Someone Has Been Hiding in the State Department for Two Years...

It starts.

Feminists are Stooges.

Stacy McCain again piles on the No Boys Allowed Club. This time, his target is Stephanie Coontz and her anti-mythological mythologizing. Naturally, he cannot resist quoting her during the Great Lewinsky Betrayal:

So we see that, at a time when the Predator-in-Chief was caught perjuring himself about an exploitative affair with an emotionally unstable subordinate less than half his age, Coontz’s principle concern was that the scandal was distracting attention from the important issues that mattered to liberals. Whatever credibility Coontz as an advocate for the equality and dignity of women in the workplace, she was willing to cast it aside — ignoring Clinton’s sordidly sexist behavior — rather than to let Clinton’s conservative critics gain any advantage by the exposure of his Oval Office affair.

Which reminds me of my own rant on this subject, from my baby days as a blogger:

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.

This is tangential to McCain's point, however, so Read the Whole Thing.

George I, William I, George II, Hillary I?*

Michael Barone's take on the burgeoning dynasticism of our politics offers an interesting explanation: that the politicizing of First Ladies leads increasingly to the politicizing of families, and thus, the current War of the Roses.

Not that this is the first time Powerful Families have taken the top job: Before the Bushes and the Clintons were the Adamses, the Harrisons, and the Kennedys. But both Adamses were one-term presidents (and from different parties, at that), as were both Harrisons, and the Kennedy dynasty is at best still-born. The fact that George W. became president but eight years after his father left the post, that another brother waits in the wings for his chance, that Hilary may be poised to repeat W's feat, that is a horse of rather a different color.

All of which is depended on Hillary actually winning. If she doesn't, then the spell of dynastic power will be broken. I think the revulsion to Royal Presidencies may rear its head even if Hillary should win; monarchs are something Americans enjoy other countries to have.


*I am fully aware that George I should really be George II, and George II, George III, because of George Washington. Also, Bill Clinton would really be William IV (after William Henry Harrison, William McKinley, and William Howard Taft. For that matter, we've had four Johns, six Jameses, two Andrews, and two Franklins. I am a geek.

A Rant for the Day

The Washington Post reports that Bill Clinton thinks Presidential term limits should be changed. He thinks that a young president who does his two terms should have a chance to be re-elected in the future, if the people should suddenly have a need that only he can fill ("I got a great corkscrew"). And of course, he's totally and completely not talking about himself. And Nixon wasn't talking about anything illegal during that 18-minute gap. Did we really give this clown eight years in the White House?





I know, I know, surprise, surprise. What else is Clinton going to say? But that's just it. What else is Clinton going to do, for the rest of his pork-rind-inhaling existence, than make statements about being President, about how the Presidency has affected his life, about his time as President and what the current President should be doing. He's going to be a lame duck for the next thirty or forty years, an endlessly running mouth. Which ordinarily wouldn't bother me, as endlessly running mouths are the single largest product of our media industry. But Billy-Boy is a $200,000-a-year endlessly running mouth. At taxpayer expense.





There used to be a time when politics was something you briefly did to serve the res publica, and then you went back to your farm or business or whatever you were running before you mounted your soapbox. Thomas Jefferson had no shortage of things to do when he was done in Washington. Is it unreasonable for us to expect Bill Clinton to find a legitimate line of work? He's climbed the cursus honorum of American politics already. Go back to Arkansas and find a big-haired girlfriend, will you? Or renounce your womanizing and be a good house-husband for Hillary, picking out fabric swatches and pestering the butler with stories about all those jobs you "created." I don't care. Just leave us alone.





While I'm huffing, when did this Presidential Library thing happen? Did Washington have a Presidential Library? Lincoln? Either Roosevelt? What petty glorification of the Commander-in-Chief is this? I can't imagine why anyone would think we needed to have every stately nuance of the Johnson Administration (Motto: "I Fought the Poverty, and the Poverty Won") set down for posterity. All of this Solemnity and Grandeur with regard to the Presidency merely balloons it into something it oughtn't be. The man is our employee, the COO we pick to keep the coasts defended and the money supply honest. Everything else is bullcorn.

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.