Clinton Fighting Two Wars
GLASS, ANDREW J.
Washington-USA CLINTON FIGHTING TWO WARS By Andrew J. Glass Washington In an 1862 Thomas Nast cartoon with the White House and the Capitol looming in the background, Major General John...
...Next, the agent and her client arranged for Paula Jones' legal team to get Lewinsky's name...
...Writing in the Washington Post, Sissela Bok, the author of Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, notes that Americans disagree about where to draw the line between purely private conduct in the White House and conduct that merits "genuine public concern...
...Subsequently, Tripp briefed Starr's team and wore an FBI wire while eliciting more damning admissions from Lewinsky...
...For that matter, the damage that might be caused by Clinton's leaving office is limited as well...
...Well-heeled Islamic terrorist networks, such as the one run by bin Laden, the exiled Saudi multimillionaire, would back off only if the United States closed its bases in the Middle East, lifted the oil embargo against Iraq and halted its support for Israel...
...Since Clinton's potential impeachment sits in a political box tied in legal bows, it remains to be seen who will be willing to do the unwrapping so long as the President's popularity holds firm...
...Moreover, his lawyers failed to seek a protective order from a compliant Federal judge —who was in the room and later threw out the Lewinsky line of questioning...
...Some mandarins attribute the disconnect to a coarsening of societal values...
...When the Afghan and Sudan strikes were launched, every so-called "operational detail," including the weapon of choice, was officially withheld...
...lives, were quickly made public...
...The caution reflects fears that the Islamic radicals will keep the cycle of violence going, in accord with their standard operating procedure...
...retaliatory attacks, Albright has been moving around Washington with a swAT-type escort in tow...
...Barry's constituents re-elected him in 1994 because they felt he was unjustly treated by the prosecutors and the press...
...Still, given the President's self-damning testimony, and his politically inept justifications, members of his official team needed to provide him "air cover" by saturating the electronic media with practically nonstop interviews once the missiles were launched...
...That could especially be the case if the need to combat Islamic terrorism escalates from some personal inconveniences to fears of being the next traveler blown up in an intercontinental jumbo jet or drowned in a collapsed traffic tunnel...
...A good deal of sorting out remains to be done, too, between Clinton's constitutional role as Commander in Chief and his newly admitted role as First Adulterer...
...The Washington jury that found him guilty of a misdemeanor, thereby limiting his sentence and enabling his subsequent revival, reflected that constituency...
...The attack plan, including its timing, was honed by an apolitical team and only then put before Clinton for his final approval...
...Nobody in this town believes the August 20 missile strikes were timed to draw attention away from his confessing three days earlier to having "misled people" about his sexcapades near the Oval Office...
...But the surprisingly precise questioning during his own deposition rattled Clinton...
...His best hope of escaping fullscale impeachment hearings rests on the polls that strongly indicate the public wants the scandal to go away...
...2) many news consumers could not care less about the President's lying, and (3) Clinton's political base in this city has virtually collapsed...
...Clinton acted after being told the targeted Afghan training base and Sudanese chemical plant were linked to the people who sought, with their own bombs, to haul down the flags that flew over the U.S...
...And tourists in the capital have been encountering fresh security measures in many public places...
...If Bill Clinton stages a comeback, it will be because the Mayor is his de facto political role model...
...journalists and political elites continue to theorize about their moral distance from the pulse of the country—about how ordinary folks view the President and what they think should be done...
...Although it can't happen as quickly as Dix demanded in the Civil War, it is quite possible that eventually Clinton will be "shot down...
...Assurances of that kind could wear thin if reporters are unable to independently corroborate them...
...It is difficult to watch Albright, who has never truly gotten over the pain of her 1982 divorce, defend a "friend" who told her that Lewinsky was a delusional groupie...
...embassies in Kenya and Tanzania...
...One of his closest advisers recently told me that Clinton thinks Starr knew of Tripp's dealings with Jones' legal team on the eve of his deposition...
...Others say it is simply a matter of the public crediting Clinton for presiding over a time of prosperity and peace, albeit a peace that necessitates erecting concrete barriers around national monuments...
...How shall the United States fight this "war" now that its Commander in Chief has not only diminished his credibility but, metaphorically speaking, stained the flag by lying about his trysts with a White House intern half his age...
...Lewinsky that was not appropriate," said the President after seven months of insisting he didn't have sex with her...
...Under the Constitution, the House Judiciary Committee's 35 members will serve as the President's initial jurors when they get Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr's report on Clinton's shenanigans...
...His poll numbers are likely to be inherited by Al Gore, who would faithfully follow his policies...
...I did have a relationship with Ms...
...strikes, to personally brief a phalanx of mid-level Congressional staffers who help oversee the U.S...
...As of this writing, the Administration has yet to make public any direct evidence to support its assertions that Osama bin Laden's Afghan-based terrorist outfit was behind the East African bombings...
...In the end, the fundamentalists can do just so much damage "to Jews and Crusaders," as bin Laden phrases it...
...Goldberg got Tripp to suggest to Lewinsky that she use a courier service run by Goldberg's brother to send love letters to Clinton...
...A more explicit Clinton speech could have pursued Barry's line about being set up...
...In this context it is worth observing that less than 20 minutes into ABC's analysis of Clinton's August 17 speech largely attacking Starr, his court-appointed nemesis, the network switched its viewers back to pre-season Monday Night Football...
...If Clinton survives in office, it was a decision worthy of a State Dinner invitation...
...As for Clinton himself, even as the designated family liar he would be warmly received by his Hollywood pals...
...Because Clinton's veracity has become such a hot issue, Albright and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen were obliged, the day after the U.S...
...Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright describes it as "the war of the future...
...Then Goldberg told a New's week reporter how to secure those billing records...
...The coarsening that the elites say has seized the Baby Boomers has also occurred here on the information front...
...If they both lied, he reasoned, they could steer safely through the mess...
...The key decisions came several days before the President's grand jury testimony, when he was still making up his mind what to tell and what to withhold from the hated prosecutors...
...The bitch set me up," said Washington's Mayor Marion Barry right after an FBI sting videotaped him smoking crack in a downtown hotel room...
...The intensive effort served to slacken coverage of dissenting voices and to shore up Clinton's eroded image...
...All this leaves us with three truths to ponder: (1) The Washington press corps is obsessed with the sex scandal...
...The following morning, January 17, Clinton walked into a perjury trap...
...Dix tells the sentry: "If any Man attempts to haul down the American Flag, Shoot him on the Spot...
...Nevertheless, she rightly says, ultimately there can be no such distinctions because "the credibility of public officials is crucial in a democracy...
...Those words surely approximate the order from President Bill Clinton to the Navy vessels that hurled their guided missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20...
...intelligence arm...
...The sex and lying knots can't be untied until Congress receives Starr's report and the Judiciary Committee does its thing—presumably by plastering The Monica Show on daytime TV The public mood could also turn sour on the national security side of the equation...
...None of these are viable options...
...The President is convinced, not without cause, that he and Monica Lewinsky were drawn into a sting operation by Linda Tripp and her onetime literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, aimed at gathering evidence of a sexual liaison...
...Cohen has said that "what the information was we had to operate on, what kind of intelligence we had, [and] the basis for the action," were made known...
...At this point, a shrink might be better suited than a scribe to analyze why Clinton has so far failed to come clean...
...Meanwhile, the D.C...
...This will require personal sacrifice and may even require his resignation, but it would fulfill the President's most important oath—to preserve and protect our nation," Nunn concludes...
...That same evening, she informed Jones' lawyers of the results of the day's wire job...
...In the same day's Post, former Senator Sam Nunn regrets that his fellow Southern Democrat has yet to fully own up to his sins...
...Andrew J. Glass, a longtime New Leader contributor, is senior correspondent and a columnist for Cox Newspapers...
...Naturally, the people closest to the President, such as my informant, will not acknowledge the deep peril he faces— any more than they would admit that they knew he had lied when the scandal broke in January...
...The terrorists saw the carnage in East Africa as yet another strike in their Jihad against the United States...
...Whether or not Clinton serves out what remains of his lie-shattered term, in truth little can be done to halt the terrorist threat against Americans at home and abroad...
...Washington-USA CLINTON FIGHTING TWO WARS By Andrew J. Glass Washington In an 1862 Thomas Nast cartoon with the White House and the Capitol looming in the background, Major General John Dix gives an order to a bearded sentry that illustrates—in several ways—the nation's present predicament...
...When President John F. Kennedy blocked Soviet ships from steaming to Cuba, aerial photographs of the errant nuclear sites, obtained at some risk to U.S...
...He knew Lewinsky's name had been placed on Jones' potential witness list, but he also knew Lewinsky had filed a false affidavit denying their affair and therefore could refuse to be deposed...
...The Pentagon brass would have spurned any such Hollywood-style caper...
...Ever since the U.S...
...Starr, who could be disbarred for any such conduct, dismisses the notion...
...Our experience with Presidential lying gives little reason to be sanguine about its being limited to private matters...
...As a result, we in the public have to be wary of all official lies, however innocent they seem to Presidents or others telling them...
...But there is a parallel here with others who have seen themselves as victims...
Vol. 81 • August 1998 • No. 9
