Who will forget the dramatic split screen inauguration news coverage of the first couple pulling up to the White House in their limousine, just as Bill Clinton's jet touched down at JFK airport? The news networks should have split the screen three ways instead of just two in order to tell the whole story. If it had been so important to feature the former President's activities on George W. Bush's day, the viewers should have also been shown the painters diligently painting over the obscenities left behind on the White House office walls. It all occurred simultaneously. It should have been a three-way split screen.

As the people of the world viewed the Bush Inauguration under rainy Washington, DC skies last Saturday, the new management at the White House was calling in the painters, cleaners, and repair personnel. This wasn't a traditional part of the day's activities, but it became necessary because the previous occupants had trashed White House staff offices. In an unprecedented act of desecration, departing staffers vandalized office equipment and furniture, damaged or rerouted phone connections, left obscene messages on outgoing voice mail, wrote obscenities on a wall, loaded office printers with copies of pornographic photos, and left smelly garbage strewn throughout the place.

I'll admit that I thought it was tacky of former President Clinton to upstage his successor by hogging the spotlight Saturday afternoon with his long goodbyes at Andrews AFB and his highly orchestrated reception at JFK airport, but this hideous version of a White House panty raid carried out by veteran outgoing staffers was an appalling parting shot. It's disconcerting to see these acts of desecration of the highest office in the land dismissed as mere pranks. Those of us who decry it are being told by the soulless masses that we have no sense of humor. Could they even begin to know how desperately low they have to plumb the depths of rationalization to say this was an attempt at humor.

It could be that to the amoral, relativist late night talk show hosts and their fans, the monuments of this country amount to nothing more than wood and drywall, but to JFK the White House was the place where he spent his last months and, among so many other things, the place where he toiled and prayed his way through the Cuban missile crisis. I can't imagine how the very people who profess to admire and venerate President Kennedy could take this in their collective stride.

Tipper Gore, to her credit, had the decency to call Mrs. Cheney to apologize for the damage that former Gore staffers had done to the Vice President's staff offices. If Al Gore, Bill Clinton, or Hillary Clinton had troubled themselves to do the same, it hasn't been publicized to date.

By the way, the next time she channels Eleanor Roosevelt, I wonder if Senator Clinton would ask Mrs. Roosevelt if she considered it a joke, the vandalizing of the place from which her husband guided Americans through World War II?

But should we be surprised that the Clinton/Gore staff behaved like they did in their last days on the job, when all the evidence shows that they had never been house trained in the first place?

In 1996 retired FBI agent Gary Aldrich wrote the controversial book, Unlimited Access, in which he described the low-life antics, security violations, and overt drug use by some of the Clinton staff. Aldrich was, of course, much maligned by the White House and by Clinton's fawning admirers in the media. I remember an Aldrich interview on ABC being spiked after calls to the network from Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and from George Stephanopoulos. Aldrich was called a pathological liar by the Clinton/Gore White House for divulging the frat house behavior that he saw during his service there. Clinton defenders dismissed him as a stuffy FBI flatfoot for expressing his national security concerns as well as his overall disgust with what was occurring within the walls of the nation's highest office.

Aldrich writes:

"As I approached the uniformed, armed Secret Service guard, he smiled and waved a greeting. Then he rolled his eyes and pointed behind him, shaking his head... It was my first glimpse of the Clinton administration and, boy, was it different from the buttoned-down Bush administration. The canteen, which was usually spotless, was a mess. Napkins were scattered like windblown Kleenex, and somebody had spilled coffee on the floor. Instead of wiping it up, people had simply tracked through it making a muddy trail.... I almost wondered if I'd walked into Hooters by mistake."
-- Gary Aldrich, Unlimited Access, Regnery Publishing, Inc.

Aldrich went on to describe the boorish behavior of the new Clinton staffers, crowding onto the elevator like a bunch of unsupervised third-graders on a field trip, trash strewn offices, disrespect and disregard for other agencies, and pornography in their work spaces.

It appears the Clinton staff left the same way they came in. If anyone remains skeptical about whether or not the people Gary Aldrich described in his book really were slobs, bereft of common courtesy and lacking the most rudimentary sense of decorum, there would be no doubting Aldrich's account of it by the time last weekend finally rolled around.

They're gone now, thank God, but the question still hangs like a persistent odor in a rental home after a particularly bad tenant is long gone. Was the intentional trashing of The White House merely a manifestation of a serious epidemic of arrested development among the outgoing staff? Was it just an unseemly prank gone out of control conducted by Clinton staffers who are surely old enough to know better? Or was it a calculated message to George W Bush that, as Clinton said last week, "We're still here."

© Lynette Warren 2001 All rights reserved


Previously by Lynette Warren...

Faith vs. Blind Faith (12/27/00)

Under the Mistletoe with Sinn Fein (12/15/00)

Mrs. Clinton Goes to Washington (12/08/00)

It's the Outrage (12/01/00)

The Great Florida Vote Hunt (11/24/00)