Editorials: Every body Knows / All Is Vanity
Tyrrell, R. Emmett
EDITORIALS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Everybody Knows When will the Boy President's ratings in the polls match his performance in office? This is one of those rare moments in modern American...
...Let us return to the Clintons' treatment of those who disagree with them...
...Here the Clintons commit the timeless error of so many other superficial moralists...
...There is no bombshell here...
...Now it is the Monica Lewinsky scandal that threatens, and do you recall when it was chic to say that Bill Clinton did not really have a women problem or that his private life could not have public consequences...
...They have hired new lawyers and Ginsburg would make an excellent patient for Dr...
...The Clintons are obviously alarmed about the moral tone of the times...
...The Clintons rarely address whether or not the information is in error...
...There is reason to believe it was available during the primaries...
...These ham-fisted attempts to suppress criticism and to threaten democratic process in America will only bring the Clintons more infamy...
...A moral breakthrough!ward are the views and the values of the great majority of Americans who understand and are concerned about the grave social and ethical questions our country faces...
...The White House's response to the president's detumescence is to pounce on any opponent who says anything the least bit controversial, even though the opponent might be speaking the unassailable truth...
...Neil Howe "Rebellion in the University" JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1973 16 August 1998 • The American Spectator Unfortunately the White House is not in a very good position to venture into disputes over morality_ Lott's rejoinder to McCurry was irrefutable: "Mr...
...Kevorkian...
...Ginsburg miscalculated the Lewinsky family's tolerance for imbecility...
...After all these procedures have run their course we can decide whether the term "decadent" applies to this great city...
...Who by now doubts that our ithyphallic president took advantage of a terminalAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...Congressman, this impotence pill is killing our seniors...
...Might it be seen as Playboy magazine's approved mode of assisted suicide...
...It takes thousands of cigarettes to kill a kid...
...Mounting data indicate that Viagra might be even more harmful than tobacco...
...Portrayed for months as a New Age vestal virgin cruelly victimized by the office of the Independent Counsel, Miss Lewinsky just wrecked her reputation...
...The Associated Press reported on June 9 that money from Indonesia was donated in 1992 by Clinton's friend James Riady after Clinton's nomination...
...L'4 Read RET's editorials every week...
...The shoot was to be therapeutic, and remember, Ginsburg is a wizard of medical malpractice...
...More damaging still to the public interest, the Boy President approved of technology transfers—even more than he has admitted—from companies run by his domestic campaign contributors to some of his foreign campaign contributors...
...Clinton pulled through the Flowers scandal by having more money than his opponents—possibly Asian money...
...His condition is perceived as either laughable or embarrassing, depending on one's original estimate of him...
...Bearing in mind that the pill has only been out a few months it seems suspicious that the Hon...
...Possibly Mr...
...God so loves the Clintons that he rains money from heaven for their support and provides them with a Carville...
...25 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator There are two ways of explaining the rise of student activism over the last ten or fifteen years, and no matter who you are—historian, journalist, curious observer—your views are bound to lean toward one side or the other...
...They believe that money is at the root of all evil, when in truth evil is at the root of all evil...
...Meanwhile Ken Starr continues to ensure their place in history...
...All they need to know is what Washington already knows...
...That he has lied about it under oath is a grim fact that even his staff must realize...
...She appeared in Vanity Fair in seductive photographs that cast grave doubt on her chastity...
...The photographs were approved by her erstwhile lawyer, the incomparable William Ginsburg...
...Or might the anti-tobacco crowd envisage an elderly man's use of Viagra more auspiciously...
...Congressional committees are preparing still more investigations, this time into the administration's role in technology transfers that may have set off a nuclear arms race in the Asian subcontinent...
...Alas, look what has again happened...
...Through the government and such loyal henchmen as Sidney Blumenthal, they are now pursuing criminal investigations and such nuisance lawsuits as Blumenthal's libel action against the journalist Matt Drudge, a lawsuit that reportedly will be used to harass other journalists...
...James Carville has taken the vow of poverty and the money that funds his pro-Clinton activity comes from heaven as manna once came from heaven...
...Then there is the Chop Suey connection...
...You either conclude that student movements have been political movements and that activism is a means chosen by students to react to and influence the "issues...
...Will money—foreign or domestic —help him now...
...Henry Waxman has issued no declarations...
...What he considers to be backI have returned from decadent Europe to — well, to Washington, and let us abstain from any descriptive adjectives about this city that might disturb Mayor Marion Barry or the Clintons...
...Not only have they vowed to eliminate tobacco among "the kids," but they also want to take action against journalists and critics who turn up unsavory information about them...
...Thus Rahm Emanuel terms it a "bombshell" when Ken Starr admits to a so-called journalist that he has spoken offthe record to real journalists to correct misinformation fed to them by the White House...
...Their existence in the country is a kind of miracle or perhaps an act of patriotism...
...From listening to their diabolical musings one would conclude that liberals have no liberal financial supporters...
...04' Then there is the latest development in the Monica Lewinsky saga...
...Here we were pursuing a line of thought about the Clinton's assessment of their critics and we find ourselves once again confronted by Clinton scandals, this time a fundraising scandal and a national security scandal...
...C Ever since the Clintons dis- -)N covered that conservative intellectuals had conservative financial supporters, they and their servitors have been insinuating that this is some grave inequity...
...It may well be, as the public fears, that certain tendencies of the American student movement in the sixties were fundamentally new to the tradition of intellectual dissent...
...Rather they point out what they insist are their critics' moral and ethical irregularities, namely that the critics do not accept the Clintons' balderdash and that they receive salaries...
...That he suborned perjury and obstruction of justice are two likelihoods that in all probability will soon be established as facts...
...But let us back away from the spectacle of illegal foreign campaign contributions being reciprocated by reckless arms transfers to unfriendly powers...
...McCurry's experience within the White House does not qualify him to tell the American people what is right and what is wrong...
...From such disparate sources as the New York Times and the Thompson committee hearings the realization has grown in Washington that our happy-go-lucky president raised funds for his 1996 campaign against the hellish Bob Dole by recklessly disregarding past standards of decorum, established ethics, and in some instances, the law...
...So long as a prosecutor does not talk about grand jury testimony this is common practice established by legal precedent...
...Sometimes the exploited statement does not even have to be controversial...
...Times are strange, but it is too early to call them decadent...
...After all, the criminal justice process is grinding on, albeit ever so slowly...
...And the Speaker of the House has tapped a congressman of irreproachable record to survey impeachment in the event Independent Counsel Ken Starr's report contains a proper corpus delicti...
...No other president has ever been able to make this claim...
...He went on to say, "You should still love that person...
...Do you suppose that when Richard Nixon made his opening to China he realized that he was establishing an eventual source of campaign support for the Democrats...
...In time that majority is going to apply its "views and values" to Mr...
...Unfortunately it now appears that God was on occasion funneling funds to the Clintons through Indonesian bankers and the Communist Chinese who got advanced missile technology in return...
...The vicissitudes of history, as they say...
...McCurry's boss...
...White House press secretary Mike McCurry, moral watch dog for the nation, rushed out with the judgment that Lott was "backward" and that "the majority leader has taken an incorrect view...
...The president's stature steadily declines here among the political cognoscenti...
...You should not try to mistreat them or treat them as outcasts...
...This is one of those rare moments in modern American history when Washington is more in touch with reality than the rest of the country...
...Actually, a growing number of Democrats, fetched by candor, are now admitting behind closed doors that they never believed back in 1992 that candidate Clinton could survive the Gennifer Flowers scandal...
...And perhaps these should be (or should have been) strongly opposed as destructive to liberal free inquiry...
...In response to an interviewer's question as to whether homosexuality is a sin, Lott, a Southern Baptist, answered "Yeah...
...Already the Food and Drug Administration has investigated sixteen deaths of elderly men using Viagra...
...His public explanation was that Miss Lewinsky was suffering from what sounded like a malignant libido...
...Or you believe that student movements are not deliberately political at all, but rather intellectualized frustration, an involuntary reaction to widespread cultural changes which the students themselves do not comprehend...
...ly silly 21-year-old White House intern...
...Visit TAS Online at www.spectator.org All Is Vanity The American Spectator • August 1998 17...
...Or consider the huge row the White House orchestrated against Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott...
...A few minutes on Viagra in the presence of a loved one can wipe out an experienced taxpayer with years of tax returns left to fill out...
...That so much unsavory information keeps coming out is proof, they say, of a dreadful decline in journalistic standards and of the existence of "a vast right-wing conspiracy...
...Yet the White House saw its opportunity...
...Can money whisk away the two scandals that now threaten his presidency, l'affaire Lewin-sky and the Chop Suey connection...
...In fact no other president has ever raised funds in China...
...Meanwhile history wobbles on...
...Some of those technology transfers appear to have set off a nuclear arms race in south Asia: The president's trip to China actually put him in the company of some of his most generous 1996 campaign contributors...
Vol. 31 • August 1998 • No. 8
