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If you have not yet seen Bill Clinton kick Fox anchor Chris Wallace's ass in the now-infamous Fox News Sunday interview, haul
yours to YouTube.com as soon as possible and watch it before Fox has another fit of embarrassment and perhaps decides to yank
it once more. (As you may know, Fox yanked the Clinton video last week from YouTube by asserting ownership rights -- a thinly-veiled
bid to save itself humiliation -- but then quickly reversed its withdrawal when it realized that trying to bury the episode
was even more humiliating. It is a defining character trait of right-wing diss machines, after all, that they can dish it
out but they can't take it.)
In this instance, what former President Clinton dished out to the hapless Wallace was an all-out reactive assault in response
to Wallace's accusatory question about why Clinton "didn't do more" during his presidency to apprehend or kill Osama bin Laden.
Wallace's question, thrown at Clinton in an interview that purported to focus on Clinton's current global initiative on world
problems, launched Clinton into a furiously detailed historical comparison of his Administration's record with that of George
W. Bush, whose own terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, went public in frustration over the Bush Administration's complacency
on al-Qaeda and terrorism in general. In the course of delivering this in-your-face history lesson, Clinton excoriated Wallace
for being a "smirking" agent of a "right-wing" agenda at Fox that holds politicians on the right to a lower standard of accountability
than all others. Clinton then eviscerated the by-now-cringing Wallace with the Question of Questions: Why hadn't Wallace asked
members of the Bush Administration why they "didn't do more" to get bin Laden when they had both more incentive and more information
than Clinton had? "You didn't ask them that question, did you?" Clinton taunted the stammering Wallace.
It was a formidable display, and it left me feeling nostalgic (can you imagine?) for the days when the nation had an actually
Presidential president -- even one as fickle as the skin-shedding Clinton -- as opposed to the grunting Little Caesar who
now defiles the Oval Office with his fetid stream of lies, mispronounced threats, and belligerent excuses. I gave a talk a
few days ago at a college at which I reminded students that, contrary to current White House edict, challenging an unworthy
president shows respect for the office, not disrespect. The Clinton interview drives home for me how far the office has fallen
in the few short years since the presidency became entirely an appendage of corporate gangsters and the Paleolithic right.
Granted, the corporate lobby has long been (and will continue to be) the anti-democratic elephant in the room absent any true
campaign finance reform. But there was once, even in the recent past, such a thing as statesmanship -- a quality of global
knowledge and political articulateness, if not eloquence -- that distinguished many of our top national leaders. Ronald Reagan,
I think, was the beginning of the end: a politician who proved that telegenic ignorance could be spun into gold. And now we
have W, a silver-spoon thug prodding the nation farther and farther into disaster with his thick tongue and his even thicker
skull.
I've wondered a lot about the mindset behind this regime's unhesitant plunge over the cliff, and I've concluded that it is
ultimately about hubris. I think there is a very small, very rich, supremely confident group of folks who believe that it
is essentially impossible to break American government. They believe that American government can be bought, starved, co-opted
and otherwise crippled without causing the nation's wheels to fall off. They think that they can wield whatever overwhelmingly
intrusive influence they like on government -- impairing the regulation of industry, redirecting tax burdens onto the lower
classes, slashing social services, tailoring foreign policy to serve corporate interests -- without breaking the basic machinery
of society. They think, in the end, that they can do anything they like, secure in the knowledge that the American state will
lumber along more or less intact and the American public will acquiesce. Their sense of rightness is so consuming, in fact,
that they banish all truthful would-be counselors who might save them from themselves.
W is the embodiment of such an attitude: a swaggerer devoid of intellectual credentials or moral principles who serves as
a just-good-enough mouthpiece for those determined to have their way with the country. He lies, for example, to foment a war
in Iraq that benefits private industry and advances the gospel of a certain cadre of hard-right zealots. He makes use of 9/11
for the same purposes. He praises public education while financially strangling it. He makes a go of handing over a successful
public agency -- Social Security -- to the private sector. He gleefully glad-hands workers at stage-managed political events
while flagrantly screwing them with ever-more-lenient workplace safety and environmental standards. He calls for alternative
energy research while cementing national dependence on fossil fuels. He proclaims that all wiretapping is carried out with
warrants, and declares soon thereafter that he has the right to secretly wiretap without warrants. He praises God while demanding
the right to abuse prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions. He is the epitome of the belief that nothing matters,
nothing is true, reality is manufactured. The nation is what he says it is.
He is, of course, thoroughly full of shit. Economies built on unsustainable foundations will in fact collapse. Regulatory
agencies starved for resources will lead to public harm. Foreign policies based on lies will fail. Environmental recklessness
will render the earth inhospitable to humans, if not downright uninhabitable. The only question, really, is when. When will
the house of cards collapse? How many Iraq casualties will it take? How many spikes in the American cancer rate? How many
preventable coal mine tragedies? How many asthma cases? How many deaths due to food and drug regulatory failures? (Did you
catch the statement a couple of weeks ago by an FDA official who bluntly predicted, in the wake of the spinach debacle, that
we will see an increase in deadly produce-borne disease because the agency has not been granted anywhere near the inspection
and compliance resources it needs?) How many families without health insurance? How many failed schools? How many increases
in gasoline prices? How many holes on the polar ice caps? How many searing summers and warm winters? How many revelations
of secret White House illegality?
It's enough to make you wish for the good old days when we could take for granted a president's intellect and acumen so that
we could hammer him on selling out the poor, selling out gays, and selling out working people with "global trade" policies
-- not to mention lying about blow jobs.
Now, that's what I call a sad kind of nostalgia.
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 10/1/06)
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