This article, by Sam Smith, is the leader in the October 1996 hardcopy edition of The Progressive Review.
It happened in Houston, TX, but it might as well been Washington. As the AP reported it:
"The woman facing retrial on charges she tried to hire a hit man to kill the mother of her daughter's cheer-leading rival pleaded no contest yesterday and received a ten-year prison sentence. ~ [Her lawyer said Wanda Webb Holloway] "felt this morning that this is the proper resolution. She never wanted anyone harmed." ~ Authorities said Mrs. Holloway hoped Mrs. Heath would die so that her 13-year-old daughter, Amber, would be too upset to make her junior high school cheer-leading team. They said Mrs. Holloway believed her own daughter, Shanna Harper, would have a better chance of making the squad in that case. Both girls were 13. ~ Actress Holly Hunter played Mrs. Holloway in a HBO comedy movie version of the case."
Much of Washington's elite would agree that anything is permissible as long as its purpose is to win, anything is forgivable as long as wrongful intent is disclaimed, and anything -- even if it isn't permissible or forgivable -- can at least be made profitable.
Thus it's not all that surprising to find ourselves approaching a election in which the apparent victor will be the most corrupt Democratic presidential candidate in history and the most reactionary of modern times, whose top campaign strategist turns out to be a slurper of toes and spiller of beans, and whose campaign manager is a foreign lobbyist who beat back human rights complaints about holding the next Olympics in China. We are being asked to vote for a man whose cabinet officials spawn special prosecutors like guppies spawn little guppies and whose own friends, aides, and business partners are going before grand juries and into prison with a frequency that approaches the diarrhetic.
Meanwhile, convicted Whitewater crook and former Clinton business partner Susan McDougal is featured on TV by a fawning Larry King and a similarly obsequious Brian Gumbel, the latter ending his hard-hitting massage with, "We wish you well." Meanwhile the toe sucker gets a $2.5 million book contract. And meanwhile -- despite indictments, convictions, sworn testimony, and evidence normally good enough to satisfy the most timorous editor -- we are told that those who see the Clintons in other than presidential terms are liars and that those who report these lies are wackos beneath contempt.
The problem is that the facts won't go away. Vincent Foster is still dead under unknown circumstances. There is still no rational explanation for Hillary Clinton's winnings in cattle futures. And even though, for example, presidential sycophant Lars-Erik Nelson promised readers in the LA Times last April that "the Whitewater 'scandal' is dying out in wisps of smoke," and that Mena is a "favorite of conspiracy nuts," they are still with us, stronger than ever.
As the evidence mounts, the media continues to suck the president's toes and engage in an unprecedented attack on those who won't join the fun -- becoming even more vociferous as the case against the president solidifies. Earlier this year the typical effort tried only to minimize the Clinton's behavior. From Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal: "The oft-repeated analogies to Watergate are like comparing a jaywalker to the Boston Strangler." Or from Diane Rehm, NPR's bodyguard to the status quo: "Any effort to compare this to Watergate is ridiculous."
But as revelatory books such as Partners in Power made it to the best-seller list, a more frantic tone has emerged. Here, for example, is Gene Lyons in the New York Review of Books: "Almost every sentence regarding Whitewater in Partners in Power is similarly irresponsible."
When the media establishment becomes so carelessly defamatory, when facts lose their meaning, when normal investigative journalistic enterprise is routinely ridiculed, when felonies are celebrated on national TV, secret files passed around the White House like dirty jokes, presidential corruption condoned, obstruction of justice ignored and chronic sexual abuse dismissed, you know you are now longer dealing with standard deviations of politics. You are now mired in real pathology. Whitewater, on top of all its other sins, has helped to make Washington a very sick place.
That such a pathology has developed virtually unimpeded reflects among other things the degree to which the lines between those in power and those writing about them have become smudged or erased. When I started out in this racket, any reporter who regarded a politician with other than extreme skepticism was considered dumb, drunk or on the take. Today a lack of skepticism is regarded as the necessary admission price for access. Blending comfortably with those you write about, you not only earn their trust (as well as an occasional exclusive bromide) but you start to share their power -- you become what you write.
For many journalists it would be difficult, at this late date, to pull the plug on the Clintons. To do so would be to admit that they have, for four years or longer, been telling viewers and readers deep and dangerous falsehoods. Worse, these are falsehoods not produced by simple error, bad leads, disinformation or double-agents, but by the inevitable myopia of the fawning and the ambitious.
The exceptions have been largely on the right or British-born, the latter seeming to have a more natural feel for corruption. Those of us who do not fit either category are small in number, the most prominent of late being Roger Morris, author of Partners in Power.
Despite writing a best-seller that is also a damn good book, Morris has been treated with considerable contempt in places like The Nation and The New York Review of Books. For example, in the NYRB review, Gene Lyons described Partners in Power as "slipshod and manifestly fraudulent," and said that "there is scarcely a statement of fact anywhere . . . that can be taken at face value."
While Morris, the author of an award-winning biography of Nixon, well documented his devastating account of the Clintons, Lyons offered little in rebuttal but adjectives, ex cathedra statements, personal anecdotes of the I-know-Arkansas-better-than-this-guy variety and quotes from a single RTC report of limited scope that the Clintonites have rhetorically (and falsely) reconfigured into complete exculpation. But then Lyons was not out to elucidate; he was out to destroy.
Morris' experience has shed light on my own. I provided, in May 1992, the first comprehensive listing of dubious characters and institutions involved with the Clintons and subsequently wrote the first book critical of Clinton's character and its impact on American politics. I had only offered an impressionistic sketch where Morris would present a detailed brief, but the same liberal media mandarins who trashed Morris's book refused -- despite uniformly favorable reviews elsewhere -- to even recognize the existence of mine.
Since then, I have periodically felt the isolation of the apostate, the contempt for those who ask the wrong questions -- "Put a sock in it!" a reporter recently yelled at an inquiring Sarah McClendon at a White House news briefing -- and the implicit suggestion that I have joined a cult or in some other manner become slightly deranged. Things have even been more lively in cyberspace where one of Clinton's most persistent defenders on the Net imagined me to be "a card carrying member of the right wing" and a segregationist (in the latter instance apparently confusing me with another of alliterative appellation: Justice Jim Johnson.)
Morris has had it far worse. A fine piece of work has been demonized, often for the most puerile of political purposes. Morris is a historian who scours the past for old facts and broad contexts that are considered irrelevant, bizarre or verboten in today's news rooms. He also has a tendency to put these old facts and broad contexts together. Under today's journalistic rules, three or more uncomfortable facts placed in close association with one another is prima facie evidence of a conspiracy theory.
Not only am I likewise guilty of inappropriate fact association, I was raised on the notion that corruption, like sex, is among the most bipartisan of the arts. I believe that the reporters' job -- while possessing some of the moral ambiguity of a referee at an illegal cock fight -- is to attempt to tell the truth unvarnished by one's hopes at the time of the last (or next) election. The theory is -- and no one has proved otherwise -- that in the long run this works out to everyone's advantage.
I was reminded of the alternative, and more currently popular, theory the other day while appearing on a Washington public radio show. I had mentioned Whitewater as a matter of some importance in the coming weeks. The host, ABC news anchor Carol Simpson, quickly dismissed my comment by saying that polls showed that people weren't interested in Whitewater. Clearly I had forgotten that in postmodern America, news doesn't happen; it's something you get to choose. Or at least someone does.
In fact, at ABC at least, news itself may be disappearing. News anchor Peter Jennings asked Cokie Roberts on the air the other day, "What do you think the spin will be tomorrow?" As Paul Krassner points out, "It used to be the job of newscasters to tell you what happened. Now they predict how the propagandists will use the media to manipulate you."
Yet the facts and the witnesses won't go away. To believe the Clintons, one must also believe that an astounding array of investigators, FBI agents, innocent witnesses to not so innocent events, federal regulators, state troopers, former business associates, law firm employees, harassed women, and investigative reporters are all chronic liars. In fact at the heart of the president's defense is the biggest conspiracy theory of them all: that somehow (and for unspecified reasons) there has been an enormous, unprecedented, and organized effort to portray the Clintons unfavorably, and that their associations with crooks, drug dealers, financial scam artists, contra arms suppliers, dirty tricksters, and others of minimal repute are at worst coincidental or at best false or a GOP plant.
The White House and the media keep demanding a smoking gun before we reach conclusions contrary to their own. But democracy doesn't require smoking guns; democracy requires reasonable judgments and a preponderance of facts and it deserves not even having to worry about such things. There really was a time when the lack of indictments was considered a less than adequate platform on which to run for high office. There really was a time when even having to ask so many questions provided much of the answer.
Here, for example, is just a sample of the things we already know about the Clintons and Whitewater, without waiting for any more indictments or reports -- or for a smoking gun:
Strip Nixon's Watergate to its essentials and one found a sleazy and nasty gang centered in the White House. Strip Clinton's Whitewater to its essentials and one finds in the White House a study of what drug prohibition, financial deregulation, the boomer barbarians of law and business, and postmodern politics have done to all of us and to our country. In this sense, Whitewater is a much bigger scandal than Watergate. This time we are all involved.
In Whitewater, at best, we might find our glasnost.. We could finally face our joint and several responsibility for permitting so few get away with so much. We could, from what we learn, begin to reorder things.
As things stand now, however, we shall head for the polls with a media that ill-serves us, a White House that deceives us, Republicans who manipulate us and liberals who can find nothing better to do then to deny that anything is wrong.
For a person wishing to leave the polling place with some sense of self-respect this is clearly the worst election since 1968. The Greens, to be sure, offer an answer and one of no small moral appeal. Notwithstanding the quirky and sometimes annoying approach of their candidate, the Nader effort at the very least flies a brave flag of virtue over the barrens of American politics.
But there are those of us who marched under a flag of virtue in 1968 -- casting a third party ballot or none at all. That year we actually may have made a difference, for Nixon won by less than one percent of the popular vote. We did not know then, however, that after our moral action more than half of the American deaths in Vietnam would occur. Learning such things makes you a little more cautious and a little less morally certain.
There is further the argument that one is not just voting for Clinton; one is voting for allowing the children of illegal immigrants to stay in school, for a few dollars more for this program and a few less cuts in that, for keeping the Environmental Protection Agency and protecting endangered species and not making life worse for blacks, latinos, and gays. In the end there is the argument that a Clinton administration will kill and maim fewer people, that the choice lies in the body count -- between mere surgical strikes on human decency and massive carpet bombing. Progressive commentator Saul Landau suggests that one should "enter the polling booth in November, say 'Here's to you Robert Reich,' pull the Democrat lever, shed a few tears and throw up in the street."
Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer thinks not: "Every four years, leftish apologists for the Democrats twist themselves into ever more complex knots to explain why a vote for whatever horror is running under the party's flag is essential."
One reason to vote for Clinton is expressed in the slogan: If we don't elect him; we can't impeach him.
This argument is not as perverse as it appears. A Dole victory would stifle inquiry into the dark side of American's recent past. Either or both Clintons might be indicted, but public interest in the larger issues of Whitewater -- including the major issue of drug trafficking -- would diminish markedly.
In fact, even before further action by the special prosecutor there seems to be adequate grounds for impeachment including:
Clinton's public declaration that Whitewater witnesses who did not plead guilty would get his help in raising legal fees. He has even powerfully hinted at pardons for those involved who play it his way. In other words: hang tough and we'll support you; cave in or squeal and you're on your own. In less prominent cases, this is called witness tampering.
The obstruction of various investigations, most notably the Vince Foster case. The improper acquisition and use of hundred of FBI files on Republican officials.
He points out that the Clinton-signed welfare bill will throw 2.5 million people into poverty and cut the average food stamp allotment to 66 cents a meal. He quotes David Brower as saying, "President Clinton has done more harm to the environment and to weaken government regulations in three years than Presidents Bush and Reagan did in 12 years." And finally he notes that "Clinton's record on civil liberties and privacy issues is at least as bad as Reaganbush's and probably worse."
Henwood concludes that had a Republican president tried what Clinton got away with, "Opposition would have been loud and forceful. With a Dem at the helm, advocates for the poor, the environment and civil liberties have been partly or wholly silenced. And in the likely event of Clinton's reelection, we can probably look forward to the privatization of Social Security. Could Dole get way with that?"
For me, the election's no big deal. Living in DC with its 80% Democratic registration, I get a free and safe protest vote whenever I want. I'll vote for Nader because it's easy. I don't know what I would do if I lived elsewhere. Those in other places where one more vote for Clinton would be merely gilding the kudzu, may wish to follow suit. As for the rest of you -- residing where your choice might actually make a difference -- just do the best you can, remembering that the system is so rigged there just might not be a right answer anyway. -- Sam Smith