[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 64 (Friday, May 20, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 20, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                           SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

                                 ______


                         HON. ROBERT K. DORNAN

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                          Friday, May 20, 1994

  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I commend to the attention of my colleagues 
an editorial by Mark Helprin that appeared in the March 25 edition of 
the Wall Street Journal. The article discusses the many scandals that 
continue to plague President Bill Clinton.

                           School for Scandal

                           (By Mark Helprin)

       Now that the bloom is off the rose, the White House oracles 
     are thumping their naked tails in unison to protest that 
     Whitewater is political. Surely they deserve the Nobel Prize 
     for the discovery that political scandals have a political 
     component, and if they continue their researches perhaps they 
     will also learn that the measure of a scandal is not the 
     material of scandal itself but the political dynamic of which 
     the unfolding scenario is but an expression.
       Though liberals hallucinate much about Watergate, Richard 
     Nixon was forced to resign because he was the first American 
     president to lose a war. The rest was merely the instrumental 
     of the underlying forces, a shadow play. By the same token, 
     Iran-Contra was a result of the complete isolation of 
     Republican political fortunes in the executive, an island in 
     a tide of Democratic power that threatened to wash over it.
       The corruption of Whitewater are like the fruit of a richly 
     bearing tree, and it seems that every day a new dead hand 
     rises from a misty Arkansas lake, but they are not the true 
     measure of Whitewater. Whitewater flourishes only because the 
     Clinton administration is condemned to rest in a politically 
     short-sheeted bed of its own making.
       What a bad idea to begin a messianic presidency with only 
     43% of the popular vote: less than polled by Wilkie, Dewey, 
     Stevenson, Nixon, Ford and Dukakis when they lost. And of 
     that 43% many were unaware of Hillary hiding in the bushes to 
     the left of the candidate, like the 900-pound boyfriend of a 
     voluptuous girl hitchhiker. As soon as Hillary got into the 
     car, she bumped out all but the president's core 
     constituency, the 25% to 30% who will be with him to the end.
       You would think that with such a narrow base the White 
     House ``Hillarys'' (highly inexperienced left-liberal 
     academic righteous yuppies) would have trodden carefully. But 
     they did not, for their abiding faith in the power of their 
     own intelligence to manage the unmanageable amounts to 
     nothing more than abject stupidity, and they acted 
     accordingly. No president in living memory has exulted in his 
     victory with the same immodesty, the immediate punishment for 
     this being that the early Clinton administration came to 
     resemble a science fiction character who ages 50 years in 
     less than a minute.
       They were blinded to their limitations by the slavish 
     obedience of a press that, tempting the fates, portrayed the 
     Clintons as saviors, saints, and divine beings, literally 
     with angel's wings. And though flackery is just a rubber 
     band--the more you stretch it out, the harder it snaps back--
     it did the impossible. It quintupled the arrogance of the 
     most arrogant people in America, a triumphalist coterie of 
     graduate students who accord to the hard left the same uneasy 
     respect that most people reserve for the clergy, and grow 
     teary-eyed over bats, squirrels and caribou as with barely 
     concealable pleasure they sacrifice whole regions of 
     rednecks.
       This is not merely the arrogance of victory and of youth, 
     but of lawyers. Lawyers, like undertakers, meddle decisively 
     in everyone's business, but only after it fails. Most are 
     redeemed by understanding that their power comes from this 
     peculiar circumstance, but Clintillians seem to think it 
     comes from a Christ-like glow within themselves. Is it 
     surprising that they believe their first task is to heal the 
     sick? And that to do so they need only redesign the country 
     after they have given it ``meaning,'' banished its greed, and 
     put it on the information superhighway to lap-top heaven? 
     They are the missionaries, and we are the Hottentots.
       Not everyone in this group is as callow as the president's 
     media director, who told the Journal last year of his plans 
     for ```BC-TV,' Bill Clinton, on TV, 24 hours a day.'' And not 
     everyone is a networked crony or a token Zoe or a chicken 
     tycoon, all put in place (if not yet confirmed) in the most 
     incompetent explosion of patronage since Caligula appointed 
     his horse.
       For at least half a dozen grown-ups have agreed to help 
     Bill Clinton, mostly eminent retreads who in their days of 
     glory were Carter's Little Liver Pills, and who, even now, 
     after all these years, still move about on little marshmallow 
     feet--Les Aspin, impotent even at his own speciality of 
     gutting the military; Warren Christopher, breaking into every 
     foreign garden and running away when the dog barks; David 
     Gergen, hand welded to the ejection lever; Donna Shalala, 
     praying that the next state dinner she won't be seated next 
     to George Hamilton; Lloyd Cutler, happy but worried, as if 
     Neil Diamond had been asked to conduct the Berlin 
     Philharmonic.
       Even the grown-ups cannot save Bill Clinton from himself, 
     if only because they cannot have any idea of how to carry the 
     quicksilver from the flames. Granted, in questions of 
     sincerity the president is perpetually condemned to be 
     upstaged by his vice president, though for the country's sake 
     let us hope that Al Gore is not as sincere as he appears to 
     be, for with sincerity like his, who needs fraud? Fraud is 
     what Whitewater, and the administration, are all about: 
     fraud--pious, tawdry, financial, sexual, political, plain, 
     simple and habitual.
       Fraud. Somewhere between the core of the left and the 43% 
     plurality that made Bill Clinton commander in chief are the 
     American voters who thought they were supporting a ``New 
     Democrat'' and wound up instead with slightly more buttoned 
     up version of the Village People. Boris Yeltsin, who ought to 
     know whereof he speaks, calls Bill Clinton a ``socialist,'' 
     and General Jaruzelski, the former military dictator of 
     Poland, looking more than ever like one of the three blind 
     mice, says that he still retains the values of the left and 
     that, ``Actually, in Clinton's program I see elements I like 
     a lot.''
       Fraud. Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution states that 
     ``We would be condemning him if he didn't pull back [from his 
     campaign promises], because he would be an irresponsible 
     president.'' That is, the president had to lie to you for 
     your own good. The president lies responsibly. Not only does 
     he remain morally superior when he lies, his lying actually 
     makes him morally superior. This goes beyond the normal 
     corruptions of American politics onto the airless and 
     unfamiliar plains of totalitarianism.
       Fraud. In a wonderful reversal of Boss Tweed's immense 
     public outlays for ``Brooms, etc.,'' the president tells the 
     New York times that he does not want a congressional inquiry 
     into Whitewater because ``it would not be worth the money it 
     would cost.'' He doesn't want a congressional inquiry into 
     Whitewater, because he wants to save money. Does the 
     president think he leads a nation of idiots? The answer is 
     yes, but he is just cautious enough to speak indirectly, 
     when, of his wife, he says: ``If the rest of the people in 
     this country--if everybody in this country had a character 
     as strong as hers, we wouldn't have half the problems 
     we've got today.''
       These are not the words of Louis XVI, Juan Peron, or 
     Nicolae Ceausescu, but of the president of the United States 
     defending his overbearing wife by insulting the rest of the 
     country. Had a Republican president said this, he would have 
     been put in the ice cream case within minutes. Nor has any 
     president of sound mind and body ever had the temerity to 
     install the first lady in a virtual co-presidency in which 
     she stalks about the country giving speeches, appears before 
     Congress, supervises at least one cabinet department, and is 
     the chief of his (her?) administration's most ambitious 
     initiative. Though in Whitewater mode it is to the Clinton's 
     advantage to dismiss this with offended innocence, they and 
     their supporters have been trumpeting it for more than a 
     year.
       The president has reinvented government, and the United 
     States of America now has not one chief executive, but one 
     and a half. This rather profound change is not the result of 
     a constitutional amendment or even informed debate. It just 
     happened. It has embarrassed Congress and escaped the 
     condemnation of an anesthetized press. It is the solid and 
     identifiable core of an otherwise mercurial cloud of hubris, 
     arrogance and petty corruption. It is the ultimate expression 
     of the nature of this presidency, in which the rules exist 
     only for everyone else, because the work of the elect in 
     remaking the world is too important to fetter with laws and 
     truth.
       Were it not for the fact that the president's own party 
     dominates Congress, the press, the universities, public 
     education, Hollywood, publishing, local and state government, 
     the unions, and bureaucracies everywhere, the assumption by 
     Hillary Rodham Clinton of the powers of an office to which 
     she did not accede would be a constitutional crisis. It 
     should be a constitutional crisis. But it is not. It is, 
     instead, sublimated in scandal. It is, instead, the driving 
     force in the conflict of which Whitewater is but the 
     instrument, the mere expression, and the shadow play.

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