In this 100th annus mirabilis of Bob Hope, the Boy from
Hope announces he should have been allowed to remain president
until he was 100. Now he’s furious that his successor got to travel
to Poland today. Because he knows that during his brief stay Mr.
Bush will hear friendly locals greet him with cries of “Sto Lat,”
which translates into “May you live 100 years.” No one has ever
wished the Hope Boy that, unless maybe he had a friend named Zuza
Glowacka. (Their song would have been, “Wake up, little Zuza, wake
up.”) Anyway, in Poland he would have had them revise their chant
to “May you be President for a hundred years.” He’s not easy to
please.
Unless he’s handed an adoring review of vicious Sid
Blumenthaler’s disinformational memoir. For instance, the
Washington Monthly’s
reviewer, one David Greenberg, on loan from Slate
magazine, where he occupies the Lubyanka chair, calls it “a
vigorous, bravura performance that brings home again what a tragedy
and travesty Clinton’s impeachment really was.” It’s enough to make
a grown man cry while leaving Ron Brown’s funeral. To be sure,
Greenberg can be brutally critical, calling the 100-year president
“a man comfortable (indeed, perhaps too comfortable) with his
sexuality.” But if you really want to know, impeachment was all
about “the Right’s rearguard efforts to repeal advances in social
tolerance and equality” and about “the central problems with our
political culture.” They remain with us to this very hour and range
“from the Right’s win-at-all-costs methods to its religious wing’s
antipathy to the tolerance of diversity.”
So if we understand right, lying under oath is a way to express
support for the University of Michigan’s admissions policies.
Sexually harassing a government employee constitutes advocacy of
gay rights (no wonder the impeached one liked the idea of “don’t
ask, don’t tell”). Beating up on officers of the court or
intimidating unfriendly witnesses is a sure way to strengthen
equality under the law. It’ll take at least a century to unravel
the underlying meanings of Clintonian culture. Most difficult of
all will be the explanation of how the win-at-all-costs crowd
failed to oust its foe when it had him where it wanted him.
Predictably, the current Bush gang is an easier mark. Janet
Reno, who now sees her chance to return to the Justice Department
until she turns 100, compares its agenda to that of the Nazis who
ran the death camps. Her twin, Sen. Robert Byrd, for a change
invoked the stormtrooper image, saying the president now has “the
boot on the throat” of the Iraqis.” He issues this warning to those
who never listen, never learn: “This Republic is at its greatest
danger in its history because of this Administration.” To think we
faced similar warnings just when Clinton was about to be impeached
and tried.
Janet and Bob’s godchild
E.J Dionne Jr. knows trouble when he sees it too. Bush has
ruined everything, he notes. Once there were greenfields, kissed by
the sun, and valleys in which Democrats used to run. Oh, and blue
skies up above. But not anymore. Where once they “placed a heavy
emphasis on comity and the search for the political center,”
Democrats now have to contend with a “hyperpartisan” Bush who never
compromises, who plays “unprecedented hardball,” who’s brought a
“new ferocity” to Washington, who insists on a ramming through a
“remarkably radical program” — i.e. “his big tax cut bill” for
“the wealthy.” The real worry is what modifiers arrow-minded E.J.
will have left in his quiver next tax cut, which will be nothing
like the piddling one Bush recently signed before escaping to
Europe and laying siege to the former Leningrad. Whoever said
“Mission Accomplished” was in self-denial.
(Immediately suppressed rumor has it that Bush was forced to
back down from a $750 billion cut and ended up signing a bill less
than half that size. But that’s loose talk passed on via what
Dionne terms the Republicans’ “powerful ‘echo chamber’” of “talk
radio, cable television, research institutes and lobbying
networks.”)
There’s a new way to defend the ancien régime at
the New York Times — blame it for all the horrible
anti-Clinton coverage, as Sidney Meanstreet Blumenthal does in his
memoir, or as Joshua Marshall, a friendlier version Blumenthal
clone, does on his website — and then ask
conservatives, apparently the judge and jury in this case: Do you
really want to see Howell Raines et al. fall by the wayside after
all the good Clinton bashing they did in the past?
Heaven forfend. Perhaps in the spirit of denazification we
flaming conservatives can build on Dionne’s vision and propose a
compromise solution. Raines can stay if he wants, but he also has
to become director of the Clinton presidential library in Little
Rock. Or share those duties with Publisher Sulzberger. Or with one
of Rick Bragg’s stringers. And he’ll have to hire newly readerless
and jobless
Maureen Dowd as cleaning lady. That way it can be said that
this week’s EOW was one of those low-wage earners whom the
president so cruelly ignored in the final version of this week’s
tax cut.
