Washington — We are living through grim times. High-ranking
government officials warn that the terror of September 11 will be
repeated. Sources I rely on for intelligence data are visibly
alarmed. Even as I write, more suicide attacks are being planned
against America by those Islamic fundamentalists and Palestinian
nihilists who have fastened on an instrument of religious warfare
unseen since the grisly time of the Aztecs, human sacrifice.
Yet even in grim times a civilized people can find something to
laugh about. In his war memoir Winston Churchill recalls that when
the Nazis began the blitz the British response was first to ensure
national security, then to return to conviviality. Laughter is the
best therapy. We Americans recognize this. Consequently who could
be surprised when our debonair President took a breather from the
war on terror to spoof his grand-standing predecessor? He sent Bill
Clinton as Washington’s representative to East Timor’s independence
ceremonies.
The President knows how to deal with a pest. For weeks Clinton
has been popping up in the news whining about the Florida vote
count, fretting about imagined slights, and complaining that the
Bush Administration never seeks his foreign policy guidance. So the
puckish son of George I sends Clinton in his baggy pants off to
East Timor, where he can wear a funny hat and ogle the girls. I bet
George II telephoned Bill in his Harlem office and told him to
bring a ukulele and expect the girls to be wearing grass
skirts.
That the capital of the new country is called Dili just adds to
the joke. I can hear the President now, joshing with his advisers,
“And guys get this. Condi Rice tells me East Timor’s capital is
called Dili. The next Clinton news stories are going to be
datelined, ‘Dili.’” And so they were. From Dili our great big
lovable lug of an Ex-President actually told his audience at the
opening of our Dili embassy, “It [East Timor’s independence] took
too long to come, but now it is here, I hope we can all make the
most of it.”
“Make the most of it”? Well Bill, party on; but first he blamed
America for not being “sufficiently sensitive in the beginning or
for a long time.” He could have been talking about almost anything.
For over a decade Bill has been apologizing for America’s historic
behavior in Africa, in Central America, in wars with the Red
Indian, in its treatment of various endangered species and
environmental shockers. The only thing the impeached Ex-President
has not apologized for is his personal treatment of various woman,
some very young, others, such as Juanita Broaddrick, very
bruised.
Clinton’s post-presidential years hold great promise. Harry
Truman spent his golden years reading history and writing a pretty
good memoir. Ike played golf and played the role of elder
statesman. Richard Nixon read books, wrote books, and advanced from
disgraced president to elder statesman. Jimmy Carter became a
carpenter and won a tortured title emblematic of the liberal
Democrats’ tortured condition, “America’s greatest ex-president.”
With Clinton the tortured condition takes a new, more preposterous
twist. He gives inane speeches and claims to be writing a memoir,
but frequent news stories suggest that this the middle-aged
arrested adolescent is actually only doing what many disturbed
teenagers do, hanging out.
He parties in the Big Apple, in L.A. and in London, where he
often stiffs his hosts for the tab. Yet his junkets are not without
a serious goal. He is as intent as Alger Hiss once was on proving
his innocence of all the charges against him — even the ones he
has admitted to in court. Like Hiss, he has attracted a loyal
following on the left. I can understand the left’s support of the
accused Communist, Hiss; its support of a president who moved the
Democrats to the political center is more complicated. The left
cannot admit Clintons’ critics were correct and has fallen for his
claim that the critics were “the right.” The similarities do not
end here. Books are being written in his defense.
Thus we have this report
from the Los Angeles Times. While visiting with ex-White
House aides in Los Angeles, Clinton recently quoted prodigiously
from David Brock’s admittedly mendacious and inaccurate book about
Clinton’s critics. New refutations of its contents appear
regularly, for instance, a
report in California’s East Bay Express, proving that
Brock lied in his book about his college conversion to conservatism
and about articles he claimed to have written. Nonetheless, reports
the Times. “Clinton, who seems to have practically
committed passages to memory, told his former aides whenever they
feel down, they should read Brock’s book to illuminate anew what
they were all fighting against for eight years, and as a reminder
of what ‘unhappy’ people their counterparts on the right truly
are.”
One wonders which passages Clinton takes satisfaction in. He
claims his critics practice tabloid journalism, but Brock’s book is
as reckless with fact as any tabloid story. Yet thousands on the
left take satisfaction in Brock’s book too. They have made it a
bestseller for weeks. It sits on their coffee tables. As with those
who read the tabloids, Brock’s readers know Martians never
impeached Bill Clinton, but they want to believe something
dreadful happened and so they read Brock. Bill Clinton quotes
Brock. I wonder if he quoted Brock in faraway Dili.
