He had to escape north to do it, but he finally did it. After 33
years of dodging the Big D, Wild Bill Clinton unburned his draft
card and announced he’s ready to serve. He wants Col. Holmes to
swear him in, and as we speak he’s composing a revised letter to
him to that effect. As he told a conference of Saddam removal
engineers in Toronto, “‘If Iraq came across the Jordan River, I
would grab a rifle and get in the trench and fight and die.” Taken
at face value, the statement suggests he’d be willing to give his
life for Israel. But it all depends on the meaning of every noun
and verb in the sentence — and not in it.
Notice the name of Israel doesn’t appear in his pledge. So whose
side would he be on? Not only that, in whose army? It’s as likely
as not that by volunteering in Toronto he’d be enlisting in the
Canadian Army, which in turn, in keeping with its government’s
multilateralist policies, would more likely be fighting with the
Palestinians and not against them and thus would regard Iraq as a
neutral party at worst and certainly not a foe.
And what if Iraq didn’t come across the Jordan River? It could
just as easily send troops and missiles into Israel via Syria and
Lebanon, thus avoiding the Jordan River. What then? Would Bill have
a new reason to dodge?
Besides, which Jordan River might he have been referring to?
There’s certainly more than one in the world — for instance,
there’s a Jordan River on the Indiana University campus in
Bloomington. Could be that’s where Bill intended to draw a line in
the sand.
And what’s this about grabbing a rifle? Gun laws he himself
signed proscribe that very gesture. Note as well he said nothing
about that rifle’s being loaded. Or coming equipped with a trigger
mechanism and safety lock. Then there would be a 90-month waiting
period before delivery.
Finally, so that we can give peace a chance, let’s just settle
on the meaning of “trench.” Is this World War I he wants to
refight? Or is he seriously willing to challenge world
environmentalists by encouraging trench despoilage of fragile
desert ecology?
As always, then, the Boy President turned Toy Soldier has raised
more questions than there are answers. The biggest mystery,
naturally, is how much he’s being paid to sign up — and how much
of it will come out of the pockets of lowly folk in Losersville,
USA, whose tax dollars have heretofore been designed to keep his
lawyers gainfully employed and those lawyers’ favorite client
mightily entertained.
What happens next isn’t clear, but Bill’s enlistment could go
the way of Marc Rich’s pardon or Bill’s TV talk show. As per usual,
it’s all Israel’s fault. Did it have to launch a preemptive hit on
the Clinton News Network? On Thursday, Israeli cable companies were
given official go-ahead to remove CNN from their programming. That
means any Clinton combat heroics would go unrecorded. If he grabbed
for a rifle, would we really know that’s what he grabbed? The hope
is that Al-Jazeera will give Bill the coverage he craves. Fox News,
meanwhile, will replace CNN in Israeli homes. Henceforth, Bill’s
trenches will be known as Fox holes.
Much as we hate to disappoint, this Bill cannot be our EOW, not
this week, not any week. Presidential and post-presidential
immunity has nothing to do with it. Nor does the lack of a Supreme
Court ruling on the award’s constitutionality in the case of an
impeached president. Rather, it’s simply our insistence here at
Enemy Central on impossibly high standards and our preference for
those who really have demonstrated courage under fire.
Someone like this week’s winner, who has survived who knows how
many bloody Pledge Weeks on PBS. So he’s been arrested in Vermont
on breathalyzed charges of drunken driving. So he’s denied the
bubbly and vino impaired his driving. So he insists his wife and
friends detected no change in his personality. So he hasn’t accused
the Gore campaign of leaking news of his arrest days before our
deadline. None of that bothers us. In fact, it’s what we’d expect
from him and why we respect, honor, and cherish him. It’s just that
we still remember the way he was introduced to a naive nation many
decades ago, shortly after he left the employ of Lyndon Johnson. It
was always as a teetotaling, God-fearing, clean-living, model son
of Texas evangelism. Could it be that Bill Moyers instead chose the
path of sin?
