The "Gotcha" Game

Yesterday the blogosphere had one of it's periodic political melodramas, this one regarding William Bennet's gambling. First the Washington Monthly weighed in. Then Jonah Goldberg of National Review gave the Monthly a piece of his mind. Others, such as Andrew Sullivan, took a more (for lack of a better term) nuanced approach. Eventually a principle was induced: It's bad to gamble, and it's bad to call people hypocrites for gambling. Unless it's good. I'm really tired this week.





Wiser minds than mine have already counted the angels on this particular pinhead, and I am loathe to add further fuel to a bonfire I am only partially interested in. One thing, however, does strike me as interesting. Goldberg talked at length in his piece about the moral "gotcha" game, whereby one looks for anything -- anything -- about an opponent that can cast him in an unpleasant light. Liberals don't like what William Bennet says, so they dug up the fact that he blows money on video poker to undermine everything he says. How great can morality be, if the people who want us to practice it can't even manage it?





This is of course dependent on one's view of gambling as moral or immoral, which is a question I have no intention of wrestling with. Otherwise Goldberg's point -- that killing the messenger does not change the message -- is a fair one, and I think his criticism of liberals playing the "gotcha" game on Bennet is apt. But he doesn't seem to see the game from the other side.





At the heart of Goldberg's fury is the oft-lamented moral blindspot that the Demmies have with regard to their recent hero-savior, Bill Clinton. Jonah complains that the libs get down on Bennet for presuming to Moralize While Gambling about Clinton during the Grand Impeachment Operetta, but they have not one word of sanction against a President of the United States who used his office to subvert the Constitution. They said that private (to the extent that anything in the White House is private) fellation didn't mean Clinton's policies were wrong or that he was a bad President, but they think private rounds of Five-Card Stud do undermine Bennett's ideas. Goldberg is right again here. But if you flip that hypocrisy around, you have Goldberg's position, and that of quite a few of the right (but admittedley, not all).





Here's the thing: The whole Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky/Shag Me Rotten, Baby, Yeah Scandal was all about Getting Clinton. Don't get me wrong. I never liked Clinton after about the midpoint of his first term. I think he was a reprehensible President and a wormy little toadstool who deserved everything that he got. The fact that he tried to evade the very 1994 sexual harassment law that he pushed through Congress (the one that makes a man's sexual escapades judicially relevant if he's being sued for harassment) fills me with the kind of anger I normally reserve for copy machines and boy bands. The man was a liar unto his very soul, a gutless hillbilly gladhandler without principle or piety, a perennial candidate going through the motions of being President of the United States with his face crazy-glued to the camera lens and his master organ up Lady Liberty's arse. I feel no symapthy for him, and will pretend none (and all you feminists out there: the fact that you stood mum while he sidestepped that very same law you fell over yourselves applauding in '94, the fact that you threw every nasty caveman stereotype you claim to abhor at Jones and Lewinsky, that you lined up to protect this Lothario, tells me everything I need to know about you. Like your spiritual mother de Beauvoir, you don't care what the Power does to others as long as you have a room of your own).





That oddly cleansing diatribe aside, the fact that I even know Monica Lewinsky's name has everything to do with the fact that the Republicans were out to Get Clinton. I don't think anyone was ever convinced that the rights of Jones, Lewinsky, and all of the other shaggees in Bill's closet were more important to Gingrich et. al than making Clinton look bad. The fact that Clinton eminently deserved to be gotten doesn't change the fact that the GOP, especially after the '96 elections, would have seized on anything to undermine that man's astonishing (and thoroughly nauseating) popularity. They'd lost their nerve after the '95 budget battle and were basically out of energy with regard to implementing their ideas. Same with Clinton. Had the Lewinsky thing never reared its ugly head (bad pun! BAD!), TV Billy Sip-Sip Tuta would doubtless have spent his second term engaging in warm-fuzzy "dialogues," taking credit for the economy, and searching for something, anything that he could call a "legacy". Neither party had anything to say other than how rotten the other side was. In fact, so interested were they in "getting" one another that they barely noticed when a bunch of terrorists started blowing up embassies in East Africa. Clinton lobbed a few cruise missles and called it a day, and the Republican front-runner for the nomination could hardly be bothered to mention terrorism as a foreign policy priority.





My point is, this whole routine of "Well, where were you when X did Y" is as endless as it is childish (my own contributions to it in the thread above notwithstanding). Shame on the Washington Monthly for taking a cheap shot at a guy whose wrong is both arguable and unrelated to any of the arguments he's made. And shame on the Republicans for forgetting that making an adversary, even a vile adversary, into an enemy limits our capacities.