Union Square Station
Malone
2/28

They Ran the White House Like a Chop Shop

This is the great paradox: it has all become a joke, but it's no joke at all.

By this time only the hard core Stalinists among Their supporters still do not recognize that the Clintons ran the White House like a chop shop, where the Presidency was stripped and sold off for the value of its parts like a hot Mercedes or BMW by a team of predicate felons led by a criminal psychopath who kept saying, "I love getting up every morning and going to work for the American people." In fact, he got up every morning and went to work on the American people.

There was one big breakthrough this week when a long-time drinker of the Clinton Kool-Aid went cold turkey. That was Bob Herbert, the number one leftist on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, telling Democrats to cut the Clintons loose and ostracize them. He admitted that the Clintons were essentially everything that their much vilified enemies said they were. He even imagined them being taken away in handcuffs.

Herbert is angry with himself and with Democrats in general as much as with the Clintons. But whether he knows it or not, he hasn't seen anything yet. The Clintons didn't just start being criminals a few days before they left the White House, they've been that way for a long time. And when that particular door is opened, by Herbert, by former Clinton staffers, apologists, and lackeys, by the high-minded liberal dupes who believed the Clinton line all along, well, then they should be prepared for what else is there, behind that door. It isn't going to be pretty.

Working back from the pardons that were sold off in the closing hours, as the stolen furniture was being moved out of the White House, all of the criminal activity falls into place. Now Bob Herbert and his fellow Clinton apologists can finally connect all those dots that they never seemed quite able to draw lines between before.

Suddenly, a line travels from the pardons last month to the commodity profits from the late '70s. Then the denials that She knew anything about her brother brokering pardons to the tune of $400 grand (that we know of) can be bridged back now to her denials that She knew anything about her husband's sex with the intern in the Oval Office. The sex in the Oval Office can be cleanly connected to the dropping of His pants in front of the young woman in the hotel room in Arkansas and a line can be drawn from there back to another hotel in '78 with the same emotionally dead psychopath flipping on his dark glasses as he exits Juanita Broaddrick's room with the advice that she "put some ice on that."

But that's the "easy stuff" to stomach, because as sordid as it is, it's cheap and personal. There's a much nastier line to be drawn between the impending impeachment vote in the House and the coincidental missile and air strikes on Iraq over the issue of weapons inspections, which missile and air strikes in fact caused all weapons inspections in Iraq to end. There's the horrifying line to be drawn between Lewinsky's appearance before the grand jury and the missile attack on the pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan that was handpicked by Him based on no evidence at all that the factory was involved in the making of chemical weapons. (What power to stick a pin in the map and have death rain down on that point so that you can be seen doing the people's business while the grand jury works.)

And there's the fat, nasty, four-lane highway of a line to be drawn between the Chinese money and espionage scandal and the air war on Kosovo that conveniently began at the outset of that scandal. That war was begun through a blatant diplomatic fraud and accomplished the very thing it claimed to be preventing: the destruction of Kosovo. (There's a line that many Republicans won't like either, because they supported this worst of all possible examples of how force should be used, all launched on the thinnest pretext.)

So too does the Lincoln bedroom dot connect to the White House gifts taken home with Them dot, which connects to the Travel Office dot, which connects to the FBI Files dot, which connects to the Webster Hubbell hush money dot, which connects to His perjury dot.

That's a lot of dots, don't you think? There are a lot of dots because that's the way the Clintons like it. They like to skate out to the edge of the ice, risk everything for nothing, and confuse their pursuers with volume. They like to flood their world with scandals. That's why there's not one rotten pardon that looks like a bribe was taken, there are forty that look that way. With the Clintons, it's by design that they work beyond the believable. Anyone can believe that they cheated once -- who hasn't, after all -- but who can believe that they cheat every chance They get, and have no consciences to stop them?

And then, what's Their explanation? Why it's all the work of Their enemies, those strange people who just seem to dislike them. Those would be the people who object to Their chronic lying, Their theft, Their corruption, and Their repulsive apologists.

And so we'll have to watch a meathead like Tim Russert invite a repulsive liar like James Carville onto Meet the Press as if he were not the absolute lowest, most craven slob walking the streets without an electronic ankle bracelet, and have him tell another twenty-five lies, mangling logic and common sense, just to make excuses for Them, one more time.

It would be so much easier if the people who have the goods on Them would finally throw off their fear and step forward and help Mary Jo White, the U.S. Attorney in New York, put Them in a federal penitentiary, returning Them one last time to public housing.

© Union Square Journal 2001

Previously by Malone...

Hannibal: The Silence of the Critics (01/16/01)

Reagan's Two Terrible Mistakes (02/06/01)

The Return of the Hero (01/19/01)

The Hero of Chappaquiddick (01/11/01)

Real Millennium Strange (01/03/01)

Smoke 'em if you got 'em (12/21/00)

Union Square Station (12/11/00)

Union Square Station (12/3 back to 11/24/00)