February 28, 1998
Message to Hillary: There IS a right-wing conspiracy to get you and Bill Clinton. It is moral, it is lawful, and it will succeed. Don't kid yourself that it is not personal. Every intellectual insult, every piece of garbage that you throw at us is personal. It energizes our struggle, it provides the ammunition, and it shortens the time till you are brought down. And you will have no one to blame but yourselves.
A man may be a heretic to the truth if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or because the assembly so determines, without knowing any other reason; though his belief be true yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.
... John Milton, Areopagitica
We are talking about using military force. We are not talking about a war.
... Secretary of State Madeline Albright
It was gratifying to read of the recent opinion of a federal judge in striking down the so-called "line-item veto." He held that the Constitution distributes the powers and responsibilities in the passage of legislation, and that the Congress (and presumably, also, the President) has no power to redistribute them. Indeed, the Constitution is quite specific about how legislation is to be enacted, and the line-item veto act (not a Constitutional amendment) so clearly and unmistakably alters that formula that it makes me wonder how it is possible that so august and distinguished a body of lawyers as the members of Congress could be persuaded to support such a ridiculous scheme.
Where has all the Constitutional scholarship gone? When I heard in 1994 that the Contract with America touted a line-item veto, I was pleased. Living in Texas, I believe that the line-item veto, in our otherwise weak-executive system of state government, has served the citizens well. But I assumed that the Contract item was a Constitutional amendment. Because of this absurdly unconstitutional substitute, we are still years away from getting an effective line-item veto. It is not just the obvious foolishness of the unconstitutional bill that rankles, but the attendant waste of time.
I feel much the same way about the vast bulk of so-called administrative law. The Constitution spells out the formula to be followed in the enactment of laws. In sharp contrast to that formula, administrative law is typically adopted through a legislative mechanism enabling some department of the administrative branch to develop a set of rules implementing a broad and possibly vague policy defined in a bill passed by Congress. After the administrative department, or some leadership clique within the department consisting of people who may never have heard of a free election, has formulated these rules, there is an opportunity for the Congress to review them. If the Congress does nothing in, say, ninety days, the rules become "administrative" law. Congress seldom alters anything that the administration presents to them. For most such bodies of administrative law, it is unlikely that they are even read by any member of Congress, let alone the whole body.
So far, the courts have held administrative law to be conformal to the Constitution. But I frankly can see hardly any difference between the kind of modification of powers of the branches of government proposed by the line-item veto and that which implements administrative law. Naturally, this practice is the locus of many of the most abusive and intrusive powers of contemporary government. The Congress never mentioned rodents in the environmental legislation that protects McWhatever's rat, but just trying to stomp the critters out will land you in jail. The means and mechanisms of protection for Mr. Cheese were defined and implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency without one syllable of input or approval from your congresswoman.
Now, the advantages of the mechanism of administrative law are manifold and obvious. All the more odious rules that are required to instill the right degree of terror and discomfort in the citizens are best cast as administrative law, so that no politician has to face the voters with a record of having specifically supported such rules. Indeed, she can turn right around and condemn these laws with such vehemence that one is convinced that never by thought or deed did she contribute to their adoption. This is precisely the kind of abuse that the Founders wanted to avoid when they framed the Constitution, so there is a clear path of accountability from the laws, through the elected representatives, to the voters. Otherwise, what is the sense of having representative government? The answer to the charge that these objections are picky is that the process defines the product, and the Congress has the obligation to make the rules and approve the judges that enforce them. The jacks-in-office may only rule with the consent of the jacked.
You have the right (the Constitution provides for this) to have your elected representative read, consider, and vote on every jot and tittle of the body of law you must live under, down to the minutest detail. The practice of administrative law undermines this right, institutionalizes governmental abuses of power, and provides a political cover for outright abandonment of congressional responsibility. If the courts would come to their senses, administrative law would go into the trash bin right on top of the line-item veto. It would make a lot bigger thump, of course.
I think that most people were a little taken aback by the recent developments at the White House. Press acknowledgement about the sexual behavior of Kennedy while in office, and a more frank public attitude about sexual matters in general, have helped to reduce the shock of finding out about our public figures' occasional wanderings. But the specificity of the charges and the lewdness of the conduct being alleged has broken through the tough shell of public indifference to such matters. The pundits are out in full force; the news broadcasts have sunk to a new level of vulgarity; and the public is, very naturally, having a wonderful time with it. Of course, everyone is waiting for the other slipper to drop. The President's high ratings are not approval but entertainment value, like Archie Bunker.
But why should anyone be surprised at the suggestion that the President's morals come from the gutter? We have had ample warning. The Clintons' political philosophy is grounded in an immoral doctrine: socialism. Consider: one of the most common attitudes of most socialists is that individual rights, such as property rights, are subordinate to the right of the group or community or nation, and they cite, as a justification for that right, one or more of the rights that they so thoughtlessly trample on. For instance, socialists are forever militating against gun rights on the grounds that without guns around, we would all be safer. Yet the removal of guns from the general population results in higher crime, less personal safety, for the quite obvious reason that the disarmed population is at the mercy of criminals with fewer scruples about gun control laws. Another example: the "social safety net." In order to create the net, they must raise taxes so high that many more people are driven into need and forced to make use of the "social safety net," requiring higher taxes, ad circulum.
Now, this is nothing new. The moral foundations of socialism are extremely thin and vulnerable to even the most casual critic. History is replete with examples of how attempts to institute socialism have achieved the exact opposite of the stated intent. The U. S. Government has erected far more slums than were ever in private hands. The finances of the war on poverty have create far more poor people than we had to begin with. Even with their own measures, such as an ever-increasing "threshold of poverty," guaranteeing that the official numbers of the "needy" will continue to grow, the poverty bureaucracy of the government is demonstrably losing ground. Education, medicine (so-called, "health care"), welfare, transportation, even roads and public works, and the suppression of crime, have each seen its peculiar and perverse treatment by socialism, not to mention the preposterous and ultimately fatal accounting of Social Security, the saving of which must be our first priority, according to the President.
So, against this backdrop of the enormous swindle of socialism, the current problems faced by the President, involving illicit sex, lies, and criminal coercion, are a mere gnat bite. Or are they? Surely the President's personal morals precipitated this. We get a glimpse of those morals through the political ideals he upholds, in socialism. If those are immoral, should we expect any better from his "private" life?
The President's defenders claim that his sex life is private. Good try, if he can get away with it. But they miss on this point: marriage is not private. What goes on within a marriage may be private, but the marriage itself is public, a public statement of commitment, a matter of public record, and acknowledged in our public and social lives in countless ways, most notable of which is the standard of sexual behavior that attaches to it in our culture. If Mr. Clinton were not the holder of a public office nor a newsmaker in the public eye, his transgressions would be ignored, for the most part. But since he is the elected President, nothing can keep the newspapers and other media from holding his life up to the microscope. This is simply one of the realities of life today, and those who rail against it are whistling into the wind.
The same goes for prosecutors. If, as a private citizen, you change your sworn affidavit, you will usually get no more than a raised eyebrow from the law enforcement institutions, though there are occasional exceptions to this. But elected officials hold a public trust and must be held to a higher standard of behavior with respect to the truth. A prosecutor simply cannot turn a blind eye to substantiated charges of corruption of a public official, without inheriting that stain himself.
Now, when Bill Clinton says, "I deny it," he is using the language of lawyers, meaning, there is at least one component of the charge that is not true ("We did not meet 37 times; we met only 35 times, your honor"). Or, it may also mean what a defendant's plea of "not guilty" means, not that the defendant can truthfully deny the charge, but that he asserts his right to require the state to prove it. Remember, also, when Bill Clinton changed the tense of the question from the past to the present in his answer. It went something like this: "Have you had an affair with Monica Lewinsky?" Answer: "There is no improper relationship between us." A simple evasion like that tells us that the lawyers are at work. These plea-like assertions have little or no truth-content to them at all. When uttered outside a legal context, they sound like what ordinary people mean by denial. But the Clintons are lawyers, and they never stop being lawyers. Even when they tell the literal truth, it is a lie, because they say it to deceive.
It will ultimately turn out that forni-gate, like Whitewater-gate, travel-gate, file-gate, China-gate, Buddhist-temple-gate, and all the other -gates, is simply another form of lawyer-gate, the systematic abuse of official powers, the concealment of the criminal truth, and the snowing of all the ordinary people with lawyer's language and tactics. No wonder people are apathetic: the ends of justice, honesty, and truthfulness are frustrated at every turn by the specious sophistries of the multitude of lawyers who swarm around power and money.
But none of this would work if the American people did not let it. The real secret behind Clinton's high approval ratings is denial. Most people simply do not want the President accused of charges to which they also are vulnerable. Americans secretly applaud his ability to slip unscathed past the moral and ethical restraints that restrict most people and bother the consciences of the rest. I am afraid that there are an appalling number of Americans who see nothing wrong with his dodging the Ten Commandments, if he can get away with it. Given the opportunity, it is what they themselves would do. When Clinton was appointing his Cabinet, he said that he wanted a Cabinet that "looks like America." It seems that we have a President who "looks like America," too.
The shorthand of Internet chat has entered the mainstream, now, as I see references to IMHO (in my humble opinion), LOL (laughing out loud), ROF (rolling on the floor), and the inevitable agglutinate, ROFLOL (rolling on the floor, laughing out loud). The march of progress requires that we enlarge the current vocabulary to include expressions reflecting the new situations that we continually find ourselves in. Here are some candidates. Perhaps you can suggest some of your own.
FAHA -- fielding ad hominem attacks
SOMJDTTF -- sound of my jaw dropping to the floor
WHAOTGTDWM -- what has any of this got to do with me?
ITADITWH?ITICS -- is there a doctor in the White House? I
think I've caught something
GRAMML -- getting repaired after meeting Monica Lewinsky
IACOCA -- I approve Clinton's obviously criminal acts
HUSSEIN -- hushing up serious scandals emerging in
newspapers
RIPOFF -- reluctantly indicting politicians over foreign
funds
GINSBURG -- getting it neatly sold by using reckless
guesswork
STEPHANOPOULOS -- selling the ever-present handouts and
notoriously open policy of undermining libertarian
opposition strategies
Benjamin Britten's undoubted masterpiece, and his most didactic work, the War Requiem, played last weekend at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, with an excellent cast of voices, a well-rehearsed chorus, and the orchestra in its finest form. Among the participants was baritone John Shirley-Quirk, a personal hero of mine, whose four-decade career in the very front rank of British vocal artistry is legend. It was a very moving performance, and just as with certain passages from Isaiah, Lincoln's second inaugural address, Whitman's war poetry, and passages from Mahler, there are moments during this work in which I have never been able to hold back the tears.
The War Requiem features the poetry of the greatest of the World War I poets, Wilfred Owen, juxtaposed with the text of the traditional mass for the dead, in a play of contrasts that is sharp and sometimes shocking. Wilfred Owen is a favorite of the pacifists because he wrote about the pain of war and the pity of so many young men lost. Indeed, the Great War, as they called it before anyone knew there would be more than one, was a calamity of immense proportions for Britain, as well as other countries. The sadness of this tragedy and its seeming interminability, as it ground on for over four years, consuming everyone in its path, are starkly and sometimes savagely conveyed in Owen's poetry. This is some powerful stuff, and one cannot read this work without being disturbed by it. I do not think one has to be a pacifist (though Britten did) to understand and be moved by this, because it is part of the physical and moral reality in which we live. Everyone should have a very clear idea of what war is before resolving to send our soldiers into it.
Ironically, the war Wilfred Owen fought in and wrote so touchingly about consumed him as well. He was killed a week before Armistice.
I hope that people will still like me.
... Michelle Kwan, silver medalist
All contents © Copyright 1995, 1996 by Redmon Barbry ¶ 10:33 AM
