In step with these nostalgic bleats for an age when children did not associate the Oval Office with semen stains was David Broder's commentary in The Washington Post that Bill Clinton was not only as bad as Nixon, but actually worse. We speak here of the Richard Nixon who sent burglars to raid the DNC and the office of Daniel Ellsberg's shrink; who suborned perjury from the burglars by paying them more than half a million dollars extracted from a Greek-American millionaire, promising cooperation to the Greek torturers in Athens by way of a thank-you, who carried on a secret war.
Why does Broder think Clinton worse than Nixon? Thus: "Nixon's actions, however neurotic and criminal, were motivated by and connected to the exercise of presidential power." In other words when Bill was coming on the shouder of Monica's dress, he wasn't acting presidential. When Nixon was screaming to Haldeman about Jewish plots against him, ordering fresh burglaries, dispensing fresh bribes, he was, in Broder's mind, protecting the presidency. Wilhelm Reich should be living at this hour.
And then, just as the orgies of editorial recrimination are at fever pitch, Bill acts presidential in the Broderian sense of the word. He discharges 75 missiles at ... well, it doesn't really matter who he fired them at, so long as the targets were brown, wore towels on their head and prayed to Allah.
Of course Secretary of State Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger labor to, explain that the medical complex in Khartoum is actually a germ factory and the target in Afghanistan a rendezvous for the world's most dangerous terrorists. They demurely suppress the fact that the Afghan target is an old CIA training camp, wherein were trained precisely those same fanatic terrorists, like bin Laden.
But in truth it didn't really matter. If Bill had decided to emulate Reagan and fire a bunch of missiles and bombs at Qaddafi's tent outside Tripoli, the thirst for vengeance would have been appropriately assuaged. As David Broder would no doubt agree, imperial power is always most impressive at its most insane.
The missile raids touched off a war among the opinion0formers, just as Clinton had hoped. Commentators pontificating on the semiotic significance of the tie Monica gave Bill and which he wore the first time she testified to the grand jury, fought savagely for front-page space against boarding parties armed with CIA-issued bios of their old student, Osama bin Laden. Legal experts analyzing the parameters of impeachment were dislodged from their firing nests by terrorism experts from RAND. The American people, doing the duty long craved of them by opinion-formers, raised two cheers for the bombs. Policians like Sens, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Dan Coats of Indiana questioning the motivation and the timing were soon overwhelmed. Scandals stop at the bomb craters' edge.
In the Middle East and Asian regions the cruise missile raids did not get good press. For one thing, the 'terror camps" inside Afghanistan, originally used by the CIA to train the mujahideen and the Saudi volunteers like bin Laden himself, are now facilities in which ultranationalist Pakistani groups are in training for sabotage against the Indian presence in Kashmir. So the Pakistanis are hopping mad. One writer in the Frontier Post of Peshawar turned in a thoughtful piece reminding his readers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion 'and suggesting that the entire Lewinsky scandal could be regarded as an afterword to that book-whose origins as a forgery by the Czarist police he naturally failed to remind his readers.
Just as it was devotedly believed in the Middle East that Princess Di was the victim of a plot by the British Secret Service to thwart her marriage to Dodi (and the birth of the child she carried in her womb when she met her end), so, too, is it held as beyond contention or doubt that the. entire Lewinsky scandal has been fomented by Zionist' agents. One Arab view, reported by the Israeli press, Is that the Zionist Conspiracy believes-all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding - that Bill might somehow become tough on Israel for flouting the Oslo Agreement, and that therefore he is to be evicted to make way for A] Gore, creature of the arch-Zionist demon, Martin Peretz. It's unclear in these conspiracy scenarios whether Monica is a witting Zionist agent, plying Bill's cigar (supposedly while Arafat was walting In the Rose Garden) for a higher cause, or Whether she was merely a useful dupe. Her current eagerness to give every detail of her intimacies with, Bill suggests the former.
The British newspapers carried material over the weekend suggesting that the medical plant In Khartoum destroyed by the cruise missiles may not have had the sinister function, alleged by the CIA, of being a place where "precursor" materials for VX nerve gas were being manufactured. Tom Carnaffin, of, Hexham, Northumberland, who had been a technical manager for the Baaboud family who owned the plant, told the Independent that the plant wasn't equipped for secret nerve-agent manufacture (though "precursors" may not require as much infrastructure). The plant turned out 50 percent of Sudan's medicine. A Belfast filmmaker, Irwin Armstrong, also told the British press that he'd shot footage in the plant as part of a documentary and never got any security hassles.
I can disclose, exclusive to NYPress, one ironic coda to the great U.S. Intelligence effort to trace Osama bin Laden. For its most sophisticated electronic tracking and snooping, the CIA routinely turns to E-Systems, a company now owned by Raytheon. And who in the past has been the business agent in Saudi Arabia for E-Systems?
Yes; you've guessed It. The bin Laden family.
At the very heart of the morality tale contrived by both the White House and the opinion-formers stands Hillary. Here indeed was melodrama's Woman Wrong'd. Writer after writer drew affecting portraits of poor Hillary, betrayed by Bill with Monica only a few yards 'from where she slept." Bill himself, pleading for a zone of privacy, gave his vast audience the sense that it was at the hearthside that he truly had to face the music. As a New York Post editorial writer put it in unusually lively prose: 'Bill Clinton grasped his daughter's hand with his left hand and his dog's leash with his right hand as his wife stood, a slightly chilly distance away from him, next to his daughter, walked [toward their helicopter], hand in hand in leash, smiles pasted on their faces, in a ghastly display of false good cheer..."
It was the best-publicized presidential rendezvous with punishment since Ronald Reagan vowed to take Stockman to the woodshed. Every unmasked adultrt in America trembled at the thought of that chill holiday home on the Vineyard. White House briefers dispensed the notion that it was only on the weekend before his grand jury testimony that Bill finally fessed up to Mrs. C.
It was all a sham, as popular opinion had long since known. And, if Bill and Hillary did not burst out laughing once they had concluded the little mime of discord and were safely inside the helicopter, they surely must have been close to it. The moralists on the editorial pages suggest that Hillary is being humiliated. Far from It With each forgiveness of betrayal, each insistence that, yes, she loves him, Hillary climbs another rung on the ladder of nobility, esteemed by every stricken adulterer and every long-suffering spouse. Just as David Broder reckoned that the crimes Richard Nixon committed displayed his devotion to the office of the presidency, so, too, every exhibition -of betrayal and forgiveness on the part of Bill and Hillary ratifies their high regard for the married state.
To be sure, Bill's sex life will be his legacy, and as such it sure beats Truman's-Hiroshima and Nagasaki - or JFK's or Nixon's, or any of them except Jimmy Carter, who's remembered for having lust in his heart, but who left no testimony to same as enduring as a stain. One of the few provocative editorials on the whole scandal came in the Jerusalem Post.
"Unlike John F. Kennedy, whose alleged philandering was never an issue during his short term, Clinton is still paying the price for espousing a life of libertarian values (or lack of them) in a system that is basically puritanical, judgmental,', hypocritical and intolerant... It is ironic that the man who fought a furious military establishment for the right of homosexuals to serve-his first naive blunder as president-should be almost crippled by a good old-fashioned, heterosexual affair. What if Clinton had been caught in a gay tryst and forced to out himself in public? Would the hounds be baying as loudly as they have been over Lewinsky, or would that have been too politically Incorrect?"
Now can't you just hear Bill outing himself? He'd do it beautifully.
Let's toast him all the same Clinton's legacy is secure. He's shown that by 1998, America has matured in its sentimental education, with only the opinion-formers; lagging far behind, as they always do.