Ethics and the Clintonites

...Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is remarkably sound political advice, as is its negative corollary: “Turnabout is fair play...

...Consider...

...It was as though the Democrats and their friends in the media forgot that their ideological opponents were people, like them, with families and children, strengths and failings...

...Recall the White House of 1993: Secret Service agents were leaking stories about domestic discord between the president and the first lady...

...Liberals want to help...

...This belief defines them, just as the conviction that government is (as Ronald Reagan put it) “part of the problem, not part of the solution” is the defining conviction of contemporary conservatism...

...Together, they proclaimed a pious goal: to purify the American presidency from ethical taint...

...Park Police from examining Vincent Foster’s office because who knows what kind of information might leak out damaging to the president and first lady, who needed to protect themselves in order to do good for people...

...the suppression of women and blacks (which is why Ted Kennedy made the grotesque claim that Bork wanted to restore segregation and back-alley abortions...

...After all, they had been materially and substantively involved in the transformation...

...But as with many displays of piety, the purification effort was really a form of institutional warfare...

...The gays-in-the-military flap...

...Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernard Nussbaum met as lawyers on the Democratic side of the congressional committee investigating Watergate...

...And, as Noemie Emery often points out in these pages, Democrats and liberals tend to excuse behavior they find repugnant in Republicans when Democratic and liberal politicians indulge in it...

...I ask these questions not because this behavior seems especially shocking, but because it seems so feckless and stupid...

...And the more perfervid among them imagined even worse motivations: Bloodthirsty warmongering (which explained the increase in the defense budget and support for the contras...

...Hillary, we now know, was not averse to being compared to Joan of Arc...

...Fully a quarter of presidential appointees in the 19th century were denied confirmation by Congress...

...And so they experienced a failure of vision, a failure of perspective, that led to lapses during the first year of the Clinton White House that were more ethically compromising than nearly all the instances of Republican misbehavior during the Reagan and Bush years...

...They are true believers in the tautology that defines what is left of the Left: Liberalism is good because liberals are good, and whatever must be done to defend liberalism and liberals is therefore both justified and good...

...Liberals looked at the Reagan White House staff and saw hundreds of people looking to cash in on what they believed to be a public trust, and they were sickened...

...The answer was obvious to Democrats and liberals, who spent the 1980s and early 1990s sharpening the definition of “ethical behavior” to such a fine point that it was no longer enough for someone to be disqualified from public service for engaging in a “conflict of interest...

...For in some elemental sense, the Democrats and Clintonites and liberals did not believe these rules applied to them...

...The sense of siege must have been strong, as strong as the sense of mission the Clintons and their loyal underlings shared...

...when you have seen what it means to be part of a controversy that might turn into a scandal, you want no part of it...

...Liberals believe conservatives are their moral inferiors, ruled by crude passions, and appealing to the basest instincts of voters...

...And the Clinton White House and executive branch were literally populated by veterans of Washington in the 1980s, by Democrats who rejoiced when special prosecutors indicted executive-branch officials...

...And, always, the possibility that Whitewater might turn into a serious crisis...

...White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum had to block the U.S...

...Liberals believe conservatives are their moral inferiors, ruled by crude passions and only worth taking seriously because conservatives are able sometimes to appeal successfully to the basest instincts in the American electorate...

...They are bad...

...For in the 12 years prior to Bill Clinton’s victory, Washington had undergone a transformation forced upon it by a disgruntled Congress and the self-appointed Diogeneses of our public and political morality—columnists, editorial page editors, the public interest groups, and what was left of the old do-gooding American Establishment...

...And those who suffered as a result of it were, almost without exception officials of the executive branch of the U.S...

...Did the Clintonites believe that Republicans, who had been subjected to their withering scorn and legislative heavy hand for more than a decade, would simply sit idly by and allow them to act with impunity...

...This was all politically useful, of course...

...The answer: Only bad things, like personal aggrandizement, self-enrichment, power-hunger...

...This was strange on the face of it: After all, in only one Republican scandal of the 1980s—the HUD scandal—was anyone accused of actually stealing money from government coffers...

...Did they think that people who were genuinely horrified by the besmirchment of Robert Bork, who believed that Iran-contra figures had been subjected to vicious political persecution, who saw friends and family (like my own) dragged through personal and financial hell for doing what they believed was right, would somehow vanish when the besmirchers and persecutors took over...

...In his wonderful Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson explains how a congressional committee headed by Benjamin Wade to look into procurement violations during the Civil War ran amok, the precursor to Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh...

...John Adams, our second president, tried to use the Alien and Sedition Acts to silence his opponents...

...even a military coup (which explains Bill Moyers’s vicious conceit that a “secret government” was operating in the basement under Reagan’s Oval Office...

...And this explains the conduct of the Clintonites in 1993 and after...

...Clinton-Bashing —Gala— Ethics and the Clintonites by John Podhoretz HOW COULD THEY...

...By the time the Bush administration took office in 1989, executive-branch officials had learned that any meeting they attended could, years later, be the subject of a congressional inquiry or testimony before a grand jury...

...What explains this behavior during the first year of the Clinton presidency...

...Nor was it enough for someone to commit a crime to be considered a criminal...

...But the temptation to deny someone with whom you disagree his essential humanity is deep-rooted...

...They are creatures of conviction, a conviction most tellingly summed up in the title of James Carville’s bestselling book: We’re Right, They’re Wrong...

...Zoe Baird and Nannygate...

...If Republicans and conservatives don’t want to use government to help people, what could possibly be motivating them...

...So, when the Clintonites took over in 1993, they had every reason to know they were expected to conduct themselves as the modern equivalent of Caesar’s wife...

...at the announcement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Bill expressed deep outrage when ABC’s Brit Hume dared ask him about the inconstancy of his opinions...

...Their ability to use government as a means of salvation was, they believed, endangered by the powerful conservative appeal to the selfish and small-hearted impulses of ordinary Americans...

...when hapless bureaucrats like Rita Lavelle went to jail for telling Congress lies in an effort to make her bosses look better...

...That temptation is nothing new in American politics, as people were always quick to remind Republicans and conservatives who complained of such things in the 1980s...

...Stories were spreading about how drug use by the incoming White House staff was making security clearances difficult...

...But that is no way to run a political system, particularly one in which the balance of power shifts back and forth between two huge parties...

...Democrats and liberals believe in the affirmative use of government...

...when the new take-no-prisoners tactic of character assassination that came to be known as Borking emerged...

...Hillary Clinton fired a White House usher for having a telephone conversation about computers with Barbara Bush...

...How could senior White House staffers have tried to force a criminal investigation of seven hapless civil servants after their firing from the travel office...

...What the Democrats seemingly failed to realize is that the draconian ethics regime they created to hamstring the executive branch would someday govern them...

...But Democrats and liberals could only wonder: If Republicans and conservatives hate government so much, why were they seeking political power...

...And it was a form of ideological warfare as well, as liberals and leftists disgusted by conservative policy-making sought not only to discredit the policies but to send the people who made the policies to jail...

...And what other reason could Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca have had to search through Republican FBI files other than to gather some kind of information whose primary use would be to protect the Clintonite ability to do good for people...

...Could such people be trusted to do what was right, proper, or just...

...Or was America endangering itself by allowing Republicans to run free throughout the executive branch...

...in a room with a female aide present was enough for an entire political party to revile him as a national disgrace...

...All in all, a bloody transformation, one that left careers in ruins, destroyed reputations, and forced people innocent of any but the most technical wrongdoing to plead guilty to crimes simply to spare their families from financial calamity...

...Untrue, of course—the Nixonites had done nothing its predecessors had not done, but the “it didn’t start with Watergate” argument isn’t very strong...

...Vincent Foster’s suicide...

...It is hypocrisy, but it is hypocrisy born of conviction...

...the mere fact that Clarence Thomas was alleged (probably falsely) to have spoken the words “Who put a pubic hair in my coke...

...How could the White House counsel have blocked a legitimate police inquest into the contents of the office of a government official who had committed suicide...

...How could mid-level Clinton White House officials have decided to search through the confidential FBI files of Republicans...

...Roger Altman, the deputy treasury secretary, had to give the White House information on the investigation into Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan because the White House needed to protect itself against vicious partisan assaults so that the Clintonites could do good for people...

...Conservatives don’t want to help...

...They are good...

...The truth is that they never gave a moment’s thought to this possibility, for the very reason they brought the ethics regime into existence in the first place...

...But what is going on here is not simply hypocrisy...

...It was self-preservation, pure and simple...

...The liberal desire to help was at risk from an unscrupulous and energetic enemy...

...They were under siege, and they had to protect themselves...

...No, merely “the appearance of a conflict of interest” came to be considered acceptable grounds for banishment, even though the very idea is an oxymoron— after all, if there is only the appearance of a conflict of interest, then there is no conflict of interest...

...It was never entirely clear either to them or to us where exactly they wanted to take America in the first two years of the administration, but they did want to take us somewhere, and the journey was proving extraordinarily difficult...

...In some elemental sense, the Democrats and Clintonites and liberals did not believe the rules applied to them...

...The White House tried to criminalize the travel-office firings precisely to avoid the kind of partisan political trouble they found themselves in later...

...Congress, in the hands of the Democratic party, was weakening the power of a Republicanrun White House without ever having to admit such a partisan assault was taking place...

...Al Gore intoned sanctimoniously on White House misbehavior from the floor of the House and the well of the Senate...

...How could a senior Treasury Department official have told the White House about a confidential inquiry into the bankrupt savings and loan the Clintons had been involved in...

...And quite a few of these people were publicly disgraced as though they were guilty of bank robbery or murder...

...For liberals, that scandal has assumed the sanctity of a political creation myth: Republicans as purveyors of executive-branch evil unparalleled in the annals of American politics...

...Thus, the Clintonites are not merely Arkansas sleazes and political hacks looking to cover up their petty crimes...

...government...

...Bush officials stopped taking notes, stopped sending e-mail, and felt no compunction about walking out of a room when something was going on they didn’t like the looks of...

...There was a mercilessness to these assaults...

...George Stephanopoulos was the chief aide to House Majority Leader Gephardt during the passage of draconian legislation that strengthened and extended the ethics stranglehold over White House officials...