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Monicagate
Sorry, folks, but there are no hot parts here. Just the
comments of an ordinary American who wants to know how the
country got into this mess and what it means.
Why are people so ticked off at Bill
Clinton?
Every president has opponents, but people hate
Clinton.
On the left, there are people who disagree with him on
policy -- NAFTA, welfare "reform," the gutting of civil
liberties -- but on the right, there really is a "vast
right-wing conspiracy." (That's no myth. Apparently there's
a group of men who meet once a week in a house in Washington
to plot strategy for bringing him down. Check out a story
from September 18, 1998, in the
Detroit
News.)
As far as I can see, Clinton's greatest sin was to be the
first of those dreadful 60's people to be elected president.
And he's not a straight-arrow Vietnam vet, either, but a
typical "boomer" who avoided military service -- a
lot of us did -- marched against the war, experimented with
drugs, had an egalitarian marriage, and so on. To see him
rise all the way to the top and stay there is unimaginably
galling to those who thought they had laid the ghost of the
60's when Nixon was elected in 1968, and Reagan in 1980, and
the Republican Congress in 1994. No matter how many battles
they win, America just goes on being a freer and more
tolerant society than they are comfortable with. By
resolutely refusing to be outraged with Clinton's
sex life -- and his other moral "flexibilities" -- we're
just rubbing their faces in it.
Then he had the gall to defend himself.
People complain about Clinton's "hair-splitting" and
"legalisms." He was in court, being sued, and was then
hauled before a grand jury. He was on the lawyers' turf.
Whose rules should he have been playing by?
This is not the place to do a full analysis of the
legalities, but a few points must be kept in mind. First,
contrary to popular belief, it is not illegal for
an employer or supervisor to have consensual sex with an
employee. There are theorists who think it should be. There
are also companies which have decided not to take chances
and have established rules for their own people. But the
law is that it is perfectly legal -- as long as the
employee is of age and genuinely consents. There is no
evidence that the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky
was anything other than purely voluntary -- Ms. Lewinsky has
never said otherwise.
Second, it is not perjury to say something literally
true under oath, even if the effect is to create a
totally false impression. That's just part of the game. If
you ask me under oath if I did such-and-such on Thursday
night, and I know it was a couple minutes past midnight and
technically Friday morning, I will look you in the eye and
say, "No, I did not." That isn't a lie. (And if you didn't
hire a lawyer smart enough not to let me get away with that,
well that's your problem, not mine.)
Third, you always sit down with your witnesses
ahead of time and go over what they intend to say. That
isn't "obstruction of justice" or "subornation of perjury"
-- unless you actually ask them to lie. For one
thing, you have to know in advance what the witnesses are
going to say, so you can plan around it. You also have to
prepare them for any tricks you expect the opposing attorney
to play to get them to say something damaging without
intending to.
Is Bill Clinton above the law? Of course not. After he
leaves office -- there are good reasons not to let him be
charged while he is in office -- he can be indicted
and brought to trial, just like any other citizen. (Of
course, he would have to be proved guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt before a jury of his peers.) But neither is
he below the law. He has the same right to defend
himself when sued -- guilty or innocent -- as you or I.
But this is all lost on the Clinton-haters. For them, it
is an unforgivable outrage that the President does anything
other than to hang his head in shame at being such a
disgusting offence to civilization -- just like all the
other "hippies," "pot-smokers," and "draft-dodgers" from the
60's.
People like that have to believe that the changes of the
last thirty years are the fault of a single malignant
generation, who might somehow be kept down forever -- and
who will, of course, eventually pass away. In truth,
however, the changes they find so obnoxious have been
building for at least a century and show no signs of turning
around -- ever.
Does anyone seriously believe that women will stop getting
educations and taking jobs outside the home? Will they go
back to having lots of children or marrying in their teens?
Of course not.
Nor are we likely to go back to keeping close tracks of our
neighbors' sex lives. Your neighbors don't know what kind of
sex you're having. If they know, they don't care. If they
care, they keep their mouths shut. If they speak up, they're
told to mind their own business. And if they persist, they
may get hauled into court for invasion of privacy. It's
illegal in many places to discriminate against people on the
basis of their marital status, and even where it isn't, not
many of us would care to.
The Clinton-haters and their ilk have been comforting
themselves for thirty years by telling themselves that only
a "cultural elite" was changing its values. Now they find
that a hefty majority of the people aren't ready to follow
them back to traditional values -- back to traditional
patterns of authority and inequality.
The simple fact is that most Americans like the
freedom we have fought so hard to win, and we're
proud of our tolerance and our willingness to let
others live their own lives as they see fit. (Think about
this -- when was the last time you cut someone from
your social circle for getting divorced, or moving
in together unmarried, or otherwise living in ways they
didn't put on T.V. in the '50s?)
In other words, the "culture war" is over -- the 60's
won, for better or worse.
They're losing their scam
Underneath all the ranting and scolding from the Right,
there are real undertones of terror.
For a generation now, they have been running a con on the
American people. They've been exploiting people's fears and
prejudices in a time of rapid social change to win
elections. Of course, once they're in power, they don't
deliver on the social issues that got them in -- they just
pass more tax breaks and other goodies for the wealthy, and
stick it to the middle class. But suddenly, it isn't working
any more.
It's not so much that people have wised up to the scam, but
that they have gradually come to terms with the social
change that used to scare them. It's a bit hard to rile
people up about the evils of divorce when almost everyone
has one or more in their own families -- if they haven't
done it themselves -- or to demonize homosexuals when most
people know at least one out-of-the-closet gay
personally.
With luck, the "social issues" of the next generation will
revolve around tolerance, personal freedom, and -- if we're
really lucky -- equality. It may be possible to win election
by promising to enforce antidiscrimination laws and protect
sexual freedom. It may be possible to run against the
religious right the way Republicans used to run against
"acid, amnesty, and abortion." Of course, this kind of
politics will be more honest than theirs if we can tie the
social issue to an economic program which actually
helps our core constituency, instead of abandoning
them once our side in office.
In most of this site, there are links to resources people
need to take part in building a better world. Check out our
homepage to find out where we're
coming from. (We also have a page for people who
disagree strongly.) Here, we
can only point you to some
links on the current U.S.
political situation and hope you find your own way in this
difficult time.
-- Kincaid
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