Clinton the Savior

May 9, 2000

“De l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace!” — Audacity, and again audacity, and always audacity! So cried one of the leaders of the French Revolution, I can never remember which one, but Bill Clinton seems to have adopted this as his motto. It has served him well. When it comes to being shameless, he is peerless.

The Comeback Kid — or the Comeback Id, as I prefer to call him — says he isn’t ashamed of having been impeached. Au contraire, as the French revolutionaries might put it, his impeachment enabled him to say that “I think we saved the Constitution of the United States”! Note the modest “we”: he doesn’t claim to have done it all by himself.

So that’s what he was doing when he not only lied to the American public for seven months, but had his underlings — “we” — lie for him and wage a smear campaign against the independent counsel’s office. He was defending the handiwork of Madison, Hamilton, and the boys!

When he put out the word that Monica Lewinsky was a “stalker” who never actually touched his private (or semi-private) parts, even as Monica herself was still trying to protect him, he wasn’t treacherously betraying the poor little fool he’d used as his Oval Office playmate: he was preserving our freedoms!

Clinton may yet get several more chances to save the Constitution, if the new independent counsel, Robert Ray, indicts him for the crimes he committed during his previous effort to save the Constitution. In fact he is currently trying to save the Constitution in Arkansas, where disbarment proceedings against him are moving toward a denouement. Clinton’s defense is that he didn’t actually lie when he employed his peculiar sexual semantics: it depends on what your definition of “false” is.

It’s not that Clinton ever lies; it’s just that the rest of the world is so doggone literal-minded. As Mark Twain said, the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. But such vital differences are lost on the Clinton-haters, who fail to grasp his nuanced distinction between “oral sex” and “sex.” The latter would have made him a perjurer; the former merely signified a “relationship” that was “not appropriate.”

How was he supposed to know that when he denied having “sex” with That Woman, some people, including a federal judge, would take it to mean he was saying he didn’t have “oral sex” with her either? The man gave direct answers to all the questions put to him, and he was impeached, could lose his license to practice law in his home state, and may yet wind up in prison. That’s the kind of blind irrationality Clinton was, and still is, up against.

And yet, after all these years of lies, perjury, and other felonies, not to mention the unique humiliation of having his semen scrutinized by the FBI, Clinton continues to speak to us as if he were our national pastor, offering us spiritual guidance from the pulpit. Humiliation has not bred humility. He continues to sermonize on what is best for “our children,” as if, after all the shame he has inflicted on his own child, he were also our national father figure. The man has the conscience of a rhinoceros.

He and his wife share one striking trait: enormous presumption. They don’t know when they’re not wanted. They took front-row VIP seats in St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the funeral of John Cardinal O’Connor in New York City the other day, only to suffer a moral rebuke that would have crushed anyone less brassy than they are. When Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston warmly praised the beloved Cardinal O’Connor for cherishing human life from conception to death, for being “unambiguously pro-life,” the entire Catholic audience stood and applauded for three minutes, as the Clintons and the Gores remained seated, isolated by their refusal to honor a great man for his love of, yes, our children.

At last, awkwardly and reluctantly, the Clintons stood too. Even their brazenness had finally broken down. The moment gave new meaning to the scriptural prophecy: “The first shall be last.”

Joseph Sobran

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