AUSTIN, Texas -- Watching some dipstick the other day on Fox
News carry on with great certainty about Hillary Clinton and her evil
motives -- and I don't think this guy actually spends a lot of time tete a tete with Mrs. Clinton while she reveals her deepest
thoughts to him -- I wondered, "Lord, when are these people going to get
over it?"
I think the answer is never, because most people have a very
hard time forgiving those whom they have deeply wronged. I know that's sort
of counterintuitive, but think about some of the bad divorces you have
known. When we have done something terrible to someone, we often need to
twist it around so it's their fault, not ours.
So we continue to suffer this deformity in our public life
because of what Sid Blumenthal calls "this perverse episode," the scoundrel
time.
Just last week, The Wall Street Journal, reminded of the Vince
Foster suicide by Mrs. Clinton's new memoir, "Living History," wrote a
nasty, callous, defensive editorial. It's a classic of the genre of
exculpating yourself by blaming others. Since Foster named The Wall Street
Journal in his suicide note, you might think the paper would, if not
acknowledge responsibility, at least have the common decency to express some
regret.
I had to force myself to start Blumenthal's book, "The Clinton
Wars," because I'm still exhausted from the whole megillah, but then I
couldn't stop reading it. It's perversely fascinating. The year this country
wasted on the impeachment was the most tawdry, the nastiest, the ugliest,
the sorriest chapter I've ever seen in politics.
I watched it from my vantage point in Texas and naturally
concluded -- as did everyone else in the country with a lick of common
sense -- that everyone in Washington, D.C., had completely lost their minds.
I'm still ambivalent about it. The late, great Billie Carr of
Houston -- a woman who had taught the baby Bill Clinton how to do politics
when he came over to Texas in 1972 -- was invited to the White House in the
middle of the Monica Lewinsky mess. Billie got all gussied up, sashayed up
to Clinton in the receiving line and said to him, "You dumb son of a bitch."
Thank heavens, I always thought, somebody said to him exactly what every
American wanted to say. (Clinton started laughing as Billie proceeded to
tear him a new one, and said, "I knew you were gonna do this, Billie.")
On the other hand, Clinton is one of the most brilliant natural
politicians I have ever observed -- I put him in a category with Lyndon
Johnson and the late Texas Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock. That his presidency could
have been so seriously damaged by what was, in fact, a vast right-wing
conspiracy is a horrible indictment of politics in our time.
The most depressing thing about Blumenthal's book is that it
keeps reminding you that these nasty little ideological zealots set out from
Day One to commit the Politics of Personal Destruction. They had no honor,
and they had no shame. They were just out to get him any way they could, and
when sex proved a convenient route, they used it -- hypocrisy, be damned.
Blumenthal, who was in the center of that cyclone, has
accomplished something remarkable -- he has actually written a rather
detached account of it all. If I had been that close to it -- and received
that much personal abuse -- I doubt I could write without anger, even now.
A couple of times Blumenthal cites some advice Hillary Clinton
gave him: "Remember, it's never about you. Whatever you think, it's not
about you."
This is not to say there is not some score-settling in this
book: The number of reporters who allowed themselves to be used by Kenneth
Star and his ideological wrecking crew is a depressing tally in itself.
Blumenthal shames the press corps simply by being meticulous himself. "Here
is what he would have found if he had bothered to check ..." is his general
method. I found only one error in the book -- it was George W. Bush who
repeatedly failed in the oil business, not his father, who made $6 million
back when that was real money.
"The Clinton Wars" has been criticized for not being more
balanced about the flawed presidency -- the Clintons themselves are almost
entirely blameless in this account. But if that's what Blumenthal had set
out to do, he would have written some other book.
I've heard many people say, "But they made it so easy for people
to attack them." That may be true, but it's still blaming the victim, isn't
it?
The Clinton wars reflect no credit on anyone, but I still think
it was journalism, or what passes for journalism these days, that most
disgraced itself. We should all be required to read this book.
To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web
page at
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