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The Tin Man

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Dec 15, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/15/98

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"There may be a great fire in our soul, Robert Fernandez
yet no one ever comes to warm himself rfer...@chuma.cas.usf.edu
at it, and the passers-by see only http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~rfernand
a wisp of smoke." - Vincent van Gogh AIM: Gamaliel8

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 02:25:25 -0500 (EST)
From: Robert Fernandez (ENG) <rfernand>
To: rfernand
Subject: cov_15newsa2.html

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A L S O+T O D A Y

[5]
[6]City of self-hate
By Greg Critser
Why Los Angeles elites love being bashed by Mike Davis
(12/15/98)

[7]
[ 21st ]
[8]Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
Bill Gates and BillClinton -- prisoners of Lawyer World

T A B L E+T A L K

What exactly is Maureen Dowd's problem? Theorize in the Politics area
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[10] [LINK] Bone up on impeachment at BarnesandNoble.com
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R E C E N T L Y[11]A kinder, gentler lynch mob
By Gary Kamiya
The GOP confirms the most brain-dead radical stereotypes from the '60s
(12/15/98)-->

[12]Off the cliff?
By Harry Jaffe
The White House tries lobbying, "scorched-earth" threats and one more
speech to sway fence-sitting Republicans
(12/11/98)

[13]Clinton's real crime
By Mollie Dickenson
The president's cagey testimony in the Paula Jones case shows he's
guilty of sexual selfishness, but not perjury
(12/11/98)

[14]"Real America?"
By Joan Walsh
Alan Dershowitz blasts Clinton critic Rep. Bob Barr for a speech to
white supremacists
(12/11/98)

[15]Impeachment hearing voices
A round-up of the most quotable moments from Friday's hearing
(12/11/98)

[16]A president apologizes
The text of President Clinton's address
(12/11/98)

[17]Clinton should be disbarred
By Lori Leibovich
A leading legal ethicist offers a punishment consistent with the
president's crimes
(12/11/98)

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A KINDER, GENTLER LYNCH MOB | PAGE [25]1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -

The façade of "judiciousness" and "bipartisanship" that the pious
media, ever cowed by the musty aura of Historic Constitutional Events,
dark-wooded chambers, invocations of "our national honor" and other
useful fig leafs for skullduggery, tried to sell us has vanished
without a trace. Hyde, the Iran-contra apologist and wisecracking GOP
attack dog who was elevated to Solomon-like heights of wisdom by the
media before the disgraceful House Judicial proceedings began, has now
taken up final residence in the trash can with unsavory American
byproducts like our anal home-grown Robespierre, Kenneth Starr, and
the maniacal [26]Bob Barr, who apparently believes that Clinton should
have been impeached at birth. There was Hyde this weekend on the talk
shows, saying that Clinton should resign. This paragon of impartiality
apparently modeled his jurisprudential approach on the Red Queen in
"Alice in Wonderland," who, as a witness departs in the trial of the
Knave of Hearts, says under her voice, "And just take off his head
outside." But, gosh, he sure sounds courtly talking that parliamentary
talk.

In fact, Hyde may have been taking those groveling Times setup pieces
a little too seriously, for this weekend he began to invoke no less a
figure than Jesus Christ. Asked by Cokie Roberts why he advocated
impeachment and didn't think censure should be an option despite
popular opinion, he replied, "If Jesus Christ had taken a poll, he
would never have preached the gospel." This is a wonderful addition to
the great American tradition of reactionary invocations of Jesus, who
after patriotism represents the best refuge for scoundrels. (The
all-time winner remains that English-only advocate who declaimed, "If
English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.") With all
due respect to the pious motivations behind Chairman Hyde's religious
parallel, however, it may not be a good strategy for him to go there.
Somehow, when one looks at the faces of Clinton's judges -- the
pig-eyed ex-exterminator [27]Tom DeLay; the robotic, hate-filled Barr;
the snidely, vitriolic David Schippers; the priggish choirboy-judge
Bill McCollum -- the loving face of the Savior does not exactly rush
into one's mind. In fact, these worthies recall somewhat less
inspiring figures from the New Testament -- namely the Pharisees,
those vengeful, legalistic Jews who denounced Jesus. (The "moderates,"
who will doubtless be washing their hands avidly in the days to come,
conjure up that noted Northeastern GOP fence-sitter, Pontius Pilate.)
Admittedly, the mushy-souled escape artist President Clinton makes a
truly terrible Jesus, but the imagery still isn't good.

The Republicans are zealots, but they're crafty zealots. Their attempt
to take Clinton down may blow up in their faces, but they have reasons
for thinking it won't. They think they can get away with this without
being punished at the polls, even if they don't kill Clinton. But they
cherish a secret hope that they will kill him -- that once impeachment
is a fait accompli, with all the previously mentioned flag-waving,
invocation of the Founders, gravity of the charges blah blah blah,
public opinion will turn against Clinton, leading either to his
resignation or to his conviction and removal by the Senate. And that
hope is based on their belief that Clinton's support is inch-deep --
that once the American people realize he's in trouble, they'll desert
him like rats abandoning a sinking ship.

It's the self-fulfilling prophecy strategy, and it is astonishingly
contemptuous. It presumes that the American people have no memory, no
spiritual or moral consistency, that they are incapable of holding
onto any position any longer than a jittery kid with a remote can
watch one TV program. The GOP believes this for several reasons.
First, they too are children of our Warholian society of the
spectacle, in which everything that flickers across the screen has
equal weight and nothing stays on the screen for more than a few
seconds. As such, they too have been seduced by the belief that, in
Marx's words, "all that is solid melts into air." Yesterday's Clinton
supporter is today's impeachment supporter.

The scary thing is, they just might be right. There have been very few
tests of our national consistency in the channel-changing age. The
public might be influenced by the media, which has begun running
this-is-a-whole-new-ballgame-now stories. The Times, much of whose
Clinton coverage continues to appall, splashed on its cover a thin
reaction story (ominous headline: "Gravity of the issues sinking in
for a public weary of scandal") that featured two or three people in
that multicultural mirror of America, Tarrytown, N.Y., saying they
were now leaning toward impeachment. (How odd, considering nothing in
this story has changed in months except the vote to impeach.) But it
would be bitterly ironic (although perfectly consistent, considering
their fealty to the most ephemeral and history-destroying forms of
commodity capitalism) if the Republican Party, which at its best
represents community and continuity, were to use postmodern public
amnesia to flick a president off the screen.

The second reason the Republicans think they may be able to change
people's minds is that their own Pharisaism, their residence on the
Gothic side of America's great cultural divide, makes them incapable
of understanding that the American people's so-what reaction to
Clinton's sexual escapades and subsequent lies about them is not mere
empty situational ethics, not a debased version of a '60s "whatever,
man" ethos, but is a coherent and [28]reasonable moral vision. That
vision represents the pragmatic spirit of one of our culture's great
achievements, the English common law, whose guiding word is
reasonableness. And it also reflects the lessons most of us learn from
our parents. You should never lie, our parents teach us when we're
young, and that is an essential lesson. But later they also teach us
to understand why people lie, to distinguish between different kinds
of lies -- and to forgive when forgiveness is called for. We learn
that the real world doesn't entirely correspond to the black-and-white
moral universe our parents taught us. In the real world, for example,
we learn that politicians make moral compromises -- and flat-out lie
-- all the time. We also learn that august politicians, and even men
with the word "judge" before their name, can be hatchet men. That
doesn't mean we don't strive to do the right thing, or expect that our
leaders do the same, but that we realize that sometimes it isn't clear
what that is. And we learn that often the people who are the most
certain what the right thing is, the people with the answer, the
really moral people, are the most dangerous of all.

Because the moralists who have hijacked the Republican Party don't
understand that the American people's morality, as evidenced in its
reaction to Clinton, is deeply rooted and coherent, they think it's
shallow, a mere cover for selfishness or laziness. They believe that
once America grasps that high moral "outrage," to use William
Bennett's word, is called for, it will condemn Clinton and reach new
ethical heights. We must again, we hear over and over, become a
country of laws, not of men. They ignore the fact that no one wants
Clinton to be above the law -- people just don't want him to be below
the law, to be prosecuted for things no one else would ever be
prosecuted for. And they conveniently forget the fact that Clinton has
been prosecuted for four years not by "the laws" but by a highly
flawed man.

In this vicious partisan climate, in which appeals to high moral
purpose cloak the intent to commit political assassination, the
incessant demands by the New York Times' editorial page that Clinton
admit he lied under oath -- say "those missing magic words," in the
words of the headline of Monday's leader -- are positively bizarre.
Demanding that Clinton fall to his knees in an act of national
self-abnegation that might sway those fabled "moderates," the Times
insists that the most important issue facing the nation is not the
unprecedented and stunningly irresponsible action taken by the House
Judiciary Committee, not the likelihood that the GOP rank and file
will follow its jackbooted leaders and shut the country down, but
whether or not Clinton says "uncle." This is ridiculous. There's no
reason to suppose that the rabid GOP dogs who have been calling for
Clinton's head all along would suddenly become docile,
censure-amenable laphounds if he admitted to perjury. There's a lot
more reason to assume that the long knives would come out in earnest,
whether now or after Clinton left office. (Republicans who are now
saying they won't consider censure unless Clinton admits he lied are
using the issue to hide: They know he can't admit that for legal
reasons, but it gives them an excuse to vote for impeachment.) Clinton
has set the world record for public humiliation, but apparently that
is not enough for the Times. Out of some inexplicably punitive and
moralistic impulse, it pays less rhetorical attention to the
appallingly partisan Judiciary Committee proceedings (which it
criticizes almost in passing) than to whether Clinton has groveled low
enough.

Maybe the go-for-the-jugular Republican strategy will work, and the
American public will be won over to impeachment. But it probably
won't. And there is reason to think that the day of the impeachment
vote -- most likely Dec. 17 -- will be a day that will live in GOP
infamy -- that it will be remembered as the day that the party lost
its moral standing, became a marginal home for dogmatists and cranks
and cynical political opportunists willing to ignore the wishes of the
majority to satisfy the ravings of true believers. The Republicans
thought they could get away with spitting in the face of the American
people, but they may be spitting against the wind.
SALON | Dec. 15, 1998

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