Get your own Free Home PageWherever the Washington slime eventually settles, Americans should have learned once and for all that character counts and that there is no separation between a person's private life and his or her public life.
Just as a person has only one body, he has only one life and one character. A person who lies and cheats in his private life will lie and cheat in his public life. A person incompetent to manage his private affairs will be incompetent to manage public affairs.
How this silly notion that the same person could be a devil in private and a saint in public lodged itself in so many heads defies rational explanation. Certainly history provides no such examples unless you want to state that Adolf Hitler was a good fellow because he liked dogs and was a vegetarian. Who but a fool would think that a man who would betray his wife and the mother of his children would be faithful and steadfast to an anonymous public?
William Jefferson Clinton is a liar, a manipulator, a philanderer, an adulterer and a draft-dodger. He was before he was elected, and he is today. Except among naive and partisan fanatics, his credibility is zero.
When Clinton leaves the office, the White House will need to be fumigated. No president has ever before brought such disgrace to the office and to the country. Richard Nixon broke laws because, in his paranoid mind, he saw his enemies as enemies of the country. Some of them were, too. American communists never forgave Nixon for nailing the Soviet spy Alger Hiss.
The purpose of the Watergate burglary was to determine if Communist Cuba was financing the Democratic campaign. The other break-ins were directed at people who were leaking classified documents during a war. The coverups were Nixon's attempts to protect people he considered loyal. But Clinton's loyalty is only to himself. If he leaves office before his term is up, it will be because of sordid acts of adultery with a girl young enough to be his daughter and an endless stream of lies designed to protect no one but himself.
Clinton, being a psychopathic person, will not voluntarily leave office. If he goes, Democrats will have to force him by threatening to vote for impeachment. Republican partisans, naturally, would prefer that he stay in office. Otherwise, Al Gore will have a two-year jump on the presidential election in 2000. The worst possible scenario for Gore is to be forced to remain the loyal subordinate of a thoroughly disgraced and ineffective president.
As much as I disagree with Gore's political ideas, it would not be in the best interests of the country for Clinton to stay. He's hopelessly tarnished and does not have the moral standing to be a leader either domestically or internationally. He has made the United States a laughingstock. Maybe you wouldn't buy a used car from Nixon, but I don't think you would trust Clinton with your teenage daughter.
The electoral success of Clinton was a product of the times. In part it was because of the arrogance of George Bush. In part it was because of the stupidity of the Republicans, many of whom think a presidential nomination is a sort of gold watch to be awarded for party loyalty. In part it was because of the low morals of the American people, many of whom are as sleazy as Clinton.
We are seeing the logical consequences of the deliberate rejection during the past few decades of morality, tradition and religion. When the only standard is success, and success is measured only by money, power or celebrityship, the civilization has pretty much been hollowed out and is ready for the proverbial ash heap of history. Eric Hoffer, the old waterfront philosopher, wrote in his last book that he didn't think that the United States would survive the 1960s generation. If the United States does survive, it will be because of a moral and religious revival not because of politics. The state of the union is beyond the help of mere elections.
If President Clinton bombs Iraq, it won't do any good.
The bombing won't destroy any biological weapons, because, in my opinion, Iraq doesn't have any left (I know that the Central Intelligence Agency says they have, but, if you believe the CIA, you probably believe that Clinton is a faithful husband). But if it does, we don't know where they are. If on-the-ground inspectors couldn't find in seven years any weapons other than the ones destroyed under United Nations supervision, you needn't expect Navy pilots to find them in an hour from 30,000 feet.
Americans should face up to the fact that we have a government that lies to us on a fairly regular basis, not only about criminal and sexual matters but about policy matters as well.
Saddam Hussein and his government will be in an even stronger position after the bombing than before. The Iraqi people, victimized again, will have even more reasons to hate us, and it is natural for people to rally around their own leader when attacked by foreigners. That's why seven years after the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein is still in office while the leaders of the United States, Great Britain and France -- which fought the war -- are out of office.
And which country gains more honor and admiration -- a defenseless small country that says it is not afraid of a superpower and will not be bullied or a superpower that gratuitously kills innocent people primarily for domestic political public relations?
Support for Iraq will go up, not only in the Middle East but in Europe, and the United States will be even more isolated.
There are real limits to military power, but because a high-school Reserve Officers' Training Corps student has more military experience than the president, speaker of the House of Representative, secretary of Defense and Senate majority leader combined, it's no surprise the Clintonistas don't understand that.
Bombings can't persuade, because you cannot win a war with conventional bombing. No one ever has. You can say you've won only when your ground forces occupy the other guy's country and can stay as long as you want them to stay. We won the Gulf War against an Iraqi expeditionary force because at the end we were in Kuwait and it wasn't. But we didn't win a war against Iraq because, at the end, Iraqi forces were in Iraq and we weren't.
Clinton will not send ground forces, because there would be too many American casualties, and American casualties are bad domestic politics. After all the high-tech stuff has done its thing, the ground soldier with his rifle would have to go into Baghdad and take it, street by street, door by door. One man with a rifle is about on a par with any other man with a rifle. There is no high-tech advantage between an M-16 and an AK-47. Many soldiers think that the AK is the better rifle.
Back before the Gulf War, there was no particular reason for any Iraqi to hate Americans. After seven years of American-imposed suffering and thousands of children and elderly dead of starvation or malnutrition-related diseases, I'm confident every Iraqi in the country would relish the opportunity to shoot at an American.
And isn't it peculiar that Saddam Hussein, a dictator, is willing to hand out rifles and ammunition to a million of his people while Clinton, an American, is trying to disarm his people with gun-control laws? Crazy world, huh?
At any rate, Clinton will find no support in the United Nations for his bombing ploy and probably not from even Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. His cowardly caving-in to the Israeli lobby while Israel destroys the peace process has wrecked American credibility in the Arab world. His dumb decision to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has encouraged the Russians to go their own way. The guy's an all-round screw-up.
What does the cattlemen's suit against Oprah Winfrey have in common with the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton scandal?
Answer: A communications revolution.
For the same reason that a revelation about a sexual tryst with the president can create a global uproar in less than a day, libel and slander laws should be brought up to date to match the communications revolution.
Sweet Oprah is being sued because on one of her shows a veggie character talked about the risk of mad cow disease infecting American beef, and Oprah said she was giving up burgers. The cattlemen contend the charge is false and that it cost them big bucks in the futures market.
The essence of slander (spoken) and libel (written) are that the statements are false and that they cause damage to someone. Obviously, if I, for example, said falsely that someone was beautiful and intelligent, that person wouldn't be damaged by that falsehood.
Prior to the world being wired, damage from false statements was, in most cases, local and slow to spread. Often corrections or retractions could be made before too many people knew about it. But in today's wired world, a person such as Oprah can speak to millions of people instantaneously, and her statements can be picked up, if they are thought newsworthy, and broadcast to millions more in the blink of an eye.
The speed and breadth with which false information can be disseminated can cause tremendous damage long before a retraction or a correction can catch up with it. American apple growers were almost ruined when CBS let itself be duped by some anti-chemical cranks and broadcast their false assertion that a chemical preservative would cause cancer in babies who drank apple juice.
By the time that false assertion was knocked down, the damage had already been done.
You can see the process at work in the Clinton scandal. In the old days, one might pick up one's paper and read that someone had accused the president of having sex and asking her to lie about it. You would have a fairly long time to think about that before the next edition -- maybe all day and all night to digest that one piece of information.
Now allegation, report, reaction, denial, discussion, countercharges and spins create an instant electronic avalanche. Before the end of the day the allegation first surfaces, the airwaves on dozens of television channels are saturated with every scrap of information, confirmed or otherwise; speculation; argument; counterargument; innuendo; etc. It goes from news to talk shows to ``special reports'' to comedy material by late-night comics in one short span of hours.
All is well and good if the information is true. But, if it's false, people's lives can be permanently ruined long before the truth catches up with the lie. It's one of the quirks of Media World that, although an allegation can be made instantly, it often takes weeks to establish the truth. The same people who broadcast the allegation without any verification will tell the target, ``Well, you're going to have to prove it isn't true.''
I think probably what the cattlemen want is not so much money as they want to send a message to the inhabitants of Media World that if you cause damage with false statements, you are at least going to have to pay a carload of legal fees defending yourself.
It is not, as I have heard some say, a First Amendment issue. The right of free speech does not protect falsehood. If it did, every con artist would plead not guilty on the grounds that he was just exercising his right of free speech.
Probably what it boils down to is that technology has outrun our brains as it often does. We have the technology before we learn to use it responsibly -- or perhaps even to realize the necessity for exercising care and responsibility. Unfortunately, it is easier to talk than to think.
Just so you can keep up with the perpetual crisis in the Middle East, I have a little quiz for you.
Question: Which country in the Middle East has nuclear weapons? Answer: Israel.
Q: Which country in the Middle East refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and bars international inspections? A: Israel.
Q: Which country in the Middle East seized the sovereign territory of other nations by military force and continues to occupy it in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions? A: Israel.
Q: Which country in the Middle East routinely violates the international borders of another sovereign state with warplanes and artillery and naval gunfire? A: Israel.
Q: What American ally in the Middle East has for years sent assassins into other countries to kill its political enemies (a practice sometimes called exporting terrorism)? A: Israel.
Q: In which country in the Middle East have high-ranking military officers admitted publicly that unarmed prisoners of war were executed? A: Israel.
Q: What country in the Middle East refuses to prosecute its soldiers who have acknowledged executing prisoners of war? A: Israel.
Q: What country in the Middle East created 762,000 refugees and refuses to allow them to return to their homes, farms and businesses? A: Israel.
Q: What country in the Middle East refuses to pay compensation to people whose land, bank accounts and businesses it confiscated? A: Israel.
Q: In what country in the Middle East was a high-ranking United Nations diplomat assassinated? A: Israel.
Q: In what country in the Middle East did the man who ordered the assassination of a high-ranking U.N. diplomat become prime minister? A: Israel.
Q: What country in the Middle East blew up an American diplomatic facility in Egypt and attacked a U.S. ship in international waters, killing 33 and wounding 177 American sailors? A: Israel.
Q: What country in the Middle East employed a spy, Jonathan Pollard, to steal classified documents and then gave some of them to the Soviet Union? A: Israel.
Q: What country at first denied any official connection to Pollard, then voted to make him a citizen and has continuously demanded that the American president grant Pollard a full pardon? A: Israel.
Q: What country on Planet Earth has the second most powerful lobby in the United States, according to a recent Fortune magazine survey of Washington insiders? A: Israel.
Q: Which country in the Middle East is in defiance of 69 United Nations Security Council resolutions and has been protected from 29 more by U.S. vetoes? A: Israel.
Q: What country is the United States threatening to bomb because ``U.N. Security Council resolutions must be obeyed?'' A: Iraq.
To understand what is going on in Washington, it will be helpful to separate facts from allegations in the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Here are the facts, not allegations:
1. Lewinsky was an intern at the White House and was later placed by the White House into a job at the Pentagon requiring a top-secret clearance.
2. Lewinsky made at least three dozen trips to the White House after moving to the Pentagon but not for any reason related to her job.
3. Lewinsky denied in a sworn affidavit that she had a sexual relationship with President Clinton.
4. Lewinsky said in tape-recorded telephone conversations with a friend that she did have an affair, and she implied that Clinton and his pal Vernon Jordan persuaded her to lie in the affidavit.
5. Jordan personally drove her to a lawyer's office in Washington and personally called Revlon in New York, which offered her a job.
6. Bill Richardson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, offered her a job with the delegation in New York.
7. William Ginsburg, her expensive lawyer, told a reporter from an Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, that neither he nor Lewinsky want Clinton forced from office because `` ... Clinton is very positive toward Israel and the Jews, and Monica and I are Jews.''
All of the above are facts that no one has denied. The questions to be answered are explanations for the facts. Nothing in human affairs happens without a cause or a reason. There is a reason that Jordan was helpful, that Lewinsky was given a top-secret clearance and a Pentagon job, that Richardson invited her to breakfast and offered her a job. And what has it all got to do with Clinton's attitude toward Israel and Jews?
Only two people, Clinton and Lewinsky, know the truth, and both of them are refusing to talk.
If you assume that Clinton is innocent of both an affair and attempting to persuade someone to lie under oath, then there must be some reasonable explanation for the following:
1. How did a 21-year-old intern with limited work experience get so much help in furthering her career from the White House, from a U.S. ambassador and from one of Washington's most high-powered power brokers?
2. Why did she say one thing in the affidavit and the opposite to her friend and confidante?
3. Why is she seeking immunity from prosecution? It is not a crime to tell fibs to your friends.
4. Why has Clinton refused to give a reasonable explanation of the facts? If, in fact, he did nothing improper, then telling the truth could not possibly incriminate him or cause him any harm. On the contrary, it would do him great good.
I believe, of course, that Clinton is a sleaze, that he did have the affair and that he did induce Lewinsky to lie about it. We know from the past that when Clinton says, ``I never told anybody to lie,'' he probably means he never used the word, ``l-i-e.''
Even if you disagree, you should not be taken in by the White House propaganda campaign that is being orchestrated and led by Hillary Clinton. Seriously now, when she tells the American people, ``We just have to wait until the facts come out,'' she is insulting their intelligence.
Presumably, she sleeps with all the facts every night, and, if the facts were not damaging, she would be sharing them with the public. Instead, she is leading the White House's normal modus operandi of attack, which is: deny, stonewall and slime all critics.
Clinton is still in trouble, even if the pollsters don't believe it.
One of the most distasteful things Congress has done is commercialize holidays, lumping what used to be presidential-birthday celebrations into one three-day weekend (it's always a Monday) called ``President's Day.''
This was done at the instigation of the federal-employee unions and the travel industry. It is an example of how commerce and politics are important to today's politicians but America's heritage is not.
The purpose of celebrating a great man's birthday is to provide an opportunity to think about and learn from his life. Today, for example, is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln, because he was assassinated, has become mythologized, and nearly all of the books originally written by his contemporaries have been edited to exclude anything not positive or have been taken out of print.
That's too bad because the real Lincoln is far more interesting than the myth. In reading some of the old books, I discovered that Lincoln was quite different from the man I had imagined in my school days.
Lincoln, for example, was very disorganized. John Hay, one of his personal secretaries, wrote to Lincoln's former law partner, William Herndon, a description of Lincoln's habits in the White House:
``He was extremely unmethodical; it was a four-years struggle on Nicolay's (another secretary) part and mine to get him to adopt some systematic rules. He would break through every regulation as fast as it was made... . He wrote very few letters and did not read one in fifty that he received... . He read very little. He scarcely ever looked into a newspaper unless I called his attention to an article on some special subject. He frequently said, `I know more about it than any of them.' It is absurd to call him a modest man... . It was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Sumner (Grand Old Party leaders) never could forgive.``
Lincoln was also intensely ambitious and had engineered his own nomination. He was obsessed with staying in power and greatly depressed when it seemed certain he would not win re-election. He did, but the election was crooked. Lincoln had assumed the powers of a dictator and caused the arrest of about 30,000 civilians and shut down about 300 newspapers -- all in the North, of course.
He was not a Christian. In fact, he was antagonistic toward Christianity, but he was a deist and superstitious.
He was also described as Machiavellian and ``having a cunning that is genius.'' Herndon, the law partner, said that Lincoln never revealed himself completely to any man, never had a confidante, and that even he, after 20 years, did not completely understand Lincoln. Lincoln is also described by some of his contemporaries as ``cold and indifferent,'' not the tender-hearted man of legend.
Lincoln was also extremely vulgar and was apparently unrestrained by either presence or occasion. One contemporary biographer wrote of Lincoln, ``Men who knew him throughout all his professional and political life ... have said that he was the foulest in his jests and stories of any man in the country.''
Another strange trait that turns up in these old books is Lincoln's passivity in certain circumstances. His wife was horrific, but Lincoln meekly accepted her tyranny and in Washington swallowed insults from his Cabinet members that most men would have answered with gunfire.
Herndon stated that Lincoln stayed away from his home as much as possible and often would bring the boys to the law office on Sunday morning, where Lincoln would loll about on the couch while the boys destroyed the office. He said Lincoln never reprimanded them. He also said Lincoln often ignored them.
One more example of truth being stranger than fiction.
(I've got to add my own comments here. It is true that Lincoln was not a Christian during much of his adult life. But he changed his mind when his young son died of disease while he was President.
Many anecdotes exist testifying of Lincoln's passivity. Some interpret it as humility and patience, others as cowardice. You decide.
The 1860s were filled with ironic twists; enough to fill a good sized book. Personally, I think the period was America's greatest tragedy (so far). 650,000 men died, and the lawyers greatly increased their control over we the people. - Jeff)
Here is a thumbnail sketch of the economic problems in Asia that will soon take a bite out of our economy.
Bank loans to Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand total the following: from banks in the United States, nearly $24 billion; from banks in France, nearly $25 billion; from banks in Germany, about $32 billion; from banks in Japan, a little more than $92 billion; and from banks in other European countries and Canada, $81 billion.
That's about $254 billion. The value of their currencies has collapsed. They can't pay those bank loans. That's why the big push to nail taxpayers for money for the International Monetary Fund.
The way this scam works is this: Congress taxes us. Congress gives our tax dollars to the IMF. The IMF gives it to countries. Countries give it to banks.
What's missing in this scam? Any benefit at all to the taxpayers who are putting up the dough? Did we get any benefit from the loans made by New York banks to folks in Asia? No. Did we earn any of the profits from the interest charged those folks in Asia? No.
Then why should we be taxed to bail out the big for-profit banks? Because they own Congress, and we don't. If most politicians sold their bodies as often as they sell their votes, they'd all be dead within a year of taking office from the wear and tear.
Whenever you hear people talk in group terms -- such as global economy, national economy, national interests, etc. -- watch out because they are talking about doing bad things to people who only come into and go out of this world as individuals.
The way this scam works is: The elite talk in collectivist, abstract terms and generalities, and individuals pay and die. You can believe, if you like, that it's in our ``national interest'' to bomb Iraq, as the elite say, but it won't be the national interest or the elite who climb into a cockpit and fly a plane through anti-aircraft fire. It will be an individual human whom the elite would not even condescend to speak to.
You may, if you aspire to be a two-legged sheep, believe the elite when they say we need to ante up another $18 billion to the IMF ``because of America's position of global leadership, blah, blah, blah.'' But the money will come out of the sweat and labor of individuals who wouldn't be admitted to the homes of the elite even if they were collecting for the Salvation Army.
I'm no radical, but it seems that many Americans are a lot less knowledgeable about human nature than Americans of an earlier generation. When a delegation of elitists came to Andrew Jackson to talk him out of vetoing a bill to extend the national bank, Old Hickory didn't mince his words.
``You are a den of vipers and thieves,'' said the president to their faces. ``I intend to rout you out and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.'' He did. He also paid off the national debt.
Jackson said on another occasion that it is an injustice for laws to make the rich richer while the humble members of society have neither the time nor the means to secure such favors for themselves.
So it was in 1832, and so it is in 1998, with the difference that the humble members of society -- that's 97 percent of us -- have no champion like Jackson. If the theory of evolution is really true, then it won't be long before politicians will be born with huge, fleshy pockets growing out of the ribs and hips but no brains, backbones or souls.
Best batten down the hatches because more than El Nino will be blowing out of the Pacific by spring despite what the IMF does. Get out of debt. Countries or individuals, the trouble is the same when you owe more than you can pay. You can be sure the elite won't be taking the advice they give you nor will they believe the fairy tales they will tell you.
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