NOW SHE TELLS US
NOW SHE TELLS US Just past sundown on April 12, Chuck Bartels of the Associated Press had some news he thought might be of interest to the most famous woman in Cabot, Arkansas. So he rang Paula...
...He marshals the executive branch of government and his political party, the Democratic party, to sustain the lie during a spectacular impeachment proceeding in Congress...
...One bit of good news, however, has emerged from this crisis...
...Undeterred and no doubt hoping to secure a quote that contained some actual words, Bartels asked whether Jones thought a finding of contempt against the president was "healthy for the country...
...The problem is not so much the president's contempt for Susan Webber Wright...
...Some of these interests concern the future of NATO: As Kissinger says, "NATO cannot survive if it now abandons the campaign without achieving its objective of ending the massacres...
...He and his aides lie to and about that investigation for eight months...
...Now she tells us— long after the announcement might have had some meaningful effect on the Senate impeachment trial— that Bill Clinton's criminal activity is proved beyond question and "not acceptable" in a president...
...A major federal investigation ensues...
...The matter will be referred to the Arkansas Supreme Court's Committee on Professional Conduct, which exercises disciplinary authority over Clinton's law license...
...All understand what the sophisticates do not: that there are profound moral reasons for our involvement in Kosovo, yes...
...The Weekly Standard has learned that General Wesley Clark has told senior administration officials that NATO can't win without ground troops, but the Clinton administration continues to quake at the thought of a ground war...
...David Tell, for the Editors THE NATIONAL INTEREST The war in Kosovo is going badly...
...Nice of her to say so...
...There can be "no factual dispute" and there is "simply no escaping the fact" and "the record leaves no doubt" and "the record demonstrates by clear and convincing evidence" . . . that the president defied the orders of a federal judge by responding to questions from Paula Jones's attorneys with "intentionally false" answers "designed to obstruct the judicial process...
...To which judgment the paper's star columnist Maureen Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize for her Jones/Lewinsky pieces fresh in hand, adds a delicate little seasoning of atmospheric gestalt: "This whole farce is so over" Ah...
...And yet, together with her many big-shot fans, how curiously subdued Judge Wright is about the whole business—as she has been all along...
...As the Wall Street Journal wrote, a victory against Milosevic will "set back the forces of irrationality that threaten the coming millennium, establishing the precedent that somewhere, sometime the world will draw a line that barbarity will not be allowed to cross...
...Well, they include, in no particular order: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Caspar Weinberger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, John McCain, Bob Dole, Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Chris Cox, George W. Bush, and Elizabeth Dole...
...It is too early to know who will win today's debate, but one thing is heartening: A creditable group of major political figures understands that the principles of Truman and Reagan remain the best guide in our new and increasingly perilous post-Cold War world...
...And when, she asks us to believe, did it first occur to Wright that the president might not have told the truth...
...All have called for victory in the war against Milosevic...
...Had Clinton told the truth about Monica Lewinsky, the judge now stubbornly insists, she would still have reached the same conclusion...
...They understood that American moral and strategic interests often converge...
...And, she adds—contrary to numerous other assertions vehemently advanced, throughout the controversy, by the Democratic party—Bill Clinton was unmistakably guilty as charged by the House impeachment managers...
...Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta," she trilled...
...So he rang Paula Jones's doorbell—it plays the spooky five-note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind—and informed her that Judge Susan Webber Wright had sanctioned the president for contempt of court in the Jones v. Clinton litigation...
...Contrary to numerous assertions," she writes, "this Court did not rule that evidence of the Lewinsky matter was irrelevant or immaterial to the issues in plaintiff's case...
...Goodbye...
...By the evidence of her contempt citation, Susan Webber Wright has learned nothing new since then...
...And his only punishment is a one-day scolding from a district court judge—plus a couple thousand bucks...
...It means that an influential chunk of America believes a mild rebuke of Clinton appropriate because it expects no better man than he in the Oval Office...
...The Washington Post embraces Wright's 32-page memorandum as the sensible grownup's Clinton-scandal Holy Grail, a proportionate response: "Finally, someone has gotten this right...
...It means something that this result should win such a widespread, sleepy welcome...
...Then she stopped: "That's all I have to say...
...On one side is, if we may say so, a rather motley combination of neo-isolationists who simply don't believe the United States should much concern itself with overseas matters not directly threatening the American homeland...
...former governor Jim Guy Tucker, who was twice convicted of Whitewater felonies by Kenneth Starr and pleaded guilty to a third, still has his law license...
...Are these American interests that are worth pursuing or not...
...The real problem is our political culture's cynicism about—genuine contempt for—the presidency itself...
...Hearing this, the plaintiff danced a quick, barefoot circle on her front porch, hands held high over her head...
...Robert Kagan and William Kristol, for the Editors...
...Barney Frank waves it off as "not a surprise"—despite having spent most of a year denying what the judge now says "no reasonable person would seriously dispute...
...To be sure, Judge Wright's April 12 essay is not entirely without its pleasures...
...The president's congressional defenders can live with the ruling—Rep...
...Nothing much will happen there, of course...
...All have insisted that ground troops may be necessary to achieve that victory...
...Well, sort of "not acceptable," anyway...
...Perjury and obstruction of justice, in other words...
...The Clinton administration has compounded its initial disastrous misjudgment of Slobodan Milosevic with an inadequate military strategy driven more by fear of negative polls than by the imperative of victory...
...The president violates the law...
...The New York Times, without evident irony, calls this apparently conclusive courtroom verdict "appropriately symbolic...
...And just who are these self-indulgent, soft-headed liberal internationalists who, in the words of one young sage, "applaud America's intervention in a place like Kosovo . . . because they see plainly that we have no national interests there...
...The war has usefully illuminated the fault-lines in elite opinion about the goals of American foreign policy and the purposes of American power in the post-Cold War world...
...but that there are profound national interests at stake, as well...
...At the beginning of the Cold War, there was a "great debate," which, happily, was won by the hard-headed internationalists...
...One year ago this month, Wright summarily dismissed Jones's complaint against the president on the truly incredible reasoning that no rational Arkansas jury would find Clinton's indecent exposure sufficiently "outrageous" to constitute a tort...
...This is a problem from which no court can offer us relief...
...Here, at last, Paula Jones, upper-middle-class nightmare extraordinaire, has learned to speak the language of well-bred society...
...and of ultra-sophisticated "realist" intellectuals who have divined that America has no interests in the Balkans and who claim that to combat Milosevic's aggression and brutality is merely to indulge in softheaded liberal internationalism...
...Like the thought embodied by the only practical penalty Judge Wright has imposed on the president: a demand that he reimburse her court and Paula Jones's attorneys for the expenses they incurred as a result of his deceit...
...And some of these interests concern the fundamental question of the kind of world we want to live in—where peace and civilized behavior reign, especially in strategically vital parts of the world like Europe...
...Not until his televised August 1998 pseudo-confession...
...She has simply held her tongue...
...To which she replied: "I could care less...
...For hers is the approved and near-universal response to Judge Wright's ruling: vague satisfaction mixed with abject boredom...
...The president can live with his contempt citation and won't appeal...
...of Clinton despisers who don't trust the administration to do any serious thing seriously (not a ridiculous position, but one that implies an utterly passive foreign policy for the next two years...
...As Brzezinski notes, "It is no exaggeration to say that NATO's failure to prevail would mean both the end of NATO as a credible alliance and the undermining of America's global leadership...
...Kosovo has brought it to the fore...
...It's the thought that counts, we suppose...
...Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta...
...For most of the post-Cold War decade, this question has been avoided...
...Some of these interests concern the credibility of American power against adversaries from Baghdad to Pyongyang...
Vol. 4 • April 1999 • No. 30
