Wake Up!
Wake Up! Washington's resistance to the poisons of Clin-tonism has dramatically deteriorated since the Paula Jones lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Susan Webber Wright on April 1. For instance....
...The scene of the crime—what Salon dramatically calls "headquarters for a sophisticated, well-financed operation aimed at discrediting the president of the United States"—is actually Dozhi-er's Bait Shop and Rainbow Landing...
...Isaacson did manage, timidly and elliptically, to question Clinton about something real...
...He will not obey the rules...
...Linda Tripp's tapes are a mirage...
...Parker Dozhier sells worms for a living...
...For the longest time, Hillary Clinton's cynically fabulist claims about a "vast, right-wing conspiracy" to destroy her husband were just that: cynically fabulist claims, graveyard-whistle murmurings restricted to the most loopily partisan of Clinton sycophants...
...The president's perjury about all this, and the organized effort of his senior aides to conceal it from view—that, too, is a mirage...
...Between 1994 and 1996, Hale occasionally visited Dozhier's cabin in Hot Springs, Arkansas...
...Monica Lewinsky's talking points for Linda Tripp on how to file a false affidavit are a mirage...
...And the only reason we're now talking about this thinly plotted charge at all is that one of Salon's reporters, Murray Waas, phoned up former senator David Pryor, current chairman of Clinton's legal-defense fund, to tip him off about it...
...And she has since acknowledged that she did not see Dozhi-er give Hale any money...
...Last month, an on-line publication called Salon reported that two people, a woman named Caryn Mann and her 17-year-old son, Josh Rand, claim to have seen Dozhier hand Hale up to $200,000 in cash...
...Hillary Clinton's billing records and cattle-futures windfall are a mirage...
...The construction of this impossibly large and complicated mirage is a deliberate plot...
...The only alternative is for more people in Washington—lots more people in Washington—to snap themselves awake from the hypnotic spell of Bill Clinton's shame-lessness and do what Dick Armey briefly did last week...
...But Armey's remarks were true, as true as any could be...
...President, sir...
...Okay...
...The FBI-files fiasco is a mirage...
...I don't know, the president responded, incredibly enough: "I think you have to ask my counsel's office, because the first time I learn about a lot of these legal arguments is when I see them in the paper...
...But this kookiness is no longer merely desperate, gassy spin...
...Nobody in Washington is quite sure what to do about this...
...This is the general White House line: Every single piece of the incontrovertible evidence that the president of the United States is a lawless, lecherous liar—every last scrap—is a mirage...
...Questioned a few days later about Clinton's assertion of executive privilege by ABC's Cokie Roberts, Begala managed to maintain straightfaced that it may not have happened: "None of us in this room really know whether it has been asserted or what it has been asserted over...
...The public is inattentive to detail and reluctant to believe the worst about its leaders...
...Except that there is no bottom...
...Okay...
...The law is weak and manipulable...
...Midway through this dopey, softball conversation ("Is there a part of you that regrets not being able to go to court to try to prove your version of events...
...The teenage son of a worm merchant's oddball ex-girlfriend tells a tall tale to a credulous, freelance conspiracy theorist...
...Yes, we have...
...Monica Lewinsky is a mirage...
...And Dozhier was receiving $1,000 a month from the Spectator—Scaife money, originally—for clipping local newspapers and providing other legwork services in support of the magazine's Clinton coverage...
...What a relief...
...One measure of Washington's paralysis before all this systemic chicanery is the reaction to something Rep...
...Flying home from Africa on Air Force One the next day, President Clinton sat down for a little post-Paula victory chat with Walter Isaacson of Time magazine, lately the most embarrassingly White House-friendly of newsweeklies...
...The Travel Office fiasco is a mirage...
...Speak the truth, loudly and in a hurry...
...Washington politics, in other words, on a daily basis, must be a largely self-refereed game...
...It is a hypothetical matter right now...
...Dozhier and Hale and the Spectator all vigorously deny it...
...Gennifer Flowers is a mirage...
...Um, "How can that be," Mr...
...Armey's remarks were treated as a gaffe...
...And Pryor then somehow managed to intercede with the FBI, which somehow allowed itself to interview Mann and Rand as "witnesses...
...Last week, the possible existence of a vast, right-wing anti-Clinton conspiracy was for the first time given the legitimacy of official government attention...
...The "whole thing," as James Carville is routinely invited to bellow on the network talk shows, is a "put-up job by the right wing," which has raised a "massive, massive amount of money" so that it might "pay people to tell lies about the president...
...David Hale has been friends for 30 years with a man named Parker Dozhier...
...And Caryn Mann is his disgruntled ex-girlfriend, an astrologist who has elsewhere claimed to have telepathically directed U.S...
...And establishment Washington treated the murmurings with amused derision...
...Got it...
...Paula Jones is a mirage...
...What's the deal with your executive-privilege claim, Walter Isaacson wondered...
...When it becomes undeniable that you have disgraced yourself, you are supposed to accept your humiliation and leave the scene...
...And okay, too, it seems, for nonsense from Paul Begala, special assistant to the president for peccadillo protection...
...Kathleen Willey is a mirage...
...He is, literally, shameless...
...But Mr...
...We like to think that law and public opinion work to restrain our politicians from misdeeds and dishonesty...
...Have we left anything out...
...Starr's credibility, alas, has been unfairly but effectively besmirched by the White House attack team...
...And after Mann broke up with Dozhier, she went to work for the private-detective firm that earlier this year tailed a Little Rock woman falsely rumored to be having an affair with Ken Starr...
...Yes, it turns out the president falsely denied having sex with her...
...And what is the worst of it...
...But it also turns out the sex was consensual...
...So for the moment people have decided not to do much of anything at all...
...The last few years have proved something very different—and unpleasant...
...The felony Whitewater convictions of Jim Guy Tucker and Jim and Susan McDougal are a mirage...
...only her son did...
...Monica Lewinsky's gifts from the president, and job offers from his friends, are a mirage...
...They have decided to wait and see...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...That seems a reasonable law-enforcement effort...
...He cannot pull this off by himself...
...The Office of the Independent Counsel has no reason to believe it...
...troop movements during the Persian Gulf War...
...But Bill Clinton's obstruction of justice...
...This is what the Department of Justice wants to get to the bottom of...
...Dick Armey said early last week...
...The president has made a momentous, deviously indefensible decision to shield White House aides Bruce Lindsey and Sidney Blumenthal from grand-jury questions about their knowledge of the Monica Lewinsky cover-up...
...Maybe a fat report from Kenneth Starr to the House Judiciary Committee will finally do the trick...
...The Department of Justice, which by tradition is supposed to be the least loopy and least partisan of federal agencies, formally initiated an investigation into charges that Kenneth Starr's chief Whitewater witness, former Little Rock municipal judge David Hale, was paid for his testimony by conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife— with money funneled through the offices of the conservative American Spectator magazine...
...Executive privilege is a mirage...
...Armey told a group of Dallas-area students that Bill Clinton is a "shameless person" whose "basic credo in life is, 'I will do whatever I can get away with.'" Armey also allowed that if he were Bill Clinton, living under the same weight of damning evidence, he would resign from the White House...
...Who repeats it to a member of the Clinton mafia...
...This is what Bill Clinton will never do...
...This is what Richard Nixon did, before he could be indicted or impeached...
...And the payments she says Dozhier made to Hale did not begin until after Hale had told his story about Whitewater to the FBI and the national media—and before Starr was ever appointed independent counsel...
...The worst of it is that establishment Washington has greeted the astounding fact of this investigation with nary a word of complaint, much less derisive laughter...
...Clinton: "I'm just not going to talk about that...
...Time to wrap that thing up...
...Whose field report induces the Department of Justice to prostitute itself to the interests of the president's public-relations campaign...
...Former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen is not a mirage, exactly...
...Hale was cooperating with the independent counsel's Whitewater investigation at the time...
...Silently...
...You are supposed to call your own fouls...
...Who tells it to the FBI...
...Indeed, you can scour the nation's major dailies and not find the slightest hint that there is anything out of the ordinary here—either about the allegation itself, or about the process by which Janet Reno's "people's law firm" has come to take it seriously...
Vol. 3 • April 1998 • No. 31
