THE CLINTON LEGACY
EMERY, NOEMIE
THE CLINTON LEGACY Morality Turned Upside Down By Noemie Emery Linda Tripp, says Margaret Carlson, when she pressed the "on" button of her little tape recorder, "lost membership in the family of...
...There is the Bible, with its boring old Ten Commandments, where certain acts are simple no-no's...
...So sex becomes the one behavior one must never, ever judge...
...It's an inversion we have seen before...
...Surrounding Linda Tripp's act were many betrayals, of which hers must appear the most innocent...
...As real crimes are downgraded to background street noise, fascinating new crimes, like date rape, hate speech, and insensitivity, are invented and pushed up in their place...
...In the strange p.c...
...In fact, the whole sorry train of betrayals was set in motion by one person, Bill Clinton, president of the United States, who betrayed his wife, his employees, and his office repeatedly...
...Like Tripp, Lewinsky is betrayed and betrayer, used by the president as she tried to use Tripp...
...How out of step can you be...
...Courage...
...Before they knew him, Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky were unlikely candidates for legal entanglements...
...From all of this, the true dimensions of the Clinton Project—the Clinton legacy, one might venture to call it—have begun to emerge...
...He has his vestals (Carlson and Clift) eager to tend him...
...Helpless in the face of the explosion of real criminality, . . . we satisfy our crime-fighting needs with a crusade against date rape," says Krauthammer...
...The office of Republican congressman Tom Coburn, a physician, cites data showing that 12 million Americans, two-thirds of them under 25, acquire new STD infections every year: That's 12 times as many as start smoking...
...But what to fight when the "health-care crisis" failed and all the other good stuff is taken...
...Somewhere in his meandering through history— Truman today, Reagan tomorrow...
...Traditionally, moral codes have sought to discipline and regulate—to moralize— sexual conduct, not out of stuffiness, but because unregulated sex can cause havoc...
...So, too, defenders of the moral swamp that is the Clinton administration deal with its obstruction of justice over sex and fund-raising scandals by defining these down, either as com-monplace—"Everyone does it"—or as too trivial to mention—"So what...
...And for what crime...
...Thus Clinton proclaims he will carefully monitor the ads taken out by tobacco companies, because parents "have the right to know" who is luring their children into smoking...
...His surgeon general didn't even think parents had a right to know when schools gave young teenagers condoms...
...4. The most powerful man in the world sent his flacks on missions to destroy the reputations of several women, whose only crime was that he had approached them...
...AIDS kills younger people and always is fatal...
...Like most epidemics, this one feeds on ignorance: Many people don't know that these dangers exist...
...While the administration works itself up to near hysteria over the harm done to young people by secondhand smoke, an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) goes unremarked...
...In the Clinton code, yes...
...Buck-passing...
...Smoking and fat tend to kill over time, but they kill older people, and many people survive them...
...Cowardice...
...By most standards, this is not wholly lovely, but as grounds for damnation, it appears rather thin...
...terms of their culture, the Clintons appear to be "differently moraled"—that is, they have morals, even quite strong ones, but ones of which no church or state has ever heard...
...But that offense did not occur in a vacuum...
...A walking source of moral contagion, he is not only corrupt in himself, but the source of corruption in others...
...Thanks to Linda Tripp and her tapes, this is no longer possible: Bill stands exposed as a lech and a liar, his wife as a very old kind of feminine victim, and their whole model life as a sham...
...As his legacy is, too...
...Her White House may have high rollers in the Lincoln Bedroom and sex in the pantry, but you can't say it isn't smoke-free...
...Is drawing smoke through your lungs, which one day may hurt you, morally wrong, while ripping a life from a womb and ending it isn't...
...Thus, of course, by Clintonian standards, smoking and taping become the all-important sins...
...The Clintons have done something different: Their compass is not lost, just re-set with north and south reversed...
...Meanwhile, when called upon to account for their own actions, they continue to stonewall, obstruct, dissimulate, and to trash and use other people...
...Dissimulation...
...But this is a prophet who should be without honor, for his is a devilish work...
...Because of the tapes, the feminist groups have been forced to surrender their pretense of caring for women, driven to explain that (a) assault isn't assault when a liberal does it or (b) any woman should be thrilled to be harassed or assaulted by such a strong supporter of abortion rights...
...In the 1970s, Jeb Stuart Magruder, a figure out of our last major debacle, admitted he had "lost [his] moral compass" in the course of the Watergate scandal...
...The question for the rest of us is whether we will let him seduce us into accepting his transvalued morality as ours...
...Tripp was also afraid of Clinton's lawyers and fixers and the dirt they had dumped on these women and others...
...Back then, faced with obvious social dysfunction— violent crime, aggressive panhandlers, deranged people sleeping in the streets and subways—some people coped by calling the situation "normal" instead of aberrant and dangerous...
...Why no crusades to save the young from the peril of sexually transmitted diseases, in this most caring and safety-conscious of administrations...
...THE CLINTON LEGACY Morality Turned Upside Down By Noemie Emery Linda Tripp, says Margaret Carlson, when she pressed the "on" button of her little tape recorder, "lost membership in the family of man...
...A crime is a choice and a choice is a crime...
...Lost contact with the whole human race...
...Anti-smoking crusaders justify their campaign by citing the high cost of treating lung cancer...
...Greed...
...The reason is obvious: the fear of even seeming to censure promiscuity for any reason whatsoever...
...Around, before, and after it, there is good evidence that these other things have happened too: 1. The president of the United States sexually exploited a young woman in his employ...
...but for recording and spreading truths others wanted kept secret...
...Linda Tripp betrayed a young woman who trusted her...
...Then there is the Bible of Bill, in which Thou-shalt-nots are downsized to glitches, and trendy new sins are invoked in their place...
...Socialist in all else, the Left here believes in unrestricted markets...
...When does it start...
...Such censure would violate the code of the strange new religion...
...some cannot be checked by condom use...
...Per patient, AIDS costs much more, yet the causes of AIDS are never mentioned, much less condemned...
...This is the Church of Bill, in the State of Bill, with its own mores and standards...
...And sure enough, his policies have embodied his unique point of view...
...On the other hand, Clinton doesn't think parents have the right to know if their children are supplied with abortions or transported for abortions out of state...
...Indeed, long before Bill Clinton appeared, trailing his fragrant scandals behind him, the Left had already marked out sex as the one great exception to its general political enterprise: the island of license in its sea of restriction, in its ocean of meddling and interference...
...No, they shouldn't...
...Bill Clinton has flouted the time-honored standards—but by his standards, he is righteous...
...People might think you were reading the Bible...
...Thanks to the tapes, Clinton's agenda is dead in the water...
...But given the context in which it occurred, its singling out for special condemnation seems odd...
...It's a new kind of morality, but their own...
...But the source of these acts is always Bill Clinton, truly the root of all evil in this sordid case...
...Not so, it seems, in the Clintons' America, where Linda Tripp's offense and others like it have become mortal sins...
...Duty...
...It is about values...
...And they face another small problem: On what ground can they appeal to people...
...tion of Scripture, certain forms of sex are not adultery and possibly not even sex, that we began to realize we might have a moral thinker of rare imagination on our hands...
...Under the present administration, apparently yes...
...Even lying under oath about sex is no big deal...
...They could say, "She blew up our charade...
...his party in trouble...
...Of course, they want Linda Tripp disemboweled...
...Should employers make such use of those in their power...
...On the other hand, smoking, which is a choice and a health matter, acquires solemn moral overtones...
...In all of this, devoted disciples of the First Church of Clinton apparently see nothing amiss...
...Or so they can tell themselves...
...Six years later, government is much as it was, but the moral traditions of millennia are under assault...
...Should adult men present ditzy interns with the kind of dilemma that propelled "that woman . . . Miss Lewinsky" to fame...
...This also explains the feminist rage over Tripp...
...6. The airheaded intern tried to get another government employee to lie under oath...
...5. The president of the United States put an air-headed intern in the position of lying under oath to protect him...
...Communitarian to a fault in economics, health, education, welfare, you name it, it is libertarian in this to an extreme...
...Because of the tapes, the Clintons will go down in history as the second coming of the Warren G. Hardings, not the Franklin D. Roosevelts...
...Six years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote of the social equivalent and called it "defining deviancy down...
...Five of the 10 most frequently reported infectious diseases in the country are STDs...
...Tripp made the tapes because she was being pressured to lie under oath about Kathleen Willey, the woman who claims Clinton harassed her, in the Paula Jones law suit...
...With a president likened to Zeus (by Nina Burleigh) and personally keen on Biblical allusion, his administration sounds more and more like a religious cult...
...For six years, all the members of the Nina Burleigh school of presidential assessment who treasure the Clintons for abortion and quotas have worked hard to reconcile their political theories (and their dreams about Hillary) with the unbuttoned urges of Bill...
...Read herself out of the human community...
...Lust...
...Many have wondered whether the Clintons and their friends are truly immoral—engaged in knowing wrongdoing—or merely amoral, unable to tell right from wrong...
...Now, it appears neither is accurate...
...That is, it is about an inversion of values...
...When is taking it justified?—is drained of its moral dimension and becomes a mere medical matter, a personal choice...
...Unable to say much about AIDS—mustn't condemn promiscuity—or about infants in dumpsters—too much like late-term abortion—liberals vent through their jihad against tobacco...
...But this downsizing of sins into glitches is only part of the story...
...Let us pause for a look at what the new morality has wrought...
...JFK in between—Clinton caught the idea that presidents get remembered when they identify a threat to human freedom and dignity—the Axis, Jim Crow, the Evil Empire—and mobilize the country against it...
...But the questions don't end there...
...Government must safeguard the right not to tell a partner one may be giving him or her a fatal illness, along with the right to kill a human being inches or days from being born...
...3. The governor of Arkansas exposed himself to a state employee of low rank and no power...
...Privacy" here is the watchword...
...Thus abortion, an issue groaning with grave value questions—What is a life...
...Likewise, taping a phone call that one party thinks private is a betrayal...
...Likewise, lying about it is just "lying about sex" and also trivial...
...Reinventing government" is tame by comparison...
...When Clinton and company went to Washington in 1993, talking about new ways of seeing and doing, who could have known what they meant...
...And as this goes on, something still stranger is happening: Real sins—sins in the Bible, like adultery and bearing false witness, two of the activities captured on Tripp's tapes—are being defined down to meaningless pranks...
...Of all these sins, Linda Tripp's would appear the least deadly—just as smoking seems less perilous for young people than promiscuous sex, binge drinking, or hard drugs...
...7. The Pentagon revealed confidential information about an employee to a hostile reporter, who used it to damage her...
...He has his disciples (Carville and Blumenthal) eager to serve him...
...Like looking for your lost wallet under the street lamp even though you lost it elsewhere, this job is easier, even if not terribly relevant to the problem at hand...
...Who then can blame him for using his "mandate" to try to make life anew...
...Is this the way presidents act...
...The Clinton Project is not really about politics...
...She herself was betrayed by the Pentagon and by Lewinsky, who urged her to lie...
...Gluttony...
...It is only in the context of other ills considerably more deadly that the intensity of the campaign against smoking must be seen as perverse...
...In fact, it is the decay of the real that requires the creation of the fraudulent: People need rules, no matter how ludicrous, to supply a sense of order to their world and a sense of their own effectiveness...
...Self-discipline...
...Smoking, of course, is a dumb thing to do, and a White House might plausibly use its moral authority to discourage the practice...
...Feeling called upon to moralize about something, they have cloaked their little cause in grand moral language, railing against a cluster of dubious admen as FDR railed against the Axis during World War II...
...Besides, both Clintons seem so hemmed in by the scandals that there is precious little they can rail against...
...his heir losing altitude...
...It is a work of confusion, inversion, and chaos that ruins perspective and sets all our standards adrift...
...But somehow it sounds so much better to say, "She betrayed that poor girl...
...As Charles Krauthammer has noted, when some forms of deviancy are defined down, there is always a parallel movement in the opposite direction: "defining deviancy up...
...It was back in January, when Bill Clinton was alleged to have said that, according to his interpretaNoemie Emery, a frequent contributor, lives in Alexandria, Va...
...TR and FDR on weekends...
...It allows them to vent and feel righteous...
...Should friends try to talk friends into crime...
...Some of these ailments cause cancer in women...
...Hillary Clinton can't make her husband keep his hands off the help, but she sure can ban smoking...
...Not murder, not larceny, not even lying...
...TR's bully pulpit, from which his successors have rallied the nation, has shrunk to the size of a pinhead, on which the Clintons are trying to dance...
...They were forced to embrace smoking as a last resort—one sin or vice in which neither has been tempted to indulge...
...Self-restraint...
...As this is the traditional view, it must now be uprooted...
...Honor...
...2. The president of the United States sexually assaulted an aide in his office who had come seeking a job...
...Convicted felons like Webb Hubbell and Susan McDougal are innocent victims, while people engaged in self-preservation are expelled from mankind...
...We are at the verge of a meaningful moment...
...Should friends tape friends...
...Adultery is "just sex" and nothing to bother with...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 46
