Goodbye to "Clinton Haters"
BARNES, FRED
Goodbye to "Clinton Haters" The epithet has lost its utility. BY FRED BARNES WHERE HAVE ALL the Clinton haters gone? Nowhere, really. It's just that the phrase "Clinton hater," brandished so...
...Why the disappearance of Clinton haters...
...White House aides used it...
...The answer is simple: the pardon scandal...
...Lying is generic to all Clinton scandals, and it's been ubiquitous in the pardon flap...
...Suddenly they find themselves in agreement with the folks they used to denounce...
...Letters-to-the-editor writers used it liberally...
...And that was by a journalist who mentioned the phrase so Republican representative Dan Burton, whose Government Reform Committee is investigating Clinton's pardons, could reject it...
...Democratic apologists used it...
...And it was used more and more by allies of Clinton as his presidency progressed and scandals proliferated...
...Sure, the pardons were horrible, but dwelling on them is designed to negate the good things Clinton did as president...
...Only this time, the campaign is working...
...Finally, there's been the usual amount of roadkill, only this time it includes Clinton himself...
...They demonized his opponents relentlessly, and, more often than not, it worked...
...Firing White House travel office employees and falsifying the reason is one thing...
...Worse, some may have even come to understand that by attacking his opponents in past scandals, they served as enablers and helped clear the way for unjustifiable pardons...
...Dionne says Clinton's foes are exploiting Pardongate to wage "one final re-education campaign" against him...
...For years, however, "Clinton hater" was an effective epithet, used to dismiss criticism of Clinton as so ill-motivated and irrational as to be The pardons have outraged liberals who once rushed to Clinton's defense...
...Dionne of the Washington Post, a chronic Clinton sympathizer, refers only to "anti-Clinton purists" and "Clinton's ideological opponents...
...It's hard to abuse a power that's absolute, but Clinton managed...
...On the Sunday talk shows, it's been uttered only once in recent weeks...
...Suddenly they find themFred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...One is the uncomfortable similarity between the pardon scandal and the earlier scandals of the Clinton era— uncomfortable to Clintonites, that is...
...I'll leave that to your imagination or the National Enquirer...
...And of course it was wealthy Clinton donors and fund-raisers who strongly influenced the pardons of Rich and convicted cocaine smuggler Carlos vignali...
...Denise Rich lied about asking Clinton to pardon her ex-husband...
...The body count is still rising...
...This makes it difficult—or at least hypocritical in the extreme— to persist in attacking these folks as insatiable critics of the former president...
...The other scandals include Whitewater, Troopergate, Travelgate, Filegate, Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky...
...This, too, is a specialty of Clinton scandals...
...Columnist E.J...
...Two other things have contributed to the vanishing of the Clinton hater...
...Sex...
...He surely misled his own aides, including John Podesta, who thought when they left the White House on the evening of January 19 that Clinton had turned down Rich's bid for a pardon...
...But pardoning totally unrepentant criminals is a more egregious abuse...
...Bob Herbert of the New York Times writes of the ex-president's "enemies"—and then suggests they've been right about him all along...
...Five factors that cropped up in the earlier scandals—sex, money, lying, abuse of power, and collateral damage—were also involved in the pardons...
...Maybe Dionne is right...
...In the past, Clinton glided through scandals practically unscathed as his friends and allies were ruined for life...
...Actually, to the extent the term Clinton hater still has a life, it's in letters to newspapers and chat rooms...
...It's just that the phrase "Clinton hater," brandished so often by defenders of President Clinton to dismiss criticism of his ethics, morals, or honesty, has been dropped from the political vocabulary in Washington and across the country...
...Just ask Newt Gingrich, Ken Starr, Billy Dale, Bob Barr, Henry Hyde, Paula Jones, Gary Aldrich, Bob Livingston, and David Sentelle...
...The standard grounds for a pardon—remorse and good works—were ignored...
...Even John Podesta, Clinton's last chief of staff, watches his words now in talking of Clinton's foes...
...Journalists sympatico with Clinton used it against their conservative foes on Tv chat shows...
...They are "people" who are "ever present" and who want to "destroy and undermine . . . all the good things [Clinton] did as president," Podesta said on Meet the Press...
...He lied by saying Rich's role in the Middle East peace process was a major factor in the pardon...
...Not only did Clinton purposely fail to consult the Justice Department, he pardoned people on the advice of Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner and the Rodham brothers...
...No doubt they would like to pretend there's no similarity...
...And so on...
...But I suspect most of them, privately anyway, now realize what Bob Herbert was bold enough to indicate publicly: that Clinton's moral and ethical shortcomings aren't new...
...Now Clinton has only a few obscure ex-aides to help, part-time, and they've been unable to rehabilitate Clinton or demonize his critics...
...Just how similar is the pardon affair to the other scandals...
...Then there was Hugh Rodham, who got $400,000 for producing two clemencies...
...The absence of Clinton spinners in the pardon scandal has also played an important role...
...In Pardongate, the Clinton victims include deputy attorney general Eric Holder, Denise Rich, Beth Dozoretz . . . oh, why bother naming them all...
...Attempting to stash Lewinsky in a government job at the United Nations is another...
...The pardons of fugitive financier Marc Rich, an herbal medicine quack named Almon Glenn Braswell, and drug kingpin Carlos vignali, among other scoundrels, have outraged Democrats and liberals who in the past rushed to Clinton's defense...
...This is a favorite line of John Podesta...
...Clinton lied by saying Republican lawyers who'd worked for Rich had advocated a pardon...
...selves in agreement with, well, the folks they used to denounce as Clinton haters...
...unworthy of serious rebuttal...
...No longer free to trash people as Clinton haters, fans of the former president have a fallback position...
...As president, Clinton could command an army of apologists and attack dogs who frequently were able to shift the media's attention to the supposed unsavoriness of Clinton's foes and away from Clinton himself...
...Abuse of power...
...The father of Vignali lied about the campaign he organized—it included heavy Democratic dona-tions—to free his son...
...It was a wealthy Democratic donor, Walter Kaye, who arranged for Lewinsky to become a White House intern...
...very...
...But money was certainly involved in Whitewater, Travelgate, Lewinsky, and Pardongate...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 25
