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Jewish World Review /Jan. 27, 1999 /10 Shevat
MUGGER
This Is Not America:
FRIDAY AFTERNOON AT THE OFFICE and the news from Washington was
depressing. Outside, on 7th Ave., it was just as gray: drizzly, smoke
pouring out of Healthy Choice and a guy grumbling about Rudy Giuliani’s
"shop till you drop" gimmick, claiming that the only items for tax-free
purchase are pawed-over, outsized pieces of clothing.
Sean Hannity, the
meathead conservative talk-show host on WABC who sounds like he’s never
read a book, had given up on the impeachment trial after the news
bulletin that Sen. Robert Byrd, that cranky "conscience of the Senate,"
called for an up-or-down vote on continuing the process. I’m in full
agreement with Byrd that President Clinton acted shamelessly with his
pep rally on the day of his impeachment, but the old buzzard’s
canonization is a little hard to stomach.
Hannity can get hysterical (although his screaming match with Clinton
lackey Alan Dershowitz several weeks ago was pure radio theater) at
times, but Friday’s show wasn’t one of them. He took comfort in sports
nostalgia: Ah, where are the New York Knickerbockers of my youth, the
Walt Fraziers, the Willis Reeds and Dave DeBusscheres. Hannity, about to
weep, was in a fetal position, at 4:16 in the afternoon, after months of
battling against shills like Sid Blumenthal, "Upchuck" Schumer, Terry
Lenzner, James Carville and Hillary Rodham; it’s sad to listen to a
grown man melt down on the air. Minutes later, a less downcast Matt
Drudge joined Hannity and agreed it’s all over.
Could be they’re right. Alex Cockburn called with a cackle on Thursday,
asking if I’d like to boost our wager on whether Clinton will finish his
term. "Not this week, Mr. Las Vegas," I said with a sneer in my normally
cheery voice. "This is the week for Clinton, with his phony-baloney grab
bag of socialist goodies that will never come to pass. But the tide will
turn when witnesses are paraded in front of the somnambulant senators."
Alex laughed, I told him to go smoke a joint, you smelly hippie, and we
chatted amiably about the journalistic atrocities of the week. My
bravado is now in question.
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter was in Friday morning for an interview—he’s a
remarkably good sport, considering that I’ve called him a scumbag in
print; then again, as a member of impeccable standing of the "chattering
class," who’s on tv every other night, I suppose he’s inured to the odd
sucker punch—and didn’t have a clue about Byrd’s upcoming statement. Who
did? In fact, Alter’s in favor of witnesses, and made for an estimable
sparring partner. And now that I think of it, he got the best of me in a
pointless but amusing prediction we both made about the presidential
tickets for 2000. Something stuck in my head from reading the papers
that morning and I ventured that Kathleen Kennedy (sorry, forgot the
Townsend) would be Al Gore’s veep choice, an impulsive pick considering
that despite the magical name it’s not as if Gore will need Democratic
Maryland in the general election.
As I said, not the sunniest way to end a week of work.
It even put my ebullient buddy Al From Baltimore in a foul mood. He
wrote the following note: "Republican prospects have never seemed as low
as they do this week. I say that, fully aware of the roller coaster ride
we’ve been on since January of ’98. It’s clear to me today that
Republicans really may lose power in 2000. It’s depressing enough that
someone like Clinton is going to skate, and will be universally hailed
for that sleight of hand; and that honorable men like Ken Starr and
Henry Hyde will be vilified for trying to do their duty. Maybe they
didn’t do it perfectly, or even well, but they performed diligently and
with integrity against the political tide, and now are viewed as creepy.
Unbelievable.
"What’s more, a few weeks ago we could take comfort from the notion
that, even if Clinton walks, he’d serve out his term as the lamest of
lame ducks. It doesn’t look that way today at all.
"What’s truly depressing is that Republicans are spent. They’ve got
nothing left; impeachment has used them up. After Clinton is acquitted
in the Senate, the Republicans have no standing to challenge Clinton.
Borderline Democrats and Republicans will vote with Clinton, not the
Republicans, with their eyes firmly fixed on 2000. Republican hopes now
rest solely on the emergence of a major financial or military crisis,
and who wants to root for that? By the way, if something bad does
happen, look for the media to blame the far-right for distracting
Clinton.
"In 1994 Republicans supported term-limits to help clear out a lot of
the entrenched Democrats. We need it more than ever to clear out people
like Trent Lott and Dennis Hastert, who clearly care more about their
jobs than the principles and issues for which their party stands.
Republican political strategy for the last few months has been this: be
likable. Republicans are never going to beat Clinton at this.
"The Republicans are no longer the party of ideas. They used them all up
and can’t come up with any new ones. Unless they do, there’s really no
point in supporting them other than they’re not Democrats, which is not
particularly compelling. I hope Prozac becomes a government entitlement
because a lot of us out there are going to need it.
Not to be contrary, but I’d say Al ought to lighten up, have a glass of
champagne and read Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog to his
precocious eight-year-old son. And I double that advice to Bill Kristol,
editor of The Weekly Standard, who, according to The Washington Post’s
Lloyd Grove, seemed downright miserable at the end of last week.
Attending the 26th annual Conservative Political Action Conference
meeting in Arlington, Kristol was ornery as he discussed the current
political climate. "The Founders were right to have a certain distrust
of democracy," Kristol said. "The job for Republicans is to change
public opinion, not to bow and scrape to it... The Republican Party is a
stupid party. I like liberal Democrats more than I like mushy
Republicans."
Get a grip, Bill: I mean, I agree, I’d much rather have a
beer with Charlie Rangel or Teddy Kennedy than the weasely Gary Bauer,
but if I locked you in a room with Maxine Waters, Barbara Boxer, Robert
Torricelli, Henry Waxman, Chuck Schumer and the dim Patrick Kennedy for
just 24 hours, I think you’d snap out of it. Not that I think the
reelection of GOP national chairman Jim Nicholson is an encouraging omen
for Republican prospects in 2000, but this isn’t the time for Kristol,
surely the party’s intellectual leader, to take his ball (and
influential magazine) and go sulk at home.
Gary Bauer: This shmuck is an irritant. He’s just as sanctimonious as
David Bonior, is full of that family values crap, has never been elected
to any office and now he’s sounding off about other candidates in an
effort to buoy his feeble run for president. He told anyone who’d listen
last week, "I think George W. Bush would describe himself as a Bush
Republican. I think Elizabeth Dole is in many ways a Dole Republican. If
I run, I’ll run as a Reagan Republican." Well, screw you, Gary. Shame on
you for denigrating former President Bush, an honorable, loyal man, and
trying to pit a son against his father. If Ronald Reagan were in decent
health, he’d smash this little bug of a man and tell him to go back to
whatever church he uses as a shield for his petty, bigoted views.
And on the subject of spirits, I don’t risk the sin of hyperbole when I
say that the oily Pat Robertson must’ve polished off a case of near-beer
before issuing his praise of Clinton’s Happy Trails State of the Union
speech and suggesting that Republicans close down the impeachment trial
and let the felonious President go about his plan of letting the
government pick its citizens’ pockets even more egregiously than it
already does.
Robertson, who tried to muck up the ’88 GOP primaries,
said Wednesday night on his 700 Club show that Clinton "hit a home run"
with his speech and "From a public relations standpoint, he’s won. They
might as well dismiss the impeachment hearing and get on with something
else, because it’s over as far as I’m concerned."
Just a month ago, Robertson, in a Dec. 27 appearance on Meet the Press,
seemed made of sterner stuff. He said: "I think we’re going to have a
lame-duck president. I don’t believe he’ll have the moral authority
that’s necessary to lead and there’ll be suspicion about every single
thing he does, whether it’s political gain or himself... There’s deep
suspicion about these bombings in Sudan; they seem to have been a
mistake. So to put the lives of American servicemen in harm’s way for
the possible political gain of a presidency is shocking, and that’s
what’s going on... So we’re talking about the future moral status of
this nation. It’s a very important thing, and to me, censure is nothing
more than a slap on the wrist."
Well put, Hazel, and I hope you, and every
other sucker who’s been lured in by the hateful Christian Coalition,
give up your membership. That would be a way for the Republicans to
regroup, forget about trivial issues like gay rights and abortion and
recapture the swing voters that can win the presidency and keep Congress
under their control. Stay out of the bedroom, let a woman make her own
choice and keep your grubby government hands out of our pockets and
businesses: That’s a slogan Republicans can win on.
The Boston Globe’s David Nyhan was as giddy as a teenage girl getting
her first kiss after hearing Clinton’s speech, all but claiming that the
United States now has just one political party and it starts with a "D."
Read the words of the loopy Nyhan, who conveniently ignores every single
act of perfidy that Clinton has committed in the past six years, and
tell me that Robert Kennedy Jr. shouldn’t be dispatched to New England
to check the water supply there.
Nyhan writes: "Hammerin’ Henry Hyde had to be throwing up on his
recliner at home. Representative Dick Armey looked as if he’d just
scarfed down a platter of bad clams. Rookie Speaker Dennis Hastert
didn’t know whether to sit or go blind and ignore the Prez when Clinton
surprised him with a let’s-bury-the-hatchet handshake before unloading
his boffo speech." Excuse me for a moment of sobriety, but isn’t Nyhan’s
cheerleading more appropriate for an afternoon’s delight at Wrigley
Field, watching Hillary’s friend-for-hire Sammy Sosa smack a couple of
homers over those ivy-covered walls?
I prefer my friend Phyllis Orrick’s analysis of the speech: "I was
stupefied and in awe. Every time there was a pause, there’d be a cut to
another noble citizen. Where do these people come from? It was like
watching a Rosie O’Donnell show or the Academy Awards. Rosa Parks!
Clinton is a show biz genius. He was having a ball. I think we should
have a pecker-meter installed in every presidential podium. I would bet
Clinton’s was bobbing that night. It was like watching a crack addict on
a rush."
Last Thursday, an editorial writer at The Wall Street Journal was on
fire, brimming with anger at Clinton’s hypocritical, selfish campaign
rally aimed at saving his remaining two years in office. The speech, the
editorial read, "was not meant so much as serious policy, but as a kind
of therapy for the Presidential persona, making him feel good during his
77 minutes before the camera. The speech was intended as a fire bell,
calling on every imaginable constituency in the Democratic village to
rally toward the burning barn of his presidency.
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, was dead-on in
his reaction to Clinton’s performance last Tuesday night: "Every time
Clinton gets into hot water, he returns to his liberal roots. It is more
than a coincidence. Clinton’s big-spending allies in Congress have been
the biggest defenders of his perjury and obstruction of justice. The new
tax-and-spend proposals in his State of the Union address are a direct
payoff to his spending interest allies so that they won’t be tempted to
remove him from office. If Al Capone did this it would be considered
bribing the jury."
I’ve heard worse speeches from Clinton—his ’92 acceptance speech at
Madison Square Garden comes to mind—but I won’t argue with the opening
lines of the Journal’s editorial: "It was the most shameless State of
the Union speech any President has ever delivered." Nyhan chortled in
his Friday column: "You can always tell how well Clinton is doing by how
viperish gets the Journal. Get the ice buckets and hose down the
editorial pen, fellas..." One writer at the Journal told me: "Nyhan’s is
not a rational argument. I’m ignoring him."
But Nyhan doesn’t stop at the paper he ridicules for "sell[ing] itself
as ‘the daily diary of the American dream.’" He moves on to the Times’
William Safire: "Veteran Republican water-carriers like William Safire
have been through GOP capsizings before. Brother Safire’s postspeech
column retreated to the relative safety of linguistic esoterica. Brother
Bill, like any prudent passenger on the runaway GOP train, moves away
from the locomotive as it draws near the derailment."
David Nyhan is clearly relishing the current turn of events so lustily
that it seems churlish to throw water in his face and tell him to wake
up, but is it folly to ask why a grown man could be so supportive of a
president who’s been such a destructive chameleon? I assume Nyhan is a
Bonior/Gephardt liberal: In that case, why is he stumping for a man who
presided over the execution of a retarded black man in 1992 as political
cover; who distorted the record of Paul Tsongas, the former senator of
Nyhan’s home state; who passed a welfare bill that was anathema to
liberals; expressed allegiance to gays in the military, but has done
nothing to help them (in fact, more gays were discharged from the
military in the last fiscal year than any since 1987); and who schmoozed
with GOP fatcats in Texas several years ago, telling them that he, too,
wanted to cut taxes?
This speech was meant to shore up Clinton’s liberal
base. Is Nyhan stupid enough to believe that the President, until
recently an admitted liar, will ever pass any of the legislation he
proposed in his Coney Island State of the Union address? Sure, it’s a
pleasure to defeat the supposed GOP demons, but to what end? To protect
a man who lied to his family, staff and country? I suspect and hope
Nyhan will have one whopping hangover in just a few
Clinton’s Set to Walk and Party On, Suckers
Later that night, on a cable
TV show, Ann Coulter ranted that Byrd’s merely a pork senator who’s had
"every building in West Virginia more than two stories tall named after
him."
Hannity
Then again, Alter went with John
McCain for the top Republican slot, a candidate I think will be out of
the running—if Beltway reporters do their homework, no sure bet—even
before the California primary that he’s counting on to catapult him past
George W. Bush.
Bush
"I say, time to start laying the groundwork for the counterrevolution in
’04 or ’08."
Lott
All of a sudden, after Clinton’s P.T. Barnum routine, and the mainstream
press hailing Charlie Ruff’s dubious defense of the President, Robertson
is ready to pack it all in. Henry Hyde, unfairly maligned by Clinton’s
sycophants, didn’t buy in: "We don’t necessarily always agree with
everything that Pat Robertson says," he told The New York Times. More
interesting, however, was the sentiment expressed to reporter Richard L.
Berke by Hazel Staloff of Brooklyn: "If Pat Robertson said, in fact,
it’s time for the Republicans to give up—and give in—to Clinton, my
membership in the Christian Coalition is over. I don’t think the party
can be hurt when it stands for what is right. It can only be hurt when
it compromises with evil."
Hyde
Appealing to these
old-style Democrats whose votes he needs to stay in office, he proposed
that the government buy up the stock market (Jesse Jackson’s dream come
true), federalizing even more education policy (the NEA’s dream come
true), a buck increase for the minimum wage (for John Sweeney), adding
prescription drugs to Medicare (an idea too expensive even for LBJ), a
redundant lawsuit on tobacco (more billions for the trial lawyers)."
And Clinton is the man who said, with a straight face, that the era of
big government was over.
Jackson
JWR contributor "Mugger" is the editor-in-chief and publisher of New York Press. Send your comments to him by clicking here.
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