Presswatch: Two-Bit Toobin

...if not their high moral purpose, and then one thing led to another...

...Linda Smith, that would require all campaign donations to be raised in the state a candidate is running to represent...

...So pity the poor befuddled justices, so out of step with the real world and its principal reflection--the dominant media culture...

...It seems the press did not live up to his standards...

...Bear with me now while I quote this at length...

...In other words, the conspiracy was real, and justice demands that it should be exposed...

...Toobin declared in his book, for example, that former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams had told "a flat-out, bald-faced lie" in testimony before Congress...

...Forgoing a real contest and the intellectual debate over the direction of the party that goes along with it could end up harming conservatives in the long run, he reasons, since it "minimizes-in truth neglects-what the Republican party needs to do to survive in the new century...

...He then violated professional standards by doing the book...

...But it does, of course, and this is something you either know or don't know, and if you don't know, any explanation would be lost anyway...

...So something had to be done to repair the marriage, and it was...

...Novak's position on term limits is also bold...

...She would portray a loutish Clinton, and then, usually about two paragraphs from the end, work in something about a mean-spirited Newt Gingrich, or a sex-obsessed Ken Starr...

...In 1989, he quit Walsh's staff, taking his notes and memos with him, and became an assistant U.S...

...Also, under the statute that set up the Office of Independent Counsel, Walsh was the only one authorized to write a report on his investigation, and it was understood that a book, by Walsh or anyone on his staff, could come only after the report was released...

...It would be "inappropriate, to say the least," Toobin says loftily, if Isikoffwas doing that--Toobin, of course, suggests he really was doing it-and not disclosing it to his readers...

...The Troopergate piece in TAS, which was all about sex, proved that long ago...

...T herefore there is no reason to take Toobin seriously as ethicist...

...Several of Clinton's "primary pursuers" wanted to write books about his sex life, and in their desire for fat contracts they manipulated key events for financial gain...

...Certainly Toobin knew what was expected...

...It also should be clear by now that the culture and its most sophisticated spokesmen--Toobin, for instance--accept, indeed promote, the notion that there is no connection between Clinton's private and public life...

...He also accuses Isikoff, among much else, of"walking up to and perhaps over the line that separates observers and participants" when he reported the story...

...In the a95o's, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, lacking access to the political system, turned to the courts to end legalized segregation...

...In interviews, Toobin weakly defended himself by claiming that Abrams, as a public figure, was "fair game," which only meant that his spiteful conduct was rooted in ideology...

...They ranged from one-case-only zealots in the cause of fighting sexual harassment to one-defendant-only federal prosecutors, and they shared only a willingness to misuse the law and the courts in their effort to destroy Bill Clinton...

...Toobin, who is a staff writer for the New Yorker and also the legal analyst for ABC News, is making explicit what the dominant media culture thinks about the scandal, but for professional reasons-journalistic standards, and all that-as well as a certain inarticulateness, is usually reluctant to put into words: Yet the most astonishing fact in this story may be this one: in spite of his consistently reprehensible behavior, Clinton was, by comparison, the good guy in this struggle...

...The real world, apparently, is where the ABC legal analyst lives, and in not recognizing it the nine justices were demonstrating "their collective ignorance...

...At the same time Hillary grew icy and bitter...

...And because of the importance he places on a Republican winning the presidency, he questions the virtual anointment, dating back nearly a year and a half before the zooo election, of George W. Bush...

...Suggesting that Republicans try to educate the public as to why most reform proposals would make the system worse than it already is would have been more in line with his other principled suggestions, and calling for the repeal of all current campaign contribution limits (with immediate full disclosure of the source of all donations) would have been downright courageous...

...Toward the end of the century," Toobin writes, "it was extremists of the political right who tried to use the legal system to undo electionsin particular the two that put Bill Clinton in the White House...

...Toobin says their success inspired civil rights workers, feminists, and environmentalists to do the same...

...Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year for her supposedly penetrating columns on Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, is one of its exemplars...

...It was the natural response "ofa humiliated middle-aged husband who lied when he was caught having an affair with a young woman from the office...

...You couldn't believe a thing those awful right-wing people were saying...

...Not even Chelsea," according to Sheehy, "could provide the glue in this splintered marriage anymore...

...They would have known that even if Clinton was a boor and a cad, the people out to get him were worse...

...Novak notes, rather understatedly, that such an effort "obviously is going to take some time and some creative thinking...

...The Walsh investigation was still ongoing, and as an assistant U.S...

...The media more or less believed in a conspiracy already, and Mrs...

...Or at least until Toobin had enough material for a book...

...attorney and employee of the Justice Department, it was clearly improper for Toobin to write about it...

...Some of the people who dislike Clinton really are obsessed by sex, and some of them really are odd, and really there have been quasijournalistic, highly imaginative, and ultimately unfounded stories connecting Clinton to dead boys on railroad tracks and other unsolved murders, drug smuggling operations, and various debaucheries too strange or too strenuous even to think about...

...Clinton decided to bomb Kosovo...

...On the other hand, you may not dismiss everything Toobin says, either...

...It ought to be clear by now that Clinton practices not just reckless, but compulsive behavior...

...Instead of aiming for this ideal, he favorably mentions a reform, championed by former Rep...

...She goes where the more sophisticated spokesmen do not go, and because she is not taken seriously she passes beneath their radar...

...Gail Collins, the Times's new columnist, is working hard to master the technique, but she's not quite there yet...

...He appeared to have no idea at all of why he had ordered it, and now you know why...

...They were willing to trample a l l standards of fairness--not to mention the Constitution-in their effort to drive him from office...

...Highmindedness is his thing...

...Obviously the appropriate thing to do was to allow him to go on unimpeded, and escape their vast conspiracy...

...We wouldn't stop until we reached the top...

...Toobin, of course, says Clinton should never have been impeached...

...Like many voters, he believes change necessitates control of the executive branch...

...Compared to his principled stands on the sales tax and term limits, Novak's recommendation for campaign finance reform seems out of place...

...It is too bad Novak opted for pragmatism in this instance...

...If they had lived in the real world, or at least some part of it-between Columbus Circle and 96th Street on the Upper West Side, say--their guideposts would have been clearer...

...As he wrote later: We would take on Reagan and all the President's men, with their contempt for the Constitution, disdain for the Congress, and hostility to the truth....We had nothing less than a blank check to uncover and rectify the misdeeds of a corrupt and dishonorable administration...

...The irony, however, according to Toobin, is that liberals brought this on themselves...

...This writer is sure he did not lie, but that's another story...

...The president's adversaries appeared literally consumed with hatred for him...

...True, but his almost-fatal wounds were mostly self-inflicted...

...Monica Lewinsky had been more than she could take...

...Clinton nailed it down...

...High-mindedness is his thing...

...Many of them talk to one another, and consider it a duty to tell everyone else what they hear...

...The right wing, he Writes, is "more obsessed with the details of Clintoffs sex life than with his character...

...It seems the press did not live up to Jeffrey's standards...

...To be worthy of votes, Novak says, the Republican Party needs to know what it stands for--and what it stands for shouldn't be an expansionist "national greatness" or "compassionate" conservatism that can be all things to all people...

...Otherwise, don't be surprised if the next Republican Congress- if there is one anytime soon-gives us more of the same...

...Rather, the goal is and should remain smaller government and more freedom for individuals...

...Even as he offers a "vision for victory" for GOP candidates, Novak has doubts about whether a Republican Congress (at least with the current party leadership) will ever act boldly and seize the agenda...

...Presswatch/Corry (Continued from page 43) scurrilous stories...

...the bigger the stakes, the smaller they acted...

...In order to avoid the possibility of taxation under both systems simultaneously, the 16th Amendment would have to be repealed--an unlikely proposition due to the procedural hurdles involved...

...Meanwhile the press is entertained, though it pretends to be appalled, and says it would never use those (Continued on page 69) The American Spectator _9 Marc h 2 o o o 43 stand out: replacing the income tax with a national sales tax, enacting term limits, and passing campaign finance reform...

...Isikoff's supposed violation of the joumalistic canon may be the stuff for some windy foundation-funded conference on the media, but otherwise can be ignored...

...Clinton, as often noted, has been blessed by his enemies...

...Impatient with conventional politics, and unwilling to build consensus for their unpopular causes, they used the legal process to achieve their aims...

...attomey in New York...

...He also implies--actually the culture insists on it-that Clinton's sex life has nothing to do with his character...

...If it were up to me," he admits, "I'd remove the [contribution] limits altogether...

...She called her husband from North Africa, and told him to get on with it...

...Hillary Clinton knew what she was doing when she went on the "Today" show to talk about the "vast right-wing conspiracy...

...If Abrams had allegedly lied in favor of, say, ending aid to the contras, or reaching rapprochement with Cuba, it is unlikely to impossible that Toobin would have cared...

...In terms of where the threat to America lay there was never any contest...

...Toobin also said that Abrams had escaped conviction for a crime only because "the evidence...fell short...

...By ridding Congress of career politicians, term limits would enable the election of citizen legislators who aren't afraid of controversy and who haven't yet bought into Washington's pork-barrel ethos...

...only primary pursuer who actually did write a book, even though much of A Vast Conspiracy appears to have been cribbed from Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton...

...But no ethical prosecutorremember that Toobin still worked for the Justice Department-would publicly malign someone who was still under investigation that way, much less someone he once had investigated himself...

...Inappropriate sex, he says, was the only real charge against him, and while his behavior may have been heinous, his lying-whether under oath, or to his wife, lawyers, cabinet, or country--was understandable...

...but at the same time Hunt is covering himself: The big boob's wounds were mostly self-inflicted...

...Abrams was carrying out the wishes of an elected conservative president, and Toobin was angry because the legal system had failed to indict him...

...Ron Brown took a .45 slug in the head, while Vince Foster got his in the Saudi embassy, and did you know about the new White House bimbo...

...Sometimes it does use them, of course, but almost always so it can knock them down, and then deplore the people who first spread them...

...A Harvard Law School grad and one-time intern at the New Republic, Toobin had joined the staffat age z6, thereby becoming its youngest, and possibly most eager, member...

...IfToobin could not get the President's men one way, then he would get them another, no matter how cheesy a performance it took to do it...

...In the 1991 Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case, Toobin wrote about his experiences as a member of the staff of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, when he was investigating and prosecuting possible crimes arising from Iran-contra...

...When he left Walsh's staff he had agreed, in writing, that anything he wrote for publication would be submitted first for review...

...Time magazine's laudatory review of A Vast Conspiracy may have said he "reserves his greatest scom for Kenneth Starr," but on the Upper West Side that's only pro forma, and Newsweek's Michael Isikoffupsets him far more...

...Conservatives soon took note of their tactics...

...But enter now Gail Sheehy, America's pop psychology queen, and the author of Hillary's Choice...

...In a similar spirit, just after the publication of A Vast Conspiracy, columnist AI Hunt of the Wall Street Journal reported that"People who've been with him [Clinton] recently say he rails against the lack of attention paid to the 42 Marc h 2 o o o " The American Spectator right-wing conspiracy that went after him...

...He really had no idea, except that she was angry, and he was empty, and something had to be done to patch up their marriage...

...Substituting a national sales tax for the monstrously burdensome income tax is still a fringe issue even though it has been debated over a couple of Republican presidential primary seasons...

...Isikoff probably inspired his peevishness only because he got his book out first...

...He is particularly hard here on the journalist Michael Isikoff, the JoHN CORRY is the American Spectator's senior correspondent...

...Impeachment, she writes, left Clinton in "a state of disbelief...

...Meanwhile all the pursuers, whether consumed by hatred, driven by literary ambitions, or obsessed by sex-which they supposedly all were to a greater or lesser degreewere helped in their pursuit of the president by the triumph of law over politics...

...The only constant in his "real world" is that principles are determined by ideology...

...F irst things first: Early on in A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President, Jeffrey Toobin summarizes what his book is about...

...Toobin accuses him--twice, actually-of inventing something called "sexual investigative reporting," and wonders if he was "stoking" the scandal story so he could profit from it in a book deal...

...Toobin is a piece of work...

...A career politician will ponder the evil of term limits every waking hour if it threatens his livelihood," Novak says, and he concedes that term limits are unlikely ever to pass...

...policy in Central America as "reprehensible"-no matter that Nicaragua had just held an electionand Abrams had been the most prominent, and controversial, advocate of the policy...

...The American Spectator _9 March 2 o o o 69...

...The noteworthy thing is Toobin's emergence as ethicist...

...In his book, Toobin had denounced U.S...

...This is also Toobin's position, and in advancing it he presents himself as media ethicist-in-chief...

...But that won't happen...

...The Joint Chiefs had told him otherwise, but hers was a stronger voice, and in his unhappiness the president obeyed...

...According to Toobin, when the iustices unanimously ruled that "Clinton was not above the law," and that his lawyers could no longer delay the Paula Jones lawsuit, they showed their "disengagement from the ways of the real world...

...Their motives were suspect, and their tactics dishonest, and up close they probably looked kinky...

...A federal judge sided with the ambitious Toobin, and Walsh appealed, but publication went ahead...

...Novak does not get much more specific than that, but warns Republicans that they need to "appear" to have "clean hands" in order to maintain the public's trust...

...Compelled to do so, therefore, he did submit his book for review, and when Walsh refused to approve it, Toobin charged prior restraint, and took him to court...

...You may remember now what he was like the day the bombing began...

...Toobin goes on to say that greed was a factor, too...

...Apparently only extremists of the political right could think otherwise, and when they misused the legal system to uphold their twisted beliefs they even suborned the Supreme Court...

...Undaunted, he also discusses other institutional reforms--such as drastically cutting congressional pay and increasing the size of the House from 435 to around 2,ooo members--that merely live in the minds of a few political scientists and grassroots activists, and have absolutely no chance of passing...

...Toobin picks up on this in A Vast Conspiracy...

...Toobin may deplore the triumph of the legal system over the political system in A Vast Conspiracy, although his pursuit of Abrams indicates that his feelings about that are flexible...

...When she says something political she is entirely conventional--Gingrich, for example, practiced "the politics of personal destruction," and he shut down the government because he had to use the rear door on Air Force One-but her reporting is not terrible, and she discovers some interesting things...