Editorials
Tyrrel, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Spinning Webb There are certain aptitudes duly associated with certain peoples. The French are bon vivants. The Italians are lovers. The Irish...
...In Whitewater, its RTC investigation, Travelgate, Filegate, and the vast array of misdeeds committed pursuant to Clinton's re-election there are incomparably more grounds for impeachment...
...These ridiculous interludes have continued for over twenty years even as the Republicans have been changing the face of American politics...
...Just a week or so before November 4 the press reported the Republicans as being in trouble in every key off-year election...
...At least this was true until our Boy President brought his entourage of Arkansans to Washington...
...v. Chapin...
...At this point things looked bad for the Clintons...
...He was associate attorney general and surely had a hand in politicizing the department, a process that began at the outset of the administration with the unprecedented demand that all U.S...
...And now we see yet another scandal-ridden Arkansan duping the system and hoodwinking the press, Webster Hubbell...
...It took a month for the Washington press corps to ask the White House about my report...
...And no "smoking gun" is necessary...
...Well, this White House aide knew nothing about the story...
...He developed amnesia...
...Only a heartless misanthrope would fail to develop a soft spot for this big, shambling pathetico, who betrays no hint of bitterness, just new-found humility and so many regrets...
...What might that be...
...Before that he was the Clintons' eyes and ears at the Justice Department...
...With the elections behind us, however, the press returns to its morbid descriptions of the Republicans...
...But the Nixon Articles issued from only two criminal acts and their cover-up...
...Why he was Dwight Chapin, a Nixon aide enmeshed in the Watergate scandal...
...Their general charge of obstruction of justice mentions repeated refusals to respond to subpoenas, delays in coming up with subpoenaed materials, and the insufficiency of materials brought forward after intolerable delays...
...It notes the hundreds of breaches of federal privacy laws committed when some goo raw FBI files appeared in the White House...
...Two of this important document's authors were former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum and Hillary Rodham...
...We do not need a tape of Bill Clinton ordering some grievous wrong...
...an Impeachment Inquiry lists .-- -:‘ the misuse of the FBI and the IRS against private American citizens...
...They make the point that no criminal act is necessary for impeachment...
...And the press just keeps getting duped...
...Now the press is back to writing the party's obituaries...
...They have called on the House of Representatives to hold the president accountable for failing to live up to the moral and ethical standards expected of a president...
...how grotesque their misplaced priorities, under the glittery perfect smiles...
...Someday historians might wonder why Barr's work did not begin at the end of Clinton's first year in office...
...Then there are films like Luis Bunuel's 29th and latest, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, infused with the same message....lf the Spanish exile's loathing of the ruling classes has tempered somewhat in recent years, it has been augmented by a maturer disdain: these spoiled sickly infantile reptiles, he is saying, these lovely, overrefined predators...
...It is about building up good will in the press before he is indicted by the independent counsel, this time for obstruction of justice—remember the aforementioned Clinton supporters whose business with Webb seems to have triggered his amnesia...
...Webb's present campaign is about more than burnishing his image...
...Barr and his colleagues are citing far more instances of presidential misconduct than merely the mass amnesia of Clinton's aides on Capitol Hill...
...Yet it is not merely the slipperiness of this book that marks Webb off as a political genius...
...It is a very thoroughly-researched document, reviewing two centuries ofimpeachment theory and practice by such diverse sources as the Founding Fathers and Supreme Court Justices...
...Then Republicans won every key race...
...Never mind that the Washington attitude was that if that's what you yearn for, perhaps you are in the wrong place...
...these despoilers of mankind, how attractively they dine, how sensible their appreciation of wines and (this reviewer's own public vice) very dry martinis, well-stirred...
...They are asking the House to begin an Inquiry of Impeachment to the Judiciary Committee...
...The call for L...
...For instance, every piece I have read in his new publicity offensive claims as the New York Times does that Webb "hasn't seen the Clintons since the fall of 1994...
...Rather, impeachment is a political remedy for political misconduct, for instance: lying, abusing power, obstructing justice...
...Writes James Traub in the New York Times Magazine, "Hubbell's memoir contains not a single jaded reflection on the cynicism or myopia of Washington...
...The Irish are politicians...
...In early October, White House spokesman Mike McCurry assured the White House press corps that he knew nothing about the charge, but would get back to them...
...As a matter of record, we now know that the White House immediately arranged for a number of supporters to offer Webb numerous business deals, and Webb fell silent...
...In fact, they are more gifted in the art of the politico than any Irishman ever heard of...
...Oki 25 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator There are films like The Ruling Class, so bitingly pungent, so wittily acid in good moments, that one almost forgives, but not forgets, the pervasive obstinacy of theme: in that current Peter O'Toole movie, the wickedness of the upper crust, hammered home to last and last...
...David Brudnoy "Lap Dogs" JANUARY 1973 The American Spectator • January 1998 17...
...The much-disparaged independent counsel Kenneth Starr sent Webb off to the calaboose on a plea-bargaining agreement in which Webb was to cooperate with the independent counsel's investigations into Arkansas corruption...
...Rather it is the mastery with which he has hornswoggled the press...
...Scores of President Clinton's "subordinates and agents" have for years now appeared before congressional committees claiming "memory loss...
...As the Articles of Impeachment devised against Richard Nixon state over and over again, the president "acting through his subordinates and agents" was guilty of "approving, condoning, acquiescing" in impeachable misbehavior...
...The standard portrait emerging from Webb's entrancing interviews is of a sad but personable fellow done in by the perfidies of heartless Washington and abandoned to the vagrant kindnesses of a few family members...
...By then Travelgate was a historic fact, and, if memory serves, Filegate, too, and the obstruction of the RTC's investigation of Madison Saving and Loan...
...Yes, the rich are different, they do have more money, and, Bunuel insists, their pastimes are infinitely more dangerous...
...Or consider page 234: "Washington houses tended to be outwardly elegant but inwardly oppressive—reflecting the personality of the city's primary industry...
...Here in the United States you could not associate any particular aptitude with the citizenry of any particular state...
...Brilliantly, this tough, clever, political enforcer for the Clintons, possessed of a long record as an apparatchik in the Arkansas political machine, has presented himself as a hapless victim of Washington...
...As I say, the Arkansans are marvelous politicians...
...Then he did, but he did not know if Webb was on Martha's Vineyard...
...Webb's spilling of the beans would not have been propitious for the administration...
...No president in this century has spent more time alibiing away serious breaches of his presidential oath as "bureaucratic snafus," "simple accidents," and the consequences of conspiracies waged against him by his hellish opponents...
...No Kennedy could create from such nothingness what Bill Clinton has...
...Here we arrive at another historic irony...
...They cite the illegal use of government computerbases and of Democratic National Committee employees in the White House...
...Recently he spent nineteen months in a federal prison for tax evasion and mail fraud...
...The judgment has been made at least twice, ironically once in U.S...
...So, one of my reporters called the White House this week for confirmation...
...The three Articles of Impeachment that were brought against President Richard Nixon in 1974 apply equally to President Clinton's acts of neglect, dereliction, and political malfeasance...
...He never did...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...Through it all President Clinton has cheerfully acquiesced in this running joke against testimony under oath...
...The Republicans do miraculously well...
...I suppose the key word is "met...
...What does it mean...
...How much corruption must the presidency endure...
...Doubtless other newspapers and broadcast media will also swallow the line...
...Now a bold move by Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia and seventeen colleagues is going to expose all these presidential excuses for what they are: presidential neglect, dereliction of duty, and political malfeasance...
...Then he did know that the Clintons never met with Hubbell...
...Now Webb is out of jail and engaged in a vast publicity campaign ostensibly on behalf of his new book, Friends in High Places, a memoir of his Arkansas and Washington days...
...Then comes election day...
...For one thing, a careful reading of Bill Clinton's enduringly high negatives make it clear that a sizable minority of the American people feel uneasy with his incompetent, accident-prone, devious performance in office...
...Then, alas, it was discovered that Webb had stolen some half million dollars from the Rose Law Firm, his firm...
...As I write, both the Washington Post and the New York Times have been beguiled into laying down Webb's fictions about himself...
...Well, far be it from me to put in a good word for official Washington,but thumbing through Webb's devious little book, I alight on page 186 and presto: "But we Arkansans felt a need for companionship, for connection...
...One of the historical documents they cite as justifying this impeachment is the "Report by the Staff of the Impeachment Inquiry," Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 93rd Congress, Second session, February 1974...
...These Arkansans are very shifty...
...His loss of memory did not save him from a perjury conviction...
...Alas, the "I can't remember" response has been adjudged perjury by the courts...
...And who was Chapin...
...16 January 1998 • The American Spectator Barring Impeachment T he splendid Michael Barone in his Almanac of American Politics 1998 makes the point that during the election cycles the Republican Party is always reported as being in a hell of a mess...
...Webb, of course, is a convicted felon...
...Then there are the flagrant, C ) abuses of power...
...and the press's powers of discernment simply collapsed...
...Apparently, ordinary voters feel differently about government than the bovine practitioners of American journalism...
...attorneys nationwide tender their resignations...
...Perhaps it should be called a mis-memoir for there is undoubtedly more fact left out of it than put in, and it surely contains huge amounts of fiction...
...In August, sources reported to me that Webb was with the Clintons during their Martha's Vineyard holiday...
...Now it is clear that Arkansans are stupendous politicians...
...They cite the administration's acceptance of foreign monies in the 1996 campaign (occasionally from criminal sources) and the president's repeated lies about his involvement, notwithstanding documents and testimony that have exposed those lies...
...After I reported the liaison, more sources corroborated it...
...Thus, read all the lovey-dovey present treatment of Webb cum grano salis...
Vol. 31 • January 1998 • No. 1
