COMMENT
Comment How Low Can He Go? Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? —William Wordsworth In the last several weeks, Clinton has sunk to new depths in his...
...You may have seen or read about Bill Clinton's new advertising spots for his reelection campaign...
...Play dead...
...The array of anti-abortion bills now before Congress, many of them drafted by the Christian Coalition, will diminish access to birth control and family-planning information as well as abortion...
...The U.S...
...The strategy is obvious: "to distract people from thinking about the women and the fact that the real issue in the debate is who should decide," says Kate Michelman of the National Abortion and Reproduction Rights Action League...
...In some of the best I investigative journalism in many a year, The Sun has exposed another instance of grotesque human-rights violations committed by our government...
...One measure would gut Title X of the Public Health Service Act, which provides family-planning services to the poor...
...And the CIA under the Reagan Administration set up, equipped, and trained a notorious death squad...
...First France violated the spirit of that treaty by quickly announcing that it would conduct eight nuclear tests in the next year before signing any such ban...
...Morris is this year's David Gergen...
...And so may you, if you display one of the posters or T-shirts he designed as a protest against the Persian Gulf War...
...pointed out in the June issue of The Progressive, there is a false meritocracy in America...
...In June the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that would enable Congress and the states to prohibit "physical desecration" of the American flag...
...Some Democrats have opposed this trampling on the First Amendment, but in the most timid way...
...Clinton's new commercials all crow about his death-penalty stance: "Expand the death penalty...
...Will there be enough doctors who know how to do the procedure...
...that's why they've lined up behind the test ban...
...This was not the action of some rogue CIA agent...
...Indeed, The Baltimore Sun reports that the CIA was so enamored of the Argentine torturers that it paid them to go to Honduras to train the new kids on the torture block...
...indeed, one proposal would allow testing for another decade...
...And since our government has insisted all along on the right to blow up the world, it needs to be sure that the gadgets of destruction will do the job...
...Negative Action Affirmative action is under fire, and if it is a casualty, the greater casualty will be justice in America...
...So willing was he to demonstrate the character of this new species that he took a day off from the campaign trail to go home to Arkansas for the execution of a mentally retarded African-American man...
...Flag for Sunset The Art Director at The Progressive, Patrick Flynn, may soon be a criminal...
...But the death penalty does not protect America...
...It weighs every issue on the popularity scale...
...That referendum tossed out all state and local laws that protected lesbians and gays from being discriminated against in employment, housing, or public accommodations...
...He has all but changed parties...
...Abortion Under Fire The Republicans are waging an all-out assault on women's reproductive rights...
...Since the November elections, the Republicans in Congress, along with major business groups, have gone after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and especially its plans to establish standards that would reduce repetitive-stress injuries...
...there's no scale in the White House that measures for principle...
...Instead of standing up for what was right, the Clinton Administration was interested only in avoiding controversy...
...The solicitor general had circulated a memo explaining why the Justice Department should file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court that would underscore the importance of anti-discrimination protection for gays and lesbians...
...Honduran Hell I ats off to The Baltimore Sun...
...The Christian Coalition is winning its anti-choice crusade by fighting a dozen different battles against women's reproductive rights...
...This is a repetitive-stress disorder all its own...
...policy...
...First there was the retreat on gays in the military...
...rather, they are debating the conditions under which women will be allowed to exercise that right...
...When will we go through our own period of self-examination...
...Given Clinton's lip-service to gay and lesbian rights, you might have expected his Administration to have taken up this cause...
...The Supreme Court recently ruled that most federal affirmative-action programs are unconstitutional unless they are narrowly tailored to accomplish a compelling government need...
...What 'I'm not sure that ten years ago, or even a year ago, social conservatives would have had enough clout within the party to win it...
...William Wordsworth In the last several weeks, Clinton has sunk to new depths in his crass efforts to seek reelection...
...Stay...
...But make no mistake—the anti-choice minority is determined to roll back abortion by whatever means it can find...
...Here's what The Baltimore Sun found: "Hundreds of Honduran citizens were kidnapped, tortured, and killed in the 1980s by a secret army unit trained and supported by the CIA...
...It does not make a single citizen safer...
...Fetch...
...But as the elections approach, he's getting worse...
...Many of his Republican-style poUcies are in keeping with the image he's been pursuing for some time—from curtailing welfare and affirmative action to grandstanding on crime and counterterrorism...
...As the series in The Baltimore Sun demonstrates, we have our own accounting to do...
...Most of us learned some time ago that if you don't like the President's position on a particular issue, you simply need to wait a few weeks.' —David Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin The capitulation on the balanced budget was perhaps Clinton's lowest move yet...
...But then the White House politicos put the kibosh on it...
...True to his word, Clinton did push through a crime bill last year that extended the federal death penalty to more than sixty new offenses, and he recently went along with severely restricting the rights of death-row inmates to appeal their sentences...
...instead, he is backing off and caving in all over the place...
...Too costly, they said...
...It will allow the states themselves to define exactly what is "desecration," and what is "the flag...
...It's so controversial, they say, that medical schools should not provide adequate training to gynecologists...
...In mid-June, the Clinton Administration wimped out again, and withdrew OSHA's plans to regulate repetitive-stress injuries...
...Now we do.' —Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, on Henry Foster's defeat Comment *We are not amending the Bill of Rights, we are not limiting free speech...
...Sometimes, the hypocrisy is almost too much to take...
...Never mind that Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, food stamps, school lunches—indeed, the panoply of social programs designed to help the poor in this country—will now be hacked to bits...
...The whole Clinton Administration is wearing rubber gloves on the issue of gay and lesbian rights...
...Once the gateway to college slams shut, so do the prospects for social advancement...
...Clinton wrote a memo in January that said the comprehensive test-ban treaty "must not prohibit activities required to maintain the safety and reliability of our nuclear stockpile...
...The Pentagon wants to make sure that our nuclear arsenal of 7,000 weapons is "safe and reliable"—as if any nuclear weapon were safe and reliable...
...It does not deter crime...
...In mid-June, the Justice Department, under intense pressure from the White House, decided not to join in a challenge to a truly reactionary 1992 Colorado referendum...
...Ted Kennedy, the toothless lion of the liberals, followed suit...
...Peace activists understand this...
...The head of OSHA, Joseph Dear, said the political pressure was just too much...
...Too bad...
...government commits atrocities that might impel citizens, and not just imbecilic ones, to protest by using the symbol of this country...
...It's a bad time to be a woman seeking reproductive health care—particularly if you are young or poor...
...Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, were killed and buried in unmarked graves...
...In May, the Administration went to great lengths to persuade the non-nuclear nations of the world to extend the nuclear non-proliferation treaty...
...Supreme Court...
...Some of the army officers who conducted the tortures have gone public and have even appeared on 60 Minutes explaining how they used to inflict horrors on prisoners and how they would throw them out of airplanes to their deaths when they were through with them...
...We must not return to the bad old days when women seeking abortions were divided into the "deserving" and the "undeserving"—petitioning doctors and judges for mercy, or forced to find sympathetic psychiatrists willing to label them mentally unstable enough to need an abortion...
...They didn't think it would look good for Clinton to be openly supporting the cause of gays and lesbians...
...But as hideous as it is, the Honduras case is no aberration...
...Bill Clinton used to talk a good game on gay and lesbian rights, but when push comes to shove, he runs for it...
...He has abandoned any pretense of presenting an alternative to the Republican onslaught...
...Flynn depicted a flag with blood dripping red off the stripes, and the following words superimposed on each stripe: Sit...
...And when will the guilty parties finally be brought to justice...
...It has supplied weapons and training to the most brutal militaries around the world, including Turkey and Indonesia...
...The flag-desecration amendment is a clear violation of our freedom of speech...
...And so, in all-too-typical fashion, the Clinton Administration turned tail and ran...
...No one acknowledges that the U.S...
...Robert Scott of Virginia said only an imbecile would burn the flag, and we don't need to amend the Constitution to protect against imbeciles...
...And now the Clinton Administration, under pressure from the Pentagon, is thinking about doing its own nuclear tests...
...And, in fact, the Justice Department was all set to go to bat on this one...
...Another bill would rescind Medicaid funding for abortion even in cases of rape and incest...
...The intelligence unit, known as Battalion 316, used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations...
...Now more than ever we must stand up for the right of all women to what the Christian right derisively calls "abortion on demand" (as if abortion on polite request or plaintive supplication were somehow more acceptable...
...Disparities in elementary and secondary school dramatically tilt the field, making it much harder for African-American kids to get into colleges...
...We do not have equality of opportunity in this country, institutional and individual discrimination persist, and without a systematic effort to overcome it, our society will only become more unequal, and the racial chasm will only gape more starkly...
...The ads reveal Clinton once again as the demagogue of capital punishment...
...But the "safe and reliable" language has been the Pentagon line for the past forty-seven years as a way to justify the arms race...
...No such luck...
...And the non-nuclear nations understand this...
...Nicholas Lemann elaborated on this point in a recent New York Times Magazine article...
...We haven't seen an epidemic of flag burning...
...Now Republicans and their business friends have got their way...
...And now the Pentagon not only wants to renew testing, it wants to carve a loophole in the test-ban treaty that would make it comprehensive no longer...
...Heel...
...Clinton doesn't feel comfortable in the same party as Maxine Waters and Dick Gephardt anyway, one unnamed White House adviser said...
...The reason is simple: if they can't test the weapons, they can't be sure that they'd work...
...This is an almost impossible standard to meet, and in practice it will surely mean the abandonment of efforts to counter discrimination...
...Will federal funding be available...
...No one wants to touch it...
...military base overseas...
...At least one CIA official was frequently present at the torture chambers...
...The time was the early 1980s...
...Prodded by Robert Dornan, Republican of California, the House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would make it illegal for an American service-woman to get an abortion on a U.S...
...Whenever the Republicans or the big companies put the heat on, the Clinton Administration collapses...
...The Colorado supreme court ruled the referendum unconstitutional, but the state of Colorado has appealed to the U.S...
...In exchange for not acquiring nuclear weapons, these countries were assured that we and the other members of the nuclear club would move quickly toward a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing...
...It's a right we're going to have to fight like hell to preserve...
...This was U.S...
...Oh, it does one other thing...
...Members of Congress are not arguing about whether women have a fundamental right to control their own bodies...
...The embarrassment of the Secret Service agents wearing rubber gloves when lesbian and gay lawmakers visited the White House was the least of it...
...Then there was his deafening silence on AIDS...
...When will the torturers in our midst come forward to take responsiblity for their crimes...
...And it has worked right alongside the torturers in Chile and Argentina...
...If you're working in a factory or in an office, and you're suffering from repetitive-stress injuries right now, don't look to the Clinton Administration for any help...
...But it's not Morris who's betraying Democratic liberals and lurching the White House riahtward...
...All it does is bloody our hands and coarsen our souls...
...CIA and State Department officials knew all about it, approved of it, and then lied to Congress about it...
...First it was Henry Foster, President Clinton's nominee for Surgeon General—defeated by Republican maneuvering because, in the course of practicing obstetrics and gynecology, he performed legal abortions...
...After spending weeks denouncing the Republican balanced-budget plan as foolish and destructive, Clinton pulled a U-turn and announced his own...
...Women's reproductive health care is too "controversial" for the nation's top doctor, according to the Republicans...
...Lemann cited a stark statistic: one social scientist calculated that had it not been for affirmative action, the number of blacks admitted to law school in one year in the 1970s would have dropped from 1,539 to 285...
...too much government, they said...
...We are limiting offensive conduct, and legislative bodies do that every day.' —Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia, proponent of the flag amendment about cases of rape and incest...
...Women have a fundamental right to choose, for themselves, whether to have an abortion...
...Roll over...
...Now the Republicans are challenging the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, saying that it cannot require medical students who specialize in obstetrics and gynecology to learn abortion procedures...
...Ironically, Argentina has recently been going through a period of self-examination...
...It is part of a pattern of U.S...
...It's a disorder that's so advanced there seems to be no treating it now...
...But the Pentagon and the Clinton Administration have never been comfortable with the idea of disarmament...
...Morris has been a Republican political consultant for many years, but he also served as a Clinton gubernatorial campaign strategist in Arkansas...
...That's how we'll protect America...
...he just hasn't announced it yet...
...Back in his 1992 campaign, Clinton boasted of being a "New Democrat" who was in favor of capital punishment...
...It is drawn so loosely that it could squash all varieties of political speech...
...Washington is all abuzz about a new White House adviser, Richard Morris, who appears to be wielding enormous power...
...Yet another would bring back the gag rule, forbidding doctors at federally funded clinics from mentioning abortion to their patients...
...It gives any opportunistic politician an issue to run on...
...Since OSHA is an executive-branch agency, Clinton could have unilaterally issued the standard, but no, that would have taken guts—a commodity in scarce supply in the Clinton Administration...
...Clinton's got a sweet tooth for Republican fixers...
...It elevates the symbol of freedom over the substance of freedom, and it establishes a state religion—patriotism—that we all must worship, under penalty of law...
...Some of his aides are quite brazen about his dislike of the Democrats...
...too burdensome on business, they said...
...Initially proposed to ban flag burning, which the Supreme Court has rightly ruled as protected speech, the House bill is now much broader...
...So workers are suffering...
...The basic reason for affirmative action is as clear today as ever...
...Never mind that his chief economic adviser, Laura Tyson, says Clinton's balanced budget, like the Republicans', might bring on a recession...
...government set up death squads not just in Honduras, but in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Haiti...
...The place was Honduras...
...Protecting millions of workers with these sometimes crippling injuries is no longer a priority...
...As Adolph Reed Jr...
...And the House is considering a measure that would criminalize a rare form of late-term abortion, used only when the fetus will not survive after birth...
...Now there's another deafening silence on the basic question of whether gays and lesbians have equal protection under the law...
...Here come the handcuffs, and the muzzles...
...involvement in the most unspeakable horrors around the globe...
...It's his boss...
...That's why we've been seeking a comprehensive test ban since the days of Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling...
...Kill...
...Never mind is the slogan of the Clinton reelection campaign...
Vol. 59 • August 1995 • No. 8
