"GROW UP, CONSERVATIVES"

“GROW UP, CONSERVATIVES”

Jerry Harkins

We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we'll do it not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring people to their senses.
                                                                                                              –Mario Cuomo

            History and myth are often hard to tell apart because of all the glitter that surrounds current events.  The media love that glitter because it is easy, it attracts attention and it sells ads.  Mario Cuomo was right about this as he was about so many things.  Thus, I ask you to bear with me while I bring out a bit of modern history for a curtain call.  History without the glitter.

            Once upon a time, February 12 was a holiday honoring the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.  But Congress, never noted for wisdom or common sense, decided there were too many holidays for a month that had only twenty-eight days to begin with so they killed it in a comedy of legislative errors which also moved Washington’s Birthday to the third Monday.  Now George was born on February 22 and the third Monday can never come later than the 21st.  Congress intended that this day should honor all Presidents but somehow Virginia objected and that desire was omitted from the final version of the bill.  Given that most of our Presidents have been fools, knaves or worse, I think that was a lucky mistake and I now propose to restore the twelfth as a national holiday.  It seems to me that February, the bleak mid-winter, needs as many holidays as it can get.  I propose to call the twelfth Impeachment Day.  On that date in 1999, the Senate of the United States acquitted Bill Clinton of perjury and obstruction of justice, the last two charges standing from the cornucopia of complaints lodged against him by Red Meat Republicans.  It was the final chapter of a story that had more serious consequences than we thought at the time. 

            For many of the players, the impeachment drama remains a dark blot hovering over the first sentence of their obituaries.  It will identify them forever with an embarrassing malfeasance that will eclipse whatever they did before or after.  For most of them, of course, it is only one of several such blots.  There is, for example, Ken Starr exercising his adolescent taste for salacious prose by drawing up a fantastical 445 page indictment complete with 480 footnotes.  Nor will we ever forget the Mighty Mormon, Orin Hatch, who for months went around muttering inanely, ”This isn’t about sex.”  Or Henry Hyde [1], the Ayatollah of Illinoiah, the Lead Manager of the House Impeachment Committee, the adulterer and home wrecker who told the Senate his job was “…to tell, nay shout truth to power.”  Whose emotional summary invoked the heroes of Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima, and Desert Storm and then ended with the gushy sentiment, “My solitary, solitary hope is that 100 years from today people will look back at what we've done and say, ‘they kept the faith.’  I'm done.”   This is the guy who, when confronted with his own sexual escapades merely said,  “The statute of limitations has long since passed on my youthful indiscretions.”  After all,  he was only 41 when he began his affair with Cherie Snodgrass, a married woman with three small children.  Cherie was 29 at the time and described by a friend as a “glamour queen.”  And, of course, there was Newt Gingrich, currently on his third wife, a woman 29 years his junior with whom he was having a torrid extramarital affair while he was leading the impeachment coup against Clinton.  He must love Calista though because he converted to Catholicism to marry her.  He explains his serial infidelities as “not appropriate” but driven by “how passionately I felt about this country.”  Patriotic peccadilloes?  The list goes on:  the sanctimonious, the hypocritical, the self-righteous, the unctuous, the mendacious, the holier-than-thou.  In short, the Army of Virtuous Christians disgorging itself of its worst nightmares.

            Fortunately, there were moments of comic relief.  We were treated to the stuff of soap opera as Pat Moynihan frenetically searched for a single word to define his disgust with the President’s behavior without lending gravitas to the jejune crusade of the hypocrites.  And Chief Justice Rehnquist all dolled up in a black robe with four gold stripes on each arm, a design he borrowed from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta to symbolize the solemnity of the occasion and the momentousness of his own role therein.  Or the late Senator Ted Stevens delicately picking his nose on national television—with his thumb no less, pinky fully extended.  Ted was representing the great state of Alaska where they have to wear mittens nine months a year, so it was very much a homespun skill.

            Bill Clinton probably did perjure himself and do everything else he could think of to obstruct what purported to pass for justice.  That much was obvious at the time but it took the Special Prosecutor nearly three years and $100 million to say so.  In fact it was so obvious that Mr. Clinton was dissembling that no one in the whole world believed the poor bastard when he went on national television to announce, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”  His tortured denials were pro forma only.  The unvarnished truth might have sounded like this, “Of course I did it and I had a lot of fun doing it.  No one got hurt.  No disaster befell the country.  It does not even rise to the level of triviality.  It’s nobody’s business except mine, my family’s and Ms. Lewinsky’s.  I apologize to them.  No one else needs or merits my apology.  Next question.”  All of which was true and none of which would have appeased the Lilliputian hypocrites who beset him.  In fact, Mr. Clinton did sort-of apologize on September 11, 1998 at a White House Prayer Breakfast attended by religious leaders.  He said, “I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned.  It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine -- first and most important, my family, also my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people.”   The next day, The Washington Post reported:

By the end of his speech, many of the clergy said they had experienced a rare moment of the spirit stirring and were moved to offer their pastoral protection.

"It was a truly holy moment for me," said Rajwant Singh, director of the National Sikh Center in Washington.

"I felt it was a religious experience," said the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches.

"It was a scene of biblical proportions," said Rev. Robert Franklin, director of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

            Please note that the President was apologizing for his sins, not for high crimes and misdemeanors.  He paraphrased the classic plea of King David in Psalm 51, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”  Kind of an awkward translation but, like David, Mr. Clinton was not repenting for adultery as much as for forgetting that the divine right of kings does not exempt one from the ten commandments.

It is of course a whole other sin to tell a lie but I don’t think Mr. Clinton was apologizing for perjuring himself either.  Rather it sounded like he was ashamed for being unfaithful to the vow he made the day he married—the part that says, “…forsaking all others.”  If so, he was right to be sorry.  A person’s word should be his or her bond.  Lying about it, however, was never an important issue whether he did it under oath or otherwise.  He wasn’t hoping to deceive anyone, all he was trying to do was maintain a modicum of dignity.  We’ve all been there, especially the Republican mountebanks who wailed most loudly about the desecration of family values.

            As I have often said, moral theology is a subtle discipline but the first thing you learn is that, in order to be evil, a sin must actually hurt somebody.  A victimless sin may still be a sin but it is not evil in human terms.  The same thing is true of a law.  A violation becomes serious only when somebody gets hurt.  Lying about one’s sex life may be illegal but only if you think the Roundheads were right and the duty of government is to define and defend public and private morals.  Alcohol is abused by a small minority of people and causes a great deal of social trouble and expense.  But “Demon Rum” was never diabolical except to people like Anthony Comstock and Carrie Nation who thought it could be legislated out of existence.  Perjury is certainly a crime and so is obstruction of justice.  But they are technical crimes—they offend against an abstract principle, the so-called “rule of law.” In moral theology, you owe the truth only to those who have a right to know the truth.  In this case, even the  court had no moral right to the truth about Bill Clinton’s sex life except as it directly affected the plaintiff, Ms. Jones.  Which it did not.  Not a shining moment of high virtue to be sure but hardly an impeachable offense.

            Hatch and Hyde knew all this and they and their cohorts did not care a fig about anything quite so technical as perjury or obstruction.  They were putting the President on trial for adultery, not to convict him which was never in the cards, but to embarrass him.  This was not high crimes and misdemeanors, it was celebrity gossip.  Sex sells.  The Roundheads wanted to sew a big red A on his breast pocket.  The whole idea of sex in the oval office actually turned them on and they were hard pressed to hide their guilty pleasures.

            Okay, we’re coming to the point of this essay.  First, though, in the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I think Bill Clinton was among the best presidents the USA ever had—a smart, charismatic, compassionate leader who was despised by the elitists of the political and media establishments but much beloved by everybody else.  I think it might be a good idea to take a jackhammer to Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson on Mount Rushmore and replace them with FDR, Harry Truman and Bill Clinton.  It’s only an opinion but I base it on an assessment of the complexity of the problems they faced and their ingenuity in addressing them.  Mr. Clinton won some and lost some, all the while suffering the indignity of having to deal with the likes of Newt Gingrich’s temper tantrums and the racism of the elites.

            We’re getting closer.  I used to think The New York Times despised Bill Clinton even though it endorsed him twice. It never had a kind editorial word for him.  When it was forced to admit he had done something right, there was always a “but,” always the sense that it was damning him with faint praise.  But I was wrong.  It was not so much hatred as it was fear.  This smart, uppity, sexually voracious Southerner fed into the worst nightmares of editors whose mothers had lived in constant fear that their black maids would steal their silverware, contaminate their China and seduce their husbands.  Make no mistake about this.  As Toni Morrison pointed out, Clinton was our first black President.  “After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness:  single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving farm boy from Arkansas.”  With certain kinds of Americans, Bill Clinton never had a chance.  Day after day, The Times excoriated him as a “low rent” pervert.  The day after the House Judiciary Committee released his testimony before the Starr Chamber, it piled on with seventeen signed stories in the news hole, a full page of Monica’s testimony, a full page of letters between various lawyers, an 8-page transcript of the testimony itself, an editorial, seven letters to the editor, three op-ed pieces, and a sidebar on the famous dress.  It lacked only a partridge in a pear tree but was otherwise a full, ranting, raving lynch mob.  The Times was not duped by the red meat radicals.  It went willingly, enthusiastically, to wallow in the journalistic swill.  The editors knew he would not and should not be convicted.  They knew his offense was not the end of the world.  They merely wanted to take him down a peg or two, to put him in his place.

            Does this sound like a conspiracy theory of history?  Well, it was a conspiracy.  It was orchestrated by a coterie of wealthy right-wing activists to drive Mr. Clinton from the White House because they did not accept the legitimacy of his election.  The New York Times (and much of the rest of what passes these days for the fourth estate) and the Republican Party merely fronted for them.  The right wing always works through puppets it can buy or seduce.  In 2000, it was a bunch of operatives in Florida that delivered the election to the Supreme Court and, hence, to George W. Bush.  Four years later, they hired another bunch of thugs to libel and slander the military service of John Kerry on behalf of a Republican draft dodger.  Again in 2008, they spent a small fortune on rumors and innuendos that Barack Obama was not American-born, that he was a closet Muslim.  In 2012, Governor Romney’s entire campaign was based on a litany of big and blatant lies.

            Okay, we have arrived.  There is evidence that America is awakening from the long nightmare of reactionary right wing politics.  We may be past the worst of it.  The defeat of the radicals in the 2012 elections represents to me the culmination of a process that began with the acquittal of Bill Clinton in 1999.  People have finally realized that the crazies and the anarchists will stop at nothing to spew their hatred and promote their big lies.  For the moment the worst of contemporary conservatism is in retreat. [2]  Those of us who think progressivism is the mainstream of historical evolution must take no pleasure in this.  We remember with appropriate humility the mindless antics of the extreme left during the 1960’s.

            Extremism—of the right or the left—in the name of liberty or for any other reason is always a threat to a community’s ability to govern itself and, therefore, to freedom itself.  It is particularly dangerous when pressure groups combine to advance otherwise unrelated agendas.  We witnessed this in 1994 when Newt Gingrich engineered a sweeping turnaround in the House of Representatives and then led his fanatical new troops in a march down Pennsylvania Avenue waving copies of their so-called Contract With America.  They represented virtually every right wing issue from pro-guns to anti-abortion.  They included isolationists, fundamentalists, Promise Keepers, anti-immigrants, and opponents of affirmative action, environmentalism and the minimum wage.  The only thing they seemed to have in common was that they were all middle aged white males without a sense of humor.  The question, of course, is who voted for these people?

Notes
1.   For example, the first sentence of Hyde’s obituary in The New York Times, November 30, 2007, read, “Former Representative Henry Hyde, the powerful Illinois Republican who won battles to prohibit federal financing of abortions and to impeach President Bill Clinton but who failed to persuade the U.S. Senate to convict Clinton and remove him from office, died Thursday in Chicago.”  His hometown paper, the Chicago Sun-Times,wrote, “Former Rep. Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who steered the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton and championed government restrictions on the funding of abortions, has died.”
2.  Obviously I was as wrong as a person can be to think that the 2012 election represented a turning point in American politics.  Four years later, the Republicans elected Donald Trump as the result of an elaborate conspiracy.  I take a small measure of comfort in the fact that the Don actually lost the election by more than three million popular votes.  Fortunately I learned to accept disappointment early in life by rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers.