The Real State of the Union
THE REAL STATE OF THE UNION While much of America is sleepily rubbing its belly and burping with satisfaction, may we take just a moment to point out that the state of the Union is actually quite...
...Got that...
...Consider, first, the behavior these past two weeks of our print and broadcast press, whose ostensible profession it is to observe, understand, and explain the workings of the government...
...The altogether admirable Henry Hyde and his increasingly lonely allies notwithstanding, that question does sort of hang in the air there, doesn't it...
...True, over three long days January 14-16, Hyde and his colleagues mounted an honorable and effective argument that Bill Clinton's grotesque behavior in 1998 warrants his removal from office...
...It fell to White House counsel Charles F.C...
...This was rather like a mafia lawyer in a murder trial proposing that, simply because Fat Louie and Sammy the Fish have both testified that Louie never told Sammy to kill anyone, neither Louie nor Sammy can be implicated in the crime...
...The "big picture" of these impossibly suspicious events, Kendall proclaimed, amounts to "zero...
...That, too, is a bald-faced misrepresentation of federal law...
...The president also insisted to the grand jury, in order to exonerate himself of witness-tampering charges, that he told his aides only "things that were true" when the scandal first became public...
...And how, by this past weekend, could conventional wisdom in Washington have so drastically changed...
...Cur-rie"—the president's African-American secretary...
...To believe he is guilty, Mills announced, "you must not only disbelieve the president, you must also disbelieve Ms...
...Responding to the president's State of the Union address last Tuesday night, and speaking for the Republican party, Dunn told America that "the state of our Union is strong"—and will remain strong "no matter what the outcome of the president's situation...
...The "house of civil rights was never at the core" of that big-haired cracker's lawsuit, according to Mills...
...The whole of the evidence has been publicly available for months...
...One must be correct and truthful...
...If so few people any longer even remember what the Union is, properly understood—"a government of laws, not men," and a hundred other principles routinely violated by the Clinton presidency—then the only fair conclusion must be that the state of that Union is really not so strong at all...
...Cheryl Mills says that the crime of witness tampering is not a crime at all unless the alleged tampering takes place after a relevant judicial proceeding has already begun...
...There was "no basis" for the House of Representatives to impeach the president, he informed the Senate...
...He is a criminal, and he must be impeached, but it won't matter a fig if he isn't convicted, because the wheat is high and the crime rate is low...
...And that would be "an insult to Betty Currie and to millions of other loyal Americans" just like her...
...What of the fact that, during the final weeks of this job search, the president had submitted a sworn declaration in the Jones litigation that he'd never had sex with any federal employee—and that Lewinsky was a subpoenaed witness in the case, whose truthful testimony would reveal this declaration to be false...
...There are objective matters to be resolved here, of course, and the two contending sides in this dispute cannot both be clear and compelling...
...Jennifer Dunn, Republican from the state of Washington, voted to impeach Bill Clinton...
...The president is guilty...
...The house of civil rights rests instead—entirely—on Bill Clinton's shoulders, since he is right on all the issues, and since his grampaw once owned a store that sold things to black folks...
...By which time the president not only knew he was the subject of a federal grand jury probe, he knew Currie was a subpoenaed witness...
...But really, now—and it is no criticism of the House managers to say so—they told the Senate nothing, nothing, that could possibly have "surprised" anyone who claims to take such questions seriously...
...A healthy state of the Union, you might think she believes, requires Clinton's removal from the White House...
...And by Tuesday night at 9 o'clock, the White House had been fully informed by the Washington Post's Peter Baker about the blockbuster story that paper intended to publish in its Wednesday late editions...
...The charges against Clinton are unfair, "absurd," unconstitutional, even— built on "sand castles of speculation," constructed of "sealing wax and string and spiders' webs," inspired by a conspiracy between Paula Jones's malicious attorneys and an out-of-control Kenneth Starr...
...The president, you will recall, acknowledged to the grand jury that Monica Lewinsky had performed fellatio when they were alone together, but denied—defying common sense and Lewinsky's testimony—that he had ever touched her breasts or genitals...
...But no senator laughed at Ruff...
...Bill Clinton finished his perjurious Jones-case deposition on the afternoon of Saturday, January 17, 1998...
...Dunn asked, a few minutes further into her remarks...
...Needless to say, no senator even dared think about laughing at White House deputy counsel Cheryl Mills, whose job it was to emit a further fog about the obstruction of justice counts against Bill Clinton...
...And it was after all this had happened that Clinton and Currie had their second little "We were never alone, right...
...When he got back to the White House, he called Currie at home and asked her to come to work the next day, Sunday, for the first of their questionable conversations...
...Surprisingly clear and compelling...
...Now, it was said, Henry Hyde's Surprisingly Clear and Compelling prosecution of the president had been rebutted by a Surprisingly Clear and Compelling defense from the White House...
...Obstruction of justice in the Paula Jones civil rights action against Clinton...
...Gosh, we were told, over and over again, at the start: Henry Hyde and the other impeachment-trial managers have presented a Surprisingly Clear and Compelling Case that the president of the United States has done some genuinely awful things—inconsistent with the health of the Republic...
...Except that White House aide John Podesta has testified that Clinton explicitly ruled out oral sex with Lewinsky...
...Cheryl Mills says that when the president had his infamous "We were never alone, right...
...White House special counsel Gregory Craig, in turn, launched a lengthy, exquisitely subtle disquisition on how oral sex (still) isn't really sex...
...Craig then abruptly reversed field, apparently without realizing it, and spent a good bit of time deriding the significance of any fine-tuned distinctions among sex acts...
...chat...
...For the White House last week did not, in fact, present the Senate with anything close to a convincing demonstration of Bill Clinton's innocence...
...The other must be incorrect and dishonest...
...By Monday, January 19, on the other hand, Washington was abuzz with talk of the intern...
...Clinton was only trying to prepare for a Lewinsky-related media onslaught prompted by Internet gossip Matt Drudge...
...THE REAL STATE OF THE UNION While much of America is sleepily rubbing its belly and burping with satisfaction, may we take just a moment to point out that the state of the Union is actually quite bad...
...But no senator laughed at him, either...
...What can it mean that all our inkspillers and tele-pundit gabsters were only recently "surprised" to find a strong case against the president...
...Ruff, last Tuesday, to establish the general themes on which his lieutenants would expand...
...Which fact alone, you would think, might be relevant to a proper judgment on the state of the Union...
...But, hey—so what...
...That is not true, and if she is the brilliant, rising-star attorney all the newspapers tell us she is, Mills knows it's not true—but she's saying so anyway...
...And that, too, is a lie...
...Sometime later still that Tuesday evening, Clinton called Currie at home to tell her what the next morning's headlines would be...
...But you would think wrong...
...Guilty, guilty, guilty...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...At the time he made this appointment, Matt Drudge's Web site had not yet so much as alluded to Lewinsky's existence...
...Senior White House aides spent the next few hours huddled in Charles Ruff's office, waiting for further news...
...And the only logical conclusions to be drawn from the evidence have been obvious for even longer...
...interviews with the sainted Betty Currie, witness tampering was the furthest thing from his mind...
...What has American journalism been doing all this time...
...Gregory Craig called this allegation, felony perjury by the president of the United States, "immaterial," "insubstantial," and "trivial...
...Analytical agnosticism on this question, at this late date, is one of the most irritating aspects of the Lewinsky scandal...
...While they were there, Betty Currie called Ruff to say she'd just been served a subpoena by Ken Starr's grand jury...
...Cheryl Mills says no crime of witness tampering can be committed without some "threat or intimidation...
...Any way you cut the evidence, it would seem, Bill Clinton has lied under oath in a federal criminal probe...
...So what can you expect from Republicans...
...Again and again Ruff reminded the senators that "the only two parties who have knowledge" of this or that incriminating conversation have "both denied" they've done anything wrong...
...Nor did any senator laugh at Clinton attorney David Kendall, who took nearly an hour to explain how it is perfectly natural for the White House senior staff, cabinet and sub-cabinet officials of the executive branch, and the president's best friend all to be continuously on the honker with the CEOs of giant corporations in an effort to secure out-of-town employment for a not-particularly-impressive 24-year-old administrative assistant...
...It is African-Americans, not the president, who are truly now on trial, Mills warned the Senate...
...What the White House proved instead—once more—is that our president surrounds himself with men and women eager to defend even his most elephantine lies...
...Hint, hint, hint...
Vol. 4 • February 1999 • No. 19
