Capitol Ideas: Hustler

...She in turn had taught the Clintons to disguise the case for more government as a defense of children...

...Martin's Press...

...Willing to stipulate in a motion of censure that the president had lied under oath and should face civil and criminal charges on leaving office, Democrats might at least have been expected to acknowledge the good faith of their opponents...

...Always lurking beneath the alleged inconsistency is a single, consistent, undeviating standard...

...On the other hand, the recipient classes, who live by politics, listen carefully to their ringleaders David Bonior, Barney Frank, John Lewis, David Obey, Charles Rangel, and Maxine Waters...

...Frank Rich speaks to "those who just can't wait for Larry Flynt to expose the sex lives of some more GOP 'big fish.'" One wonders if Flynt, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem will at some point hold a joint press conference in defense of thepresident...

...bate like Clinton...

...Feminists, Gloria Steinem, Larry Flynt, leftist newspaper columnists, pro-abortion fanatics, congressmen who complain about "the ayatollahs of the right" and "sexual McCarthyism" are in fact vigorously pursuing a single standard...

...She has the warrior's mentality, operating on behalf of a revolution which has come close to prevailing over the forces of reaction...

...And that is the destruction of Christian culture...

...22 February 1999 • The American Spectator their meal ticket and livelihood...

...They are put on the spot, construe questions as a snap civics test, andrely on cues within the questions themselves to give the "right" answers...

...If hypocrisy is the one newsworthy sin, Bill Clinton is of course its leading exponent...

...But Clinton has made their task much more difficult...

...It's possible that he will accept a measure of Social Security privatization —a reform that Al Gore (tethered to the unions as long as he seeks the presidency) will not touch on his own...

...Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said of Flynt: "While he's doing it for publicity, in his own twisted way he has a history of using embarrassment and sexuality to expose what he sees as hypocrisy...

...Liberals must remain our moral tutors, or die...

...Hillary, on the other hand, having worked for Barry Goldwater, seems to have experienced a real conversion to the left...

...But polls can be used to manufacture opinions, and that is often what they do...

...I believe also that when the phone rings at home, and a pollster is on the line, many respondents think: "Somehow, this guy got my phone number...

...So closely does he fit the profile that suspicions are bound to be aroused by his one deviation from the norm: Sociopaths have juvenile criminal records...

...Republicans formed a solid phalanx and ignored all reports of adverse public opinion...

...It's striking that his approval rating dipped in the late summer and then rose again, exactly paralleling the movement of the Dow Jones average...

...To sustain the fiction of relevance, in fact, the federal government is increasingly usurping such state and local functions as hiring police officers and teachers...

...I should add that the insincere affectation of moral standards is as undesirable within the GOP as it is anywhere, and Flynt could indeed perform a public service by ridding us of GOP office-holders who are probably neither fit nor disposed to engage in the escalating combat of modern politics...

...Another interpretation of the popular response to Clinton is that the people want to be left alone and would rather hear as little as possible about Washington...

...Meanwhile, Clinton's approval ratings rose higher than ever...

...In this, as Robert Bork has pointed out (TAS, November 1998), he conforms to the clinical definition of the sociopath...

...Moral indignation is the only posture they know, even while defending a moral reproTOM BETHELL is TAS's Washington correspondent...

...Thus the only moral failure to be recognized by the mainstream press is falling short of the standards one ostensibly supports...

...With his charm and his glib tongue he was made for politics and he seems to have calculatedly entered the arena on the side of the "have-nots...

...As long as they have jobs and the government is not gouging too much from their paychecks, they seem to feel, little can be expected from busybody politicians...

...There is none greater than Slick Willie...

...People really know very little about what is going on in Washington, as pollsters find out when they seek facts rather than opinions...

...Conservatives can be accused of hypocrisy if they violate their own standards, but those who disparage traditional morality or at least refrain from harping on it cannot be accused of violating anything...

...But that would be asking too much...

...Perhaps what enraged Democrats more than anything was the GOP's abandonment of its usual defensive crouch...

...If it were to become a habit, the Democrats would be in trouble indeed...

...Moral Party on one side of the aisle, Immoral on the other...

...Bill Clinton is their man —the key cog in the machinery that extracts benefits from the pockets of the productive and puts it into their own...

...hat are we to make of Bill Clinton...

...This was stupidity, which was unforgivable...

...This in turn fell sharply in response to fears that the Federal Reserve was crimping the money supply, and rose again once it was clear that Chairman Alan Greenspan was on the case...

...Perhaps Barney Frank and Geraldo Rivera will join them...

...And for a few short weeks, they had the opportunity to brand the man they disliked so much with a mark that would stay with him in the history books...

...If the Republicans were emboldened, the Democrats stayed on offense—which is why it has been interesting times in Washington...

...Washington is no longer where the action is...

...By his very support, he threatened to bring discredit upon all the causes they had fought for all their lives...

...He feels no trace of embarrassment, no prick of conscience...

...Thus is Larry Flynt welcomed into the Peter Zenger Room of the National Press Building...

...Liberals, as exemplified by the Kennedy family, will be exempt from scrutiny...

...The American Spectator • February 1999 23...

...By the 1960's, he knew which side the intellectuals and the media were on and it wasn't difficult to guess who had the upper hand in the propaganda wars...

...It was irresistible, and they took it...

...And we can be sure that any material that Flynt disseminates (gathered by offering large sums of money to informants) will be to the detriment of conservatives or Republicans only...

...So they will support Clinton, come what may...

...But something unusual happened, something not anticipated either by the White House or the country at large...

...But that is another story...

...That is what the "cultural war" is all about, and the sooner that is brought out into the open the better...

...Does Clinton...

...At the time of his first inauguration, the Beltway adored the Clintons...

...As Sam Donaldson said, he leaves a trail of human wreckage behind him wherever he goes...

...Most weeks he comes out of church with a Bible conspicuously on display, holding hands with his wife or his daughter, as though he really subscribed to the Christian and family values that he flouts, I won't say in private, but in the Oval Office itself...

...By all means, then, let us really have a double standard...

...We should be on the alert when conservatives complain of a double standard...

...Republicans, many of whom had been treated with scorn or directly lied to by the president, recognized that they had the legal justification that they needed to act, if not the support of the people...

...True he did nothing to help the economy, having inherited it...

...Frank Rich has now restated the case for a double standard in the New York Times: "By never promising us Boy Scouts in the Rose Garden or Rotunda, the Democrats have little to lose in this ugly game...

...Their defense of victim groups (in the aggregate, now constituting close to a political majority) depends upon the assumption of a moral depravity in their opponents, and without it they would be finished...

...He is no longer beholden to the usual pressure groups (gun owners, labor unions, the NEA) whose united opposition can make nomination or election impossible...

...That is one reason why, as Sally Quinn's article in the Washington Post showed, the Washington establishment so dislikes Clinton...

...They fully understand that the Democratic Party is A president who discredits all he supports...

...His whole public lip-biting act, tears ready to be wiped away when the cameras are in view, is based on insincerity...

...It's appropriate that he is being defended by Hustler, for he is a hustler himself, an unusual operator in politics, not because he lies but because he really doesn't seem to mind at all if you know it...

...But he wins as long as he doesn't undermine it...

...He was on the right side...

...Then he will look for something that can be called legacy, and to achieve that he may move toward the left on some issues (gun control) and away from it on others (Social Security...

...Conservatives make a big deal of these moral issues, Hunt pointed out, but liberals don't...

...Clinton, oddly, may fill that bill...

...If the GOP were taken over by people who lived up to their marriage vows, while the Democrats were dominated by adulterers, whores, and perverts (who would perforce be hypocrites also), there's no doubt which side would prevail in the long run...

...This "Go away...

...Several years ago, just such a double standard was promulgated by Al Hunt, the Wall Street Journal's left-wing columnist (and former Washington bureau chief...

...Unlike Jimmy Carter, Clinton had not run against "the Beltway...

...There has been no historical precedent for a Democratic president in his position —that is, prevented by the 22nd Amendment from seeking re-election...

...This display of fortitude was as unexpected as it is likely to be short-lived...

...But in the end he turned out to be almost unbelievably reckless...

...Such records are concealed by juvenile courts, and as governor he could have had them destroyed...

...He supported the Party of Government...

...His new book, The Noblest Triumph, was recently published by St...

...Hillary, it turned out, was a friend of the wonderful Marian Wright Edelman...

...Talk about a church-going hypocrite...

...The Washington Post's James Glassman construed the non-reaction to impeachment as a sign of "the growing irrelevance of national politics to our lives...

...What are we to make of this...

...In the wake of Larry Flynt, the media's most pompous watchdogs are already laying the groundwork for importing this philosophy into the canons of journalism...

...Phoned out of the blue by a pollster, many people will think, "I am not without sin," and construe disapproval of the president as an invitation to cast the first stone...

...Forecasting Clinton's future has been wide of the mark in the past, but today it seems likely that he will beat the rap in the Senate...

...might in particular be the reaction of the productive classes, who could be expected to oppose the president...

...She seems to believe sincerely that untold wickedness and evil will spread across the land if the class with which she was formerly allied is not muzzled by an activist, suspicious, all-powerful government...

...No wonder Clinton and Jerrold Nadler begged Livingston to reconsider...

...The resignation of Bob Livingston, on evidence furnished by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and then re-transmitted by the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, is no doubt causing Republicans some concern...

...One possibility is that the sexual revolution has essentially triumphed in America...

...To the extent that impeachment was a battle in the cultural war, it really was about sex...