...Sidney Blumenthal insists that Clinton was not unduly distracted by his accusers, that even during his darkest hours he ably fashioned policy, mastered the budget, and came down hard on terrorism. Indeed, Blumenthal makes a special point of highlighting Clinton's awareness of the growing dangers of Osama bin Laden and violence against Americans: Clinton demanded funds to defend critical infrastructure, pushed money-laundering and counterterrorism bills, and, above all, integrated these initiatives into a comprehensive vision of "indispensable" American leadership. The problem was that the media--and all of us--cared more about impeachment.


The scandal-mongering that beclouded Clinton's presidency represented both a venting of the Right's rage at liberalism's quiet victories on the issues of sex, race, and religion and an evasion of conservatism's own political weaknesses on those issues.

The main flaw of Toobin's estimable A Vast Conspiracy was its rickety thesis that the impeachment was about the takeover of politics by legal stratagems. The Clinton Wars more accurately locates not "law" (which was always a smokescreen) but rather a culture war at the heart of the saga. This view is not a partisan one. Henry Hyde was only one of many Republicans to endorse it, while many liberals and Leftists had a hard time recognizing that the impeachment was about matters larger than Clinton personally.

At one point in The Clinton Wars, the president himself proposes to Blumenthal that the Right just wants power for its own sake, a claim that echoes the popular view that the impeachment, and the 2000 election recount fight (which Blumenthal also retells), were pure power struggles in which each side did whatever it could to win. But while those two critical episodes of the Clinton presidency do underscore the new conservative resolve to win power at any cost--a resolve intensified by Clinton's successes--the thesis fails to reckon with the Right's real and specific agenda.

Another unsatisfactory explanation for Clinton-hating is that it stemmed from a dislike of Clinton's personal qualities, notably his verbal evasiveness and deceptions. Countless other politicians of all stripes are equally slippery and mendacious but don't incur the same wrath. Nor does Clinton's record provide a clean answer; though mocked as a 1960s anything-goes liberal, he governed mostly as a moderate, devising a new Democratic rhetoric, vision, and program on such issues as the budget, welfare, crime, and national defense that severed the party's last ties to its 1972 McGovernite identity.

Where Clinton truly offended the Right was on the cluster of issues surrounding sex, race, and religion. Notwithstanding the post-1960s backlash against "permissiveness," Americans have grown increasingly broadminded on these matters, as Alan Wolfe showed in One Nation, After All (1998). Clinton not only championed toleration in his policies (at least most of the time) but, more important, he personally embodied the new ethic. He was the first Baby Boomer to win the presidency; a white Southerner at ease with blacks; the husband of a confident career woman; an avid learner who liked the company of Jewish intellectuals; and a man comfortable (indeed, perhaps too comfortable) with his sexuality.

Clinton's attackers, on the other hand, mostly came from those elements unreconciled to the new toleration. When Bob Barr disparaged Clinton supporters as not being "real Americans," when Tom DeLay said he pushed impeachment to promote a "biblical worldview" that Clinton didn't share, or when Ken Starr touted his own marital fidelity and his daily singing of Christian hymns, they revealed their own alienation from the emerging live-and-let-live consensus. In this context, the Right's more sinister swipes at the Jewish intellectual Blumenthal--not to mention its resolve to press ahead with impeachment in the face of public outcry--becomes more comprehensible. These are the death throes of a retrograde morality.

"multiple untruths"

The "multiple untruth" need not be a particular large untruth but can instead be a long series of loosely related untruths, (The Clinton Smear Campaign), or a single untruth with many facets. In either case, the whole is composed of so many parts that anyone wishing to set the record straight will discover that it is utterly impossible to keep all elements of the falsehood in mind at the same time. Anyone making the attempt may seize upon a few selected statements and show them to be false, but doing this may leave the impression that only the statements selected are false and that the rest are true..An even greater advantage of the "multiple untruth" is that statements shown to be false can be repeated over and over agian with impunity because no one will remember which statements have been disproved and which haven't
~ Senator Joe McCarthy

...Too many journalists--Susan Schmidt, Tim Russert, Jackie Judd of ABC--remained captive to the Republicans' script. (Russert, Blumenthal suggests, once even lied to protect Starr. After attributing a story to Starr's office at a moment when Starr was under fire for leaking, Russert publicly insisted that he had ascribed his tip to "congressional" sources.) Perhaps these reporters had become too dependent on their right-wing sources. Maybe they had grown convinced of Clinton's arrant immorality. Most likely, they simply lacked the nimbleness of mind to see the issue in its broader context; superficiality and groupthink remain the cardinal sins of press corps, especially television reporters. Yet in the end these journalists were left marooned with their sources on a rock of Clinton-hating long after the public had repaired to higher ground...

>>>“never before had a sitting president been so assiduously investigated about a matter that had occurred before his election.”<<<

...America is at one of those tricky junctures when the forces of fierce reaction are wobbling and the forces of possible reform strain to find their footing. As the right reduces itself to fiery self-caricature and Bush’s support subsides, some who would relieve us of the burden of his rule stir from their despair and think they see a green light to rush headlong leftward. It is, then, an appropriate time to review the political history that brought us Bush’s version of Reaganism without Reagan.

American politics over the past decade are incomprehensible unless you grasp the intensity of Clinton-hatred, its motives, sources and channels.

To do so requires, among other things, reckoning with the only Democratic presidency to have succeeded in winning two terms since Franklin D. Roosevelt, that of William Jefferson Clinton...

Such a reckoning, in turn, requires an intellectual confrontation with the hatred that greeted and savaged Clinton, ruptured his reign and escorted the Bush restoration into office. Indeed, American politics over the past decade are incomprehensible unless you grasp the intensity of Clinton-hatred, its motives, sources and channels.

An anatomy of Clintonophobia

In late May 1993, a calendar called “365 Reasons to Hate Bill Clinton” was already on sale in right-wing bookshops. Clinton had moved into the White House a bare four months before. Who had already divined 365 reasons to hate him, and why?

The claim that the scandals caused the hatred runs afoul of the fact that the hatred preceded most of the scandals. True, early in the 1992 campaign, scandal sheets funded by Clinton-hating fat cats had wound up the volume on charges that Clinton was not only the longtime lover of the lounge singer Gennifer Flowers but a drug-smuggler, a serial adulterer, a rapist, and the father of a black baby.

More consequentially, the New York Times had jumped in with a front-page story implying a sleazy though barely penetrable real-estate partnership between the governor and a fast-talking investor whose building society, founded years later (a fact that the headline obscured), was subject to state regulation.

Whitewater allegations, implications and offshoots cascaded through the respectable news, promoted by Clinton-hating Republicans in Congress and the special prosecutor’s office. No spin-off charge was too petty – “Travelgate”, “Filegate” – to be dubbed an auxiliary case of White House malfeasance.

When the relevant federal agency cleared the Clintons in 1995, major news organisations (including the New York Times) could barely be troubled to notice. It didn’t seem to matter that, after years of grand juries and headlines, no one was ever convicted of any charge stemming from the Clintons’ failed investment in Ozark real estate. As Sidney Blumenthal writes without exaggeration, “never before had a sitting president been so assiduously investigated about a matter that had occurred before his election.”


For the scorched-earth right, Bill Clinton was, if not the literal Antichrist, a close approximation: the perjurious, adulterous doper Slick Willie, admitted draft dodger and reputedly serial womaniser who had opposed the Vietnam war, visited Moscow, and married a card-carrying feminist.



By the second half of Clinton’s first term from 1992-96, the incoming Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich, was calling Clinton “the enemy of normal Americans” and forcing the government to a standstill. Slash-and-burn criminalisation was all the rage on talk radio and in the bought-and-paid-for right-wing press. Establishment pundits relayed such charges with glee while prettying them up as “the character issue.”

For the scorched-earth right, Bill Clinton was, if not the literal Antichrist, a close approximation: the perjurious, adulterous doper Slick Willie, admitted draft dodger and reputedly serial womaniser who had opposed the Vietnam war, visited Moscow, and married a card-carrying feminist who only belatedly took his name and was the first professional woman to take up First Ladyship in the White House. Clinton was, in their eyes, the 1960s incarnate, and worse: he won elections (five out of seven in Arkansas, including his last four in a row). He promised, now, to baste together the left and centre of the Democratic Party.

The hard right viewed such successes as infringements upon their God-given prerogatives. They did not mourn, they organised. The story of how they succeeded is the shank of recent American political history.

Clinton did a great job with many things I thought.

But one thing I questioned him on was his weak responce to USS Cole, and the Bombing of our embassys in Africa.

(hopes his timetable is correct for those events)