Case Closed
CASE CLOSED He has known this day would eventually come. He has not cared. At last, it has come, and he still does not care. He will stay clawed to his White House desk until his fingers are bloody...
...Its effects will be uniformly baleful: The private lives of public officials will be subject to prying and poking forever...
...IT IS FALSE...
...He would sooner have his conduct exposed as criminal and degenerate than lose his hold on office...
...He will no longer "excuse" or "compare" or "blame" or "complain...
...They are not just serious...
...Amnesia...
...Are we really to banish him from office—against their will...
...By such sacrifice and self-abnegation, the president believes, or wants us to believe, some "good can come of this for our country...
...The decision is really quite simple...
...If need be, yes...
...America, in other words, is "about" his administration's commitment to "the public's business," which he now promises to pursue anew...
...It is insincere...
...The question whether Clinton is or was having sex with Lewinsky "depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," he asserted at one point in his deposition...
...But it is neither a crisis nor a tragedy...
...Yes, the president reportedly rebuked Shalala, that is exactly what I'm suggesting...
...Clinton is innocent of such charges, his attorneys essentially contend, because—so far as law and politics are concerned—there was no such relationship to conceal...
...The question whether he was ever alone with her "depends on how you define 'alone.'" This remains the official position of the Clinton administration, attested to, on White House letterhead dated September 11, 1998, by presidential counsel Charles F. C. Ruff...
...What Kenneth Starr has done—suffering relentless White House assaults on his reputation with a dogged loyalty to mission that looks positively heroic in retrospect—is add a devastating measure of finality and weight and obligation to the city's judgment against the president...
...Our executive branch, in short, continues to organize itself around a spectacular lie...
...The nation will lose nothing much at all if a few adulterers are prevented from advancing in our politics in the future...
...And to maintain that hold, to help America deceive itself that the conduct is so much harmless "old news," Bill Clinton now encourages us to concentrate our minds on the state of his soul...
...Democracy's elected representatives do that—on a basis of careful consideration and conscience, and through orderly steps and means anticipated by our founders and written deliberately into our Constitution...
...At Clinton's private meeting with his cabinet this past Thursday, health and human services secretary Donna Shalala shocked the room by openly questioning his latest pleas for mercy...
...And what is the "good" he has in mind...
...As is the president's solemn vow to get "to the rock-bottom truth of where I am and where we all are...
...They demand the action of an impeachment proceeding...
...It was a just result...
...Yes...
...Congress must refuse the request and remove him...
...Nothing else he did with the young lady—masturbation in a White House sink, "oral-anal contact," all the other business detailed in the Starr referral—is "sex...
...Come along with him, please, he asks, as he travels "quite a journey": a trip through the quasi-spiritual, easy-virtue psychobabble of repeated public "apologies...
...Should "elite opinion" be enough to "undo" a popular democracy's presidential election...
...And the people still support Bill Clinton...
...Clinton has "repented," he says...
...Monica Lewinsky, Clinton argued in Florida last Wednesday, is "not what America is about...
...He has a "broken spirit...
...L'affaire Lewinsky, Congress and the editorial pages tell themselves, has become a national crisis, a tragedy, even...
...And our democracy's public-opinion polls do not determine our president's fitness for office in the present...
...His "repentance" is motivated exclusively by a determination to retain power...
...If only we will relieve him, by "forgiveness," of any real practical responsibility for an episode more disgusting— and cloaked in greater mendacity—than any other in our presidency's history...
...John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election, he explained, only because the nation remained ignorant of his true character...
...Bill Clinton is asking Congress to judge acceptable a president revealed to the world as a lout and liar and criminal...
...he still defies it...
...The 1996 election will not be thus "undone...
...That it is all just a lie is news to almost no one in Washington...
...You seem to be suggesting, she incredulously told the president, that the beauty of your policy-wonkery is adequate compensaBILL CLINTON'S "REPENTANCE" IS MOTIVATED EXCLUSIVELY BY A DETERMINATION TO RETAIN POWER...
...The heavens will not fall if Bill Clinton's vice president becomes president...
...Only intercourse, Clinton told the Lewinsky grand jury August 17, constitutes "sex" the way "most ordinary Americans" understand the word...
...He has renounced "pride and anger...
...the basic, factual record of the Lewinsky scandal was near-universally accepted here already...
...And yet, even as it accepts this move as inevitable and necessary, Washington tortures itself with doubt and gloom...
...And so it will be a just result, in Clinton's theology, if he evades impeachment by inducing the country to forget what it already knows about his character...
...Impeachment is a sober matter...
...IT IS INSINCERE...
...tion for the wretchedness of your personal behavior— that you should survive in office, that is, no matter what, simply because you are right on the issues...
...He will stay clawed to his White House desk until his fingers are bloody stumps—and until the nation's expectations for its leader are similarly reduced and wounded...
...The president, they insist, was testifying "accurately," in public and under oath in court, when he refused to acknowledge a dalliance with the intern...
...The charges are not just true...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...America, remember, is about HMOs and school reform and gun control...
...that is what vice presidents are for...
...The term 'sexual relationship,'" they write, "like sexual affair, has no definitive meaning...
...All but the last few die-hard Clinton believers in the capital fell off the turnip truck some weeks ago...
...Truth is Bill Clinton's last concern...
...Even before Kenneth Starr's 445-page impeachment referral to Congress was made public last Friday, the president's attorneys were releasing an extensive memorandum purporting to rebut what the independent counsel's meticulously corroborated evidence proves beyond a shadow of a doubt: that the president obstructed justice and tampered with witnesses and committed multiple perjuries, all in an effort to conceal a lurid, adulterous sexual relationship...
...It is false...
Vol. 4 • September 1998 • No. 2
