The Vast Right Wing Picnic and Bake Sale
Like the Reagan funeral, the appearance of Bill Clinton’s memoir is giving a good whack to the hornet’s nest of morons who pollute our national discourse with their self-serving pursuit of trivia. I speak of course of the national pundit corps – left, right and so-called center – whose thigh-rubbing wallowing in sensationalism and grinding of private axes has almost entirely supplanted reasonable discussion and examination of the issues that actually affect people’s lives.
Exhibit A was the round-table discussion on the increasingly odious “Meet the Press” this morning. Here, Joe Klein, Bob Novak and Katty Kay, a supercillious airheaded bimbo from the BBC, debated Clinton’s book, egged on by uber-clownmaster Tim Russert. Klein – the pseudononymous author of a scurrilous roman a clef about Clinton’s run for the White House, Primary Colors – tried to suggest that Clinton was at least as much sinned against as sinning (his words). Novak, the man who betrayed the identity of a US intelligence asset for political purposes, wasn’t buying, and bimbo was more concerned about whether Bill Clinton had actually learned anything from his years of analysis. Much discussion about the deep inner darkness of Bill Clinton’s sexual urges followed.
Russert then ran a clip of Clinton’s remarks following the screening of the new documentary, The Hunting of the President, in which he had the nerve to suggest that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he had supplanted international Communism as the Great Satan necessary to preserve the right wing’s cosmology of good guys and bad guys. This set off a new round of tittering as the guests clucked at Clinton’s persecution complex, suggested he was simply trying to evade responsibility for his own actions, and that just because he had “beat the rap” on every single one of the substantive allegations around Whitewater and the related (now known to be entirely fictional) “scandals” didn’t prove to the satisfaction of the far Right that he hadn’t, in fact, done something utterly and irredeemably awful.
It was around this moment that Hillary Clinton’s line about the “vast right wing conspiracy” made its inevitable appearance in the discussion. Because the term “conspiracy” connotes tin-foil hats and folks with 10-foot shelves of books on the JFK assassination, it suggests a political position that is at least a little bit ridiculous and possibly unhinged from reality. Yes, Bill Clinton had his enemies, clucked Klein, but conspiracy? Nah. Just a little overzealous prosecution. Novak wouldn’t even concede that point.
Still, the record here is fairly clear – not even the participants deny it. Clinton was hated by a certain hard core of people right from the start. They believed his election was illegitimate (although he won outright in both the popular and electoral votes, he didn’t win a majority thanks to the presence of Ross Perot), he had rubbed some people the wrong way in Arkansas, people were threatened by his policies, and, most of all, they were scared to death of his political skills. A successful presidency by Clinton – who came into office with a Democratic House and a closely-divided Senate – would have set the Republican party back 40 years. There are plenty of quotes from terrified Republicans in real-time that attest to this fear, which manifested in the desperate – and ultimately successful – bid to scuttle Clinton’s health care proposals in 1993 and 1994 for entirely political reasons.
Furthermore, the Clinton opponents were well-organized through an infrastructure of think-tanks, PACs, grass roots organizations and mailing lists. They were well-funded by individuals like Richard Mellon Scaife and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, as well as other institutional entities. They had a network of media channels that resembled news organizations, but were in fact conduits for talking points, false stories, rumors and propaganda (documented by David Brock in his insider memoir, Blinded by the Right). Following the 1994 Congressional elections, the anti-Clinton right had an institutional outpost within the government from which to pursue its agenda as well. The statements of some of the office-holders who led this effort, such as former GA representative Bob Barr and Dan Burton (R-IND), are so tinged with hatred, invective and the propensity to uncritically seize on the most hateful suggestions about the Clintons that it’s hard to credit simple disagreement over policies for the intensity of their opposition. These folks were not out to oppose Bill Clinton: they were out to destroy him. None of this is in dispute: indeed, most of the participants point with pride and accomplishment to their roles in these activities.
So you have a motivated, well-resourced and extremely well-organized effort whose purpose was to discredit, disempower and displace President Clinton by whatever means necessary. You have an 8-year record of systematic attacks, now shown to be almost entirely fabricated and without merit, which were issued through channels owned and operated by Clinton enemies and force-fed into the mass media due to the laxity, incompetence and complicity of the professional press corps (something which Klein actually admitted in the “Meet the Press” segment). And you have a hard-core of partisans who, to this day, can’t stand the sight or mention of Bill Clinton and begin spewing venomous bile at the slightest provocation, who happily admit they’d have done anything to get him out of office and are now eager to repeat, by the same tactics, anything to discredit his legacy of achievements and ongoing relevance.
So I have to ask, since means, motive and opportunity are not in doubt, what about “conspiracy” is so ridiculous here?
I think it was James Carville who said that it was hard to make the conspiracy angle stick because conspiracies tended to work in secrecy, while the activities of the anti-Clinton mob were, by and large, done out in the open. Fair enough. But in that case it seems perverse at best to ignore the obvious amount of orchestration and excess on the part of Clinton’s attackers when discussing his achievements and term in office. Yes, his personal failures are well-known and exceedingly well-documented by our sex-obsessed press corps. But Clinton achieved some remarkable successes during his Presidency, in spite of the most concerted and well-resourced partisan opposition in American history.
Unlike Bush, Clinton was exceedingly competent, articulate, generally moderate in his political positions (e.g., trade, welfare reform, fiscal policy, foreign policy), and twice legitimately elected by a plurality of the popular votes. Objections to Clinton preceded his politics and were not, generally, criticisms of his failed execution of policies. People hated Clinton for who he was, for what he represented, and, I suspect, out of fear and jealousy (would anyone suggest that Bush’s opponents are motivated by jealousy?). Those are ugly emotions, the product of deep-seated personal qualities that people should not be proud to express. The press doesn’t talk about the anti-Clinton movement – either as a conspiracy or otherwise – because it exposes a vileness in themselves and in a large portion of their audience. Telling the truth about the campaign of hatred leveled at Bill Clinton serves no one’s interests. The pundits know to stick to sex and blow jobs, to the human failings Clinton put so prominently on display, and, most of all, they know to laugh dismissively whenever anyone dares use the word “conspiracy.”
