For the longest time the left denied that Bill Clinton was a
liar and philanderer. The infidelity charges against him were
“uncorroborated,” “baloney,” even “unbelievable,” they said.
Gennifer Flowers and all the other greedy connivers lied, they
insisted. Clinton told the truth. Now his obfuscators openly admit
he was a lying philanderer and disclose quite casually that they
knew it all along. “Those particular weaknesses through the years
that I’ve known him were pretty well known,” says former Clinton
flak Lanny Davis. Former Hillary Clinton flak Lisa Caputo says, “I
knew he had demons.” Candor only about 14 years too late.
The left, not the right, is now eager to say that Bill Clinton
was demonically possessed. Clinton’s soul was crowded with demons,
they say. Not so long ago liberals would have called this sort of
demon talk a right-wing smear against Clinton. Suddenly Clinton’s
possession is their consoling therapeutic model for analyzing him.
This is yet another significant advance for the left: They used to
describe the concept of demons as the superstitious babble of
priests; now that psychiatrists speak of them liberals find the
concept soothing. The passivity of it all is so reassuring: demons
victimized the poor man. Rendered helpless by them Clinton needed
an exorcist, not an independent counsel.
Moreover, these demons were fairly considerate, according to the
left, far more considerate than the demons they eyed in Richard
Nixon’s soul. That is, Clinton’s demons only baffled and corrupted
him in his “personal” life, never in his public one, staying clear
of his pardon powers, appointments, and public pronouncements. The
demons were always thoughtful enough not to bedevil him when he was
hard at work for the American people. Nixon’s demons, on the other
hand, left him alone in his personal life, but set upon him with a
fury once he turned to official business.
Benefiting from a sizable stable of religious advisers, family
counselors, and assorted therapists, Clinton has come to terms with
his demonic possession. He has devised a “unified field theory” of
his moral lapses, says Joe Klein of Time magazine. A big
believer in “couples therapy,” Clinton has discovered in such
sessions that his childhood cast a spell over him, driving evil
spirits deep into his soul only to reappear when conservative evil
spirits called out to them during emotionally perilous moments of
his presidency. “Clinton’s theory is that he has always lived
‘parallel’ lives,” writes Klein. “As a child, he hid the deep anger
he felt over his stepfather’s drunken violence behind a
relentlessly sunny façade.” Reeling from his stepfather’s
inappropriate behavior, Clinton says he was “fat, uncool and hardly
popular with the girls” — Monica Lewinsky would make up for this
valuable time lost to childhood trauma. The trauma also made him a
hesitant cyclist: “He was so clumsy,” writes Klein, “he outgrew his
fear of riding a bike without training wheels only as a college
student at Oxford.”
Again, it is important to note that the demons were disciplined.
Clinton’s public life was demon-free. He was fortunate that the
parallel public life was the honest one. Having an affair with a
government intern not all that much older than his daughter in a
government building was merely the private side of the double life
his stepfather burdened him with. So was perjuring himself and
suborning perjury about the affair. So was lying to the American
people month after month. Also thoughtfully, the demons only made
Clinton lie about sex, nothing else. The demons disappeared when he
turned to public business, such as the time he pardoned one of the
world’s leading fugitives, Marc Rich. This decision was “based on
the merits,” the now therapeutically lucid and honest Clinton tells
Klein.
Clinton, writes Klein, has “fitted Lewinsky into his unified
field theory of his life.” Clinton said to Klein, “I think a lot of
it was that I was back to living my parallel lives with a
vengeance, dealing with the Ken Starr thing.”
For the benefit of history, Clinton has given a name to one of
his chief demons. It is Ken Starr. The demons of childhood ran into
a demon from adulthood, causing a pile-up in Clinton’s soul. The
devil — Ken Starr — made him do it.
