Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [57]
Joe Lockhart, former Clinton press secretary, describes the GOP’s SOBs’ SOP:
What they’d do is they would use the power of the subpoena to get document after document out of the White House that they could then distort and leak. And it was warfare. I mean, it was from the very first day Bill Clinton went in there, there was a declared war on him.
Why did they hate Clinton so much? I think it’s because we—and by that I mean Bill, Hillary, and myself—I think we represented everything they despised. We were young. We were charismatic. Bill Clinton, for example, “was tall and handsome . . . [and] had a vitality that seemed to shoot out of his pores.”3 The mauling of Clinton was payback for Nixon, Bork, Iran-Contra, and Clarence Thomas (every time we caught them doing something wrong, they got even madder), but more than that, it was payback for the sixties: Freedom Riding, bra burning, pot smoking, free loving, tree hugging, draft dodging, Woodstock attending, Woodstock overdosing, God not-fearing, and carrot cake. They’ve never forgiven us for carrot cake.
I don’t defend everything that happened in the sixties. Just as I don’t defend everything that happened in any decade. The current decade, for instance, is not off to the best of starts. But to the right, the Clintons embodied all of a generation’s vices and none of its virtues. The Clintons’ energy, their intellectual intensity, their compassion for those on the margins of society, their fundamental belief that the world could be made a better place—the right found all of these extremely irritating.
So they weren’t content just to call him a murderer and a rapist. The fact that Clinton continued to be successful and popular left only one option. Clinton had to be removed. Determined not to sink to his level and have the President “conveniently” run over by a train, the Republicans took the high road and impeached him on blow job charges.
The story of Clinton’s impeachment has been told many times and in many ways, though not yet in an opera, which I believe is the form to which it is best suited. One version of the story came from Kenneth Starr, who made his own perverse contribution to the tone in Washington with his gratuitously pornographic Starr Report, which my publisher says I cannot quote if I want this book sold in Wal-Mart.
The tone that Bush had promised to change had been created by his own party. His pledge to change that tone contained both a promise and a threat. Elect me and the tone will improve because I am a consensus builder, a uniter, not a divider, and a compassionate conservative. Elect Gore, and we’ll nuke the living fuck out of him just like we did the last guy. America, the choice is yours.
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Did the Tone Change?
No.
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Why Did Anyone Think It Would Change?
Everything you need to know about the legitimacy of Bush’s claim to the moral high ground can be summed up by the conduct of his campaign in the South Carolina Republican primary.
You may remember that Senator John McCain, like Bush a Vietnam-era fighter pilot (with one key difference—McCain actually fought in his fighter), had roundly defeated the Texas governor in New Hampshire. McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” was gathering momentum. Something had to be done.
In February of 2000, lucky Republican voters in South Carolina began receiving phone calls assessing their feelings about a series of important issues. A typical call began like this:
CALLER: Hi. I’m calling from an independent polling company and I was wondering if I could have a minute of your time to conduct a survey.
UNSUSPECTING VOTER: Uh . . . sure.
CALLER: Great! If you knew that Senator John McCain was a cheat and a liar and a fraud, and that he has fathered an illegitimate black child, would you be more likely to vote for him or less likely to vote for him?
UNSUSPECTING VOTER: Hmm. Probably less.
As you might have gathered, the calls were not actually made by independent polling companies.