Clinton & Me Read online

  Then when Republicans began to suggest that a political operative might want political files for political reasons (another wild GOP conspiracy theory), the White House attorney said no, because “my own investigation of the files controversy found there is nothing to indicate that there is a political motivation behind this.”

  Now that’s reassuring.

  But the final insult to us all was when the Clinton administration tried to blame the mess on previous presidents. The Clinton stooges argued that FBI files have been obtained this way for thirty years, and any other president could have done the same thing.

  Which is the perfect time to note that they didn’t. No other president—not Reagan when the Democrats had the Congress, not LBJ when Vietnam was red hot, not Carter when he was about to get his electoral brains beaten in—was willing to use the federal police force as his personal private eye for potential political dirt.

  There is something these other presidents had that President Clinton does not: shame. They may not have had much, but for presidents as revered as Kennedy and as reviled as Nixon, there was a line out there somewhere they would not cross: a deed too foul, a demand too great, something they wouldn’t do to be reelected.

  We cannot honestly count Bill Clinton among these men.

  Meanwhile, there are a lot of things Bob Dole won’t do to get elected (like figure out why he wants to be president). And that is the reason he’s got my vote.

  To Di For

  * * *

  September 1997

  The basic game of photographer and quarry will not essentially change . . . the stars want the media, when they want them. That won’t stop.

  —Chris Steele-Perkins, Parisian photography agent

  The day after the wreck, I was asked by a reporter if I knew Prince Charles’ last name. “Stuart?” I guessed. “Something royal. I don’t know. . . . Tudor? Windsor? Montague? Capulet?” Such is my ignorance on all matters royal.

  I am told the royal wedding that gave the world Prince Charles and Princess Diana was viewed by three-quarters of a billion people in seventy-six countries, but I must have been watching Jeopardy at the time. Indeed, a Botswanan sheepherder could clean my game show clock if Alex Trebek called out, “Lifestyles of the British Monarchy for five hundred!”

  A week ago, everything I knew about the royals could fit on the back of Dan Quayle’s resume. Today, I know more about Lady Di than I do about my own mother, whether I like it or not.

  I cannot recall the last media feeding frenzy as all-consuming as the death of Her Divorceship. I was headed from New York to Philly the night of the wreck, spinning through the radio dial looking for traffic and weather reports. Forget it. My dashboard had become “All Di, all the time! We’ve got Di dead on the eights: eight, eighteen, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-eight, and fifty-eight after the hour! Give us twenty-two minutes, and we’ll give you the princess . . . dead!”

  My local paper was even worse. The daily comes out with four sections: world news, local news, sports and the wimpy lifestyle/arts section. The Monday after Di’s death—I swear this is true—my local yokel Di-wouldn’t-come-to-this-town-on-a-bet newspaper had nothing but Di on the front page of three of the four sections: nothing else! Not a single non-Di story anywhere on the front except in the sports section, where Di was relegated to page three.

  Why? What am I missing? I’m sorry, folks, but your fascination with the royal family completely escapes me. And I am particularly bewildered by your irrational connection to the white-trash wonder of the world, Lady Di.

  Every news story is filled with quotes from maudlin members of the great unwashed, weeping for the People’s Princess (a notion as internally consistent as that of the beloved despot). “It’s like we’ve lost one of our own political figures,” said Joni Van Vliet, eighteen, of Bend, Oregon, proving in one fell swoop that

  a. The Oregon public school system is a disaster.

  b. American newspapers will print anything.

  And I mean anything. Newsrooms across America, desperate to localize Di’s death, had their reporters scouring the streets for anything remotely related to the British Isles. Ordering an English muffin at a sidewalk cafe could get you five minutes on the local news. My favorite was the news radio station whose reporter made a mad dash Sunday morning to the local Anglican church. (“Hey, aren’t they the Church of England? Grab your mike and let’s roll!”)

  And it worked. In such Anglophilic enclaves as Germantown, Pennsylvania, and Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the locals choked, sighed and sobbed on cue over the shocking death of this beautiful and tragic hero who meant so much to us all.

  Watching Americans react to the media coverage of Princess Di’s death is a lot like watching the audience in the Tony-n-Tina’s Wedding–type plays that are all the rage off-Broadway. In these plays, the audience members are supposed to be family members attending the wedding or bar mitzvah or whatever, and they are expected to interact with the professionals in the show.

  So too with the average citizen when the TV camera comes on: People know they are supposed to be upset because, well, everyone else seems upset, so why not just play along?

  If the newspapers say Lady Di’s a tragic figure, then she’s a tragic figure—though the tragedy of a life that began in aristocracy, blossomed at Buckingham Palace and ended in the backseat of a millionaire’s Mercedes escapes me.

  Clearly, Diana’s death is a tragedy—every death is. But how can anyone use the word tragedy to describe Diana’s life?

  She got divorced, sure. So do 50 percent of all married Americans, but how many of them get out with $26.5 million in cash and $600,000 a year in walking-around money?

  Yes, Lady Di had bulimia and was depressed—but why? Because her husband was doinking around? That’s the sad tale of every country-western song on the jukebox, and besides, so was she. One reason royal-watchers were enthusiastic about her relationship with Dodi was that Di was finally dating somebody single.

  Sure, Diana had an overbearing mother-in-law and her every haircut was on the cover of a tabloid, but if a life of Swiss finishing schools, fantastic wealth and a castle filled with servants is tragic, then I say, “Hey, Alex! I’ll take Tragedy for twenty-seven million!”

  But pointing out these obvious facts is not part of the game that the tabloids, their mainstream press allies and the millions of mall-coifed females who finance them want to play. The Star puts Diana on the cover because the working girls and hausfraus who buy it want to see it. NBC News wants a piece of that Oprah demographic, so Tom Brokaw pretends that it’s news, too. Hey—you gotta put something between the commercials, right?

  There was a time when newsrooms were run by people who made judgments about what ought to be news, not what people would pay to read. That era ended long ago, and its death was reaffirmed when “legitimate” news organizations began using the tabloids to break stories so that they could put Dick Morris and Gennifer Flowers on their front pages, too.

  Now that the paparazzi are under fire, news editors are pretending they never heard of them: “Why, we would never run those awful photos in our paper . . . until someone else does, anyway.”

  It’s all part of the game. I’ll take complete irrelevance and crocodile tears for whatever they’re worth. Today they look like a sure winner.

  God’s Punch Line

  * * *

  September 1997

  Two wire reports appeared on the same day:

  Accepting the Nobel in the name of the “unwanted, unloved and uncared for,” Mother Teresa wore the same $1 white sari that she had adopted to identify herself with the poor when she founded her order, Missionaries of Charity. Wherever people needed comfort, she was there: among the hungry in Ethiopia, the radiation victims at Chernobyl, the rubble of Armenia’s earthquake, in the squalid townships of South Africa. One day in 1948, she found a woman “half eaten up by maggots and rats” lying in the street in front of a Calcutta hospital, and sat with the woman until she
died.

  Seventy percent of viewers polled by the tabloid TV show American Journal said Princess Diana should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian work.

  There is a God, and he is laughing.

  He has played cosmic paparazzo, using a flashbulb irony to catch the entire human race at its most petty, pompous and self-deluded. And most of you didn’t even smile.

  My theory is that Mother Teresa, who had been in ill health for years, was originally slated to become lead soprano in the Choir Invisible months ago. But God, who loves nothing more than a good joke, booked her on the celestial equivalent of USAir to ensure a late departure. Thanks to His immaculate sense of comic timing, Mother Teresa roared to heaven right over Di-Fest, like a low-flying 747 drowning out the wailing below.

  The trouble is, Americans have become deaf to irony. Everyone who got up at four in the morning to watch the funeral, who wore out TV remotes clicking from one prime-time special to the next, who thought Princess Diana’s demise received an appropriate level of press coverage—these people don’t realize they’ve just been had.

  It’s a gag, a joke, folks—and you’re it. As the kids say: You are so busted!

  Oh, you thought you were safe, indulging in the shameless excess of the Royal Death, playing along with this real-life edition of Oprah meets Dallas. After all, wasn’t everyone else playing along, too?

  You felt free to say aloud that Lady Di deserves sainthood—after all, hadn’t she once shaken hands with an AIDS patient? And one wearing polyester at the time, too? (Ooh!)

  And Diana sacrificed so much happiness to raise those two fine sons (though not quite enough to stay in an unhappy marriage), despite the daily hardships she faced: living in a castle, being a multimillionaire, having a staff of full-time nannies, finding time to pick up the latest from Armani . . .

  “How does a single mother do it?” you wondered aloud.

  So you wept along, obsessed along, played along, rationalizing it all by saying that Princess Di deserved the wave of overwrought media mourning. She was unique. There was no one else like her.

  Then . . . wham! The cosmic cream pie. The so-called tragedy of Di’s life was put in instant perspective when compared to the life of Mother Teresa. The celebrity-struck goons who whooped up Di’s occasional visit to an elementary school sounded painfully boorish as the media quietly reported the life’s work of a woman who founded leper colonies.

  If all the self-indulgent, Elton John–esque tears shed for Diana Spencer—whose celebrated accomplishments amounted to giving other people’s money to charity and breaking up a couple of marriages—could have been shed for Mother Teresa, the Saint of the Gutter herself would have been embarrassed.

  Watching them shed for the Saint of Saks Fifth Avenue was almost unbearable.

  I will confess enough personal naïveté about the human condition to expect that Mother Teresa’s death might slow down the national Di-gasm, or at least reduce it to low moanings.

  Silly me. In most media outlets, Mother Teresa was the second lead, bumped by more pressing news involving which color socks Prince William would wear while following the royal hearse.

  Jehovah’s joke went right over our heads. We are all lost in the era of Oprah: We demand crying queens, people’s princesses, and mob-fearing monarchs who genuflect before the readers of the National Enquirer.

  The true nobility of a life such as Mother Teresa’s means nothing to us. When was she ever on the cover of Vogue? How many naughty phone calls did she make from Buckingham Palace? When did she ever auction off an old dress for charity, and what would she get for it, anyway—a buck?

  Diana Spencer had a higher calling. Many believe she was the only hope of saving the British monarchy, quite a feat given that Britain has been ruled by a parliament for a while now. Others believe she was the most beautiful woman in the world—a claim that might seem true in England—but a casual glance through Cosmopolitan puts that notion to rest.

  But Diana’s true higher calling was to be the first martyr of the Oprah era, the first celebrity to die whose entire celebrity was self-contained. Diana was famous simply for being famous.

  And Mother Teresa? It was once believed that a lifetime of sacrifice for others would be rewarded with honor at your death and beyond. I cannot speak for the hereafter, but our children—watching the difference in reaction to the death of a plastic pop icon and a true humanitarian—can see clearly what we treasure more.

  Impeach Reno

  * * *

  September 1997

  On April 19, 1993, government agents raided a Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, killing about eighty men, women and children and leaving just one survivor: Janet Reno.

  How this spectacled incompetent kept her job after perhaps the single worst law enforcement debacle in American history is a mystery. You usually have to be a member of the teachers’ union to be this incompetent and not get fired for it.

  As attorney general, Janet Reno is part of a long line of “bad babes” serving in the Clinton administration. Hazel O’Leary, the soon-to-be-indicted head of the Department of Energy, was flying herself around the world on a luxury tour jet. She has since been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

  And when the surgeon general, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, wasn’t promoting masturbation in our middle schools, she was doing her part to keep Bill Clinton in the same back pages of the history books as the Harding or Polk administrations.

  Add to this Janet Reno. Attorney General Reno is supposed to be the watchdog in the government, making sure everyone plays by the rules. While her physical appearance may enhance the watchdog image, in fact the Clintons have walked over her like a cheap rug. And she lies there and takes it. Consider the record.

  The Clintons take office and immediately order all of the U.S. attorneys to be sacked—including the one investigating Whitewater—and Janet Reno obediently passes out the pink slips. No questions, no complaints.

  The Clintons get their hands on the FBI files of eight hundred political opponents, and Janet Reno can’t find anything worth prosecuting. A group of Americans are unprotected while their government passes around their FBI files like a bottle of Boone’s Farm at a high school party, and Janet Reno doesn’t lift a finger.

  Documents subpoenaed by law enforcement for two years mysteriously reappear in the White House, practically on Hillary Clinton’s nightstand, and Janet Reno mutters something about how “things like that always turn up in the last place you look.”

  And now we have Buddhist monks with prosecutorial immunity. Try running that one through your First Amendment Rights-O-Meter.

  During the 1996 campaign, Al Gore visited a Buddhist temple in California filled with devotees who had taken a vow of poverty. Miraculously (hey, they’re monks), the impoverished acolytes were able to scrape together a few hundred grand for Vice President Gore.

  When it was discovered that this group of impoverished monks were laundering money for the Democratic National Committee, Al Gore did what politicians do: He lied. He claimed he didn’t know the event was a fund-raiser, even though his staff covered his desk with more disclaimers than a pack of cigarettes.

  The problem isn’t Al Gore’s lying. That’s his job. The problem is when the chief law enforcement officer lets him get away with it. Janet Reno’s refusal to name a special prosecutor to investigate the White House fund-raising scandal is a new low, even by Washington standards. We know there was money laundering, we know Gore has lied about his conduct, we know that he solicited money on government property—just by watching CNN.

  Janet Reno is such a poor prosecutor that her crack investigative team had to find out that Al Gore was raising money for himself inside the Oval Office by reading about it in the morning paper.

  She’s a watchdog who won’t bark, a bloodhound who won’t tree. Janet Reno is a disgrace, and she should go.

  Now, many of you are already yawning: “Who cares if the law was broken? So Clinton-Gore
are dishonest—oh, that’s a news flash.” You are right, of course. The American people, taken as a whole, couldn’t care less about the rule of law. They want justice and revenge served up on Court TV. If it doesn’t involve homicide or hanky-panky, the people just won’t care.

  That’s why it is particularly important to have a law enforcement officer who does care, especially when no one else does. Being obnoxious in defense of the law is no vice.

  When the Hillary hounds start baying that these campaign laws are minor (these are the same whiners who want to execute people guilty of unauthorized smoking), someone needs to look them in the eye and say, “The law is the law—change it, don’t break it.”

  Think, for example, of the 55 mph speed limit. Fifty-five on the interstate was about as easy to enforce as the six-inch rule at a Catholic-school dance. Should our sheriffs have had the policy of letting their buddies off the hook because nobody liked the law?

  No, we want the law enforced. We also want our political leaders to change the laws that don’t work. If campaign finance laws need to be reformed (I certainly think so), then get Congress to change the law. Only Janet Reno could argue with a straight face that the Clinton administration supports tough new campaign laws when they were unwilling to obey the old lax ones.

  Janet Reno’s scorched-earth policy of incompetence and cronyism continues long after Waco. It is long past time for the Congress to impeach her and bring it to an end.

  These Kids Today

  * * *

  August 1997

  My mom’s just going to have to take me shopping.