**A nice example of the "Do as I say, not as I do left".**http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg032702.aspMarch 27, 2002 4:15 p.m.
The Clinton Record
Let’s roll the videotape.
Enough already.
A while back I promised not to write any more Clinton-bashing columns. Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt. (Seriously. It reads: "My President Soiled the Country and All I Got Was this Lousy T-Shirt!") But this is getting ridiculous. In the last month or so there's been an outpouring of revisionism so profound it reminds me of the days when the Soviets would mail replacement pages for the official encyclopedia of the Soviet Union based upon who had fallen in or out of favor during any given week.
Thanks to Frank Rich, David Brock, Joe Klein, Hendrik Hertzberg, and numerous others (including Monica Lewinsky herself), we are now supposed to believe that pretty much all conservative opponents of Bill Clinton were twisted little snitches, hacks, and hypocrites, or, simply, sweaty-palmed pervs while the former president was nobly all-too-human.
Oh wait, that's what they've been saying all along.
The difference now is that conservatives have moved on — just like the liberals begged us to. There's a war on you know? Bill Clinton, no doubt, spends his time in his Harlem office eating bucket after bucket of fried-chicken skins while constantly asking his "secretary" to come in and pick up the pencils he "accidentally" dropped in front of his desk. So, most of us ask, why bother with him?
Anyway, the major problem with the new revisionism is there's very little new to it. To the extent there are any fresh revelations the bulk of them come from David Brock's bitchy new book, which seems to be intellectual Viagra for folks like Frank Rich. In the New York Times Magazine, Rich wallows in Brock's muck in order to denounce how dirty it all is (See Bill Buckley's column on this point.)
The title of Rich's coprophilic essay is "Ding Dong the Cultural Witch Hunt is Dead." Rich's thesis is a common one, which would make sense since he carved out a niche as the Bartles and James of New York liberalism — a mid-market distiller of low-potency conventional wisdom. Denouncing the majority of conservatives as "gargoyles and lunatics," Rich giddily notes "the almost unending hypocrisy of so many of Brock's circle in journalism and politics." Insert usual examples here. He continues later, "For a political movement that wanted to police sexual "lifestyles" and was pathologically obsessed with trying to find evidence that Hillary Clinton was a lesbian, the New Right of the 90's was, in Brock's account, nearly as gay as a soiree in Fire Island Pines."
WALKING IN HALF-WAY THROUGH
Without engaging in Rich's and Brock's delight in airing people's dirty laundry in order to denouncing dirty-laundry airing, suffice it to say the problem with this analysis is that it leaves out a lot of history. Indeed, a theater reviewer by training (and a good one), Rich should know that's it's not fair to judge a play if you've only seen the second act.
This may sound juvenile, but they started it. It was the cultural Left which declared that the "personal is political." Indeed, that was a feminist slogan. In the 1980s it was conservatives who argued, in effect, "boys will be boys" and it was the Left who said "not on your life." Liberals disinterred the archaic verb "womanize" in order to lay siege to John Tower. Liberals — agents of the government no less — invaded Robert Bork's private life, investigating his video rentals. Liberals chanted "you just don't get it!" with Maoist fury over the perfidy of Clarence Thomas's alleged joke about a pubic hair and for asking a longtime employee and friend to go out on a date. The whole thing was like Milan Kundera's The Joke — except liberals weren't laughing.
Liberals celebrated the most insane and dangerous ideologues of the Left who told us that "sex is rape" and that all men were horrid, lecherous evil creatures. As a result, liberals — like Hillary Clinton and her nodding husband — created a vast web of rules, laws, and secular customs designed to police the sexual lives of Americans.
And this was all against a backdrop of liberals denouncing conservatives as awful, evil, heartless, greedy, nasty people simply because of the policy positions they took. You like tax cuts and the free market? Oh, well then you're greedy and unfeeling. From homelessness to the Contras, it was the penchant of the Left to equate policy positions with ones spiritual or moral worth. This practice continues today, though perhaps with slightly less intensity.
Anyway, getting back to "sex policing," it was the conservatives — or, more broadly, the Right since libertarians have been consistent on this stuff from the beginning — who fought a losing battle against the Orwellian aims of sexual-harassment laws and the hysteria which created them. National Review, for example, remained consistent on this point before and after Bill Clinton came on the scene, repeatedly noting that while Bill Clinton was a lecherous cretin, the sexual-harassment laws he found himself ensnared in were idiotic.
Considering David Brock's narcissism (show us your nipple again Dave) and Frank Rich's prurience, it's no wonder they don't understand what Brock's role in the culture wars actually was. Brock was popular for no other reason than that he was a sign conservatives were going to start fighting back. Brock describes himself in those days as "a Jew in Hitler's army." As offensive as this is, it's between him and his therapist. But for all of the talk about how he was a "hatchet man," liberals forget that he was one hatchet-wielder against an army. If you want to say that conservatives were the author of this tawdry chapter in American history, that's fine. But, keep in mind that if you do say such things you are revealing the fact that you are either a liar or a fool.
HYPOCRISY, AGAIN
Moving on, I am at a complete and total loss as to how conservatives are the greater hypocrites in this passion play.
First, let's divide up the competing brands and strands of hypocrisy. If I say all people who drink too much beer are reprobates while I continue to go through beer like Bluto in Animal House, that is a kind of hypocrisy to be sure. But, if I pass a law or advocate the passage of a law which bans beer drinking for everybody, while I continue to drink beer, that's a whole other level of hypocrisy. It is one thing to express a fealty to a cultural norm, it is another thing entirely to try to impose that norm by force of law.
Now, let's see. As a general proposition, who was the champion of sexual-harassment laws? Hmm, seems to me it was the party of Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Chris Dodd. Who celebrated Anita Hill as a martyr in the cause for ever-more draconian sex laws and regulations? Seems to me it was that cadre of humorless feminist lawyers and activists lead by the likes of Hillary Clinton (who has called Anita Hill her hero), Gloria Steinem, Pat Schroeder, et al. Don't tell me I'm wrong, I went to college in a bastion of feminism in the late 1980s and I took notes.
In every measurable sense, it was the cultural Left which dropped a thick tarp of laws and regulations — from speech codes on campuses to mandatory education on how to talk to women in the workplace — over the society. And yet, what happened when Bill Clinton was revealed to be precisely the sort of sub-par person we all knew he was?
Well, golly. Gloria Steinem proposed in the pages of the New York Times a "one free grope rule," whereby male employers were now allowed a free chance to do something worse than anything Clarence Thomas was ever accused of (besides, by the time Bill Clinton had groped Monica, he'd already laid more hands on more women than a guard searching for contraband at a women's prison).
Liberals cheered Katie Roiphe when she wrote, also in the Times, "There is nothing inherently wrong . . . with [Monica Lewinsky's] attempt to translate her personal relationship with the President into professional advancement." Feminist author Jane Smiley, writing in The New Yorker, forgave Clinton because he was simply acting out of a human "desire to make a connection with another person."
Meanwhile, Ken Starr, who was nominally the man in charge of defending these laws liberals put in place, was denounced by liberals across the spectrum because, in the words of Richard Cohen, Clinton was being "mortified, subjected to an Orwellian intrusion by the gumshoes of the state." I don't remember liberals feeling that way when they picked Ken Starr to invade Bob Packwood's privacy and read his diary — an intrusion far worse than anything Clinton went through.
I could go on for hours with this kind of stuff. But here's my favorite. Carol Mosley Braun, recall, was the woman who won her Senate seat by running entirely on the "issue" of Clarence Thomas. Her opponent in 1992 had voted to confirm Thomas, and the media cited Braun's victory as exhibit A of the "feminist backlash." During the Lewinsky scandal, she appeared on Meet the Press to defend the president of the United States playing Baron-and-the-Milkmaid with an intern by sagely noting: "Thirty years ago women weren't even allowed to be White House interns."
FINALLY
And then there's Bill. The revisionists would have us believe that the Independent Counsel's final report on Whitewater, etc., is the final proof that the whole fuss over Bill was a giant waste of time.
It may have been a waste of time, I grant you, but it was not conservatives who wasted it. I will not now — nor have I ever — condoned every tactic and statement of everybody on the Right in the various Clinton battles. But, the fact remains that the Clintons sought out every opportunity to stretch their troubles out. This is a point that even the editors of the New York Times felt obliged to concede last Sunday.
It always struck me as a prime example of the dysfunction-enabling ethos of the liberal establishment; Bill Clinton would not loosen his white-knuckled grip on his deceptions and obfuscations but conservatives were the "obsessed" and "maniacal" ones for not being able to "just let it go."
But don't get me wrong here. I find the legalistic critiques of Bill Clinton to be woefully insufficient. Robert Ray's final "exoneration" is almost meaningless to me because I never thought the case against Bill Clinton should rest on such petty complaints. Oh sure, the charges were serious and relevant. Indeed, I can think of a half-dozen charges that should have warranted impeachment that were never even leveled against him. But the law should be considered the minimum standard for a president's conduct, not the only standard.
Bill Clinton was a shabby and shameless man. The rest is commentary and, frankly, he's not worth the effort to provide any more of it.
