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President Clinton will serve out his term not because he deserves to but because of the rationalizations of his spin doctors. The overriding question for us should be how best to use this crippled administration. It is a pragmatic question as to how best to undo the Clintons’ determination to erode our rights as citizens, husbands and fathers.
We are safest where government isn’t worshipped and is treated as a necessary evil. The Founding Fathers feared politics and politicians. They warned their fellow countrymen not to expect justice at the hands of human beings unless they are continually vigilant. Our subsequent history confirms the wisdom of this warning.
The multiple-choice answers to the questions of how we act don’t include an ideal choice.
Keeping Clinton on ice
There is no political party or faction ready to fill the void in the event of a Clinton impeachment or resignation with a pro-father policy. Until there is, it is better that the branches of the federal government quarrel with each other, run around in circles, and enact minimal legislation after a lot of horse-trading.
Keeping Clinton in cold storage in the White House through the confusion that will ensue and to the end of his term will invert the legacy he intended. It can make his presidency of great value to us.
Our enemies will be forced to go through the motions of reassessing the many feminist fabrications about the root of the human problem that are the basis of a mass of bad law and rulings. The feminists will be forced in the media to reconcile this man’s behavior with his false sentiments every day. That will undermine their unity and divert their efforts from aggressive policy matters to a defense of the man, a parallel to what will be occupying Clinton’s own spokesmen.
Feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem have already justified Clinton’s lying on the principle that the end justifies the means. From now on, only those like Clinton himself who can lie with a straight face will any longer argue that women always tell the truth when they accuse men of relationship abuse. Before this process is over the Gloria Steinems will have to repeat this moral relativism or abandon the President and their own fanatical agenda.
They openly boast that the President may be a bastard, but he is their bastard; Paula Jones, Clarence Thomas and we fathers did nothing wrong except get in the way of what Gloria Steinem et al. want. The President and the First Lady made it their priority to embed in our law and heritage these perverse feminist standards demanded by Steinem, Ireland, MacKinnon, Reno, etc.
The longer Clinton remains in the eye of the storm the more discrepancies in feminism we will be able to emphasize. The feminists were the last holdout in condemning Clinton’s behavior as improper. Even previously loyal Democratic Senators and Representatives have deserted Clinton.
The categorical imperative
The great philosopher Immanuel Kant is remembered for his categorical imperative “act so your action may become universal law.”
How does this apply here? For example, Clinton justified lying under oath to the question whether he had sexual contact with Monica Lewinsky with the argument that where no intercourse results, legally there is no sexual contact. What happens when that argument is applied generally? It certainly raises doubt that these people are serious about the epidemic of child sexual abuse as well as sexual harassment in the workplace.
If Clinton’s crime is only lying about a sexual indiscretion than why did the Air Force dismiss Kelly Flinn? If it’s all right for the Commander-in-Chief to have a consensual affair then why was General Joseph Ralston dropped from consideration as the new head of Joint Chiefs of Staff? Ralston was repudiated not because the woman was in his line of command, but just because it was adulterous. Since Clinton did not resign and was not impeached, these hypocritical claims have to be covered up and the people will never be forced to face up them.
Let’s be careful that this strategy isn’t used to make either the Republicans or the Supreme Court the beneficiaries of the Clinton void. They are no more to be trusted with excessive power than is Clinton or anyone else. It will be good to have a government limping its way across the hackneyed bridge to the twenty-first century discredited as an ersatz religion.
We should react to Clinton’s vulgarity no more shocked than we would to the behavior we have come to expect from Hollywood. That is quite the opposite from the acceptance of his behavior by his feminist supporters. The panoplies of political office over the past two decades have begun to imitate Hollywood. The two have a symbiotic relationship. Washington yearns for Hollywood’s glamour and Hollywood salivates for Washington’s power. But we are not Britain; we are not a monarchy. Our politicians were never intended to be our model.
Our Founding Fathers banned titles as a threat to republicanism. Obsequiousness disgusted them.
For those of you who teach the young as well as being parents, the real opportunity to clarify our national ideals is to keep Clinton frozen in the spotlight. Inform the young and impressionable of G. K. Chesterton’s precept about what made the Roman Republic great. He wrote, “Rome was not loved because she was great; she was great because the people loved her.”
Civic pride
Our children should be encouraged to take pride as Americans in their families working together in communities bound by promises made and kept. We should take pride in the initiative of countless immigrants who came here from every corner of the globe and succeeded by observing the laws and seeking its protection from those who abused it. That’s what made America the shining light on the hill for all the world to see. But the light has grown dim. The world must clearly see what has caused that to happen.
Those of you who read the foreign press on the Internet now know that our feminist-obsessed media misled us. Leading journals around the world condemned Clinton more harshly than our own newspapers after the Starr report was released. Yet our press had been reporting that foreigners caricatured our indignation with Clinton’s dishonesty and cheating as childish and puritanical.
This crisis bears no analogy to the chaos that is gripping Russia.
Russia has no tradition of continuity of government. Technology long ago transformed the office of President from an individual pressing his vision to a faceless bureaucracy. Our mail will get delivered, our seniors will get their social security checks, our embassies will function for better or worse, the CIA will be what it has always been - mediocre - no matter who occupies the White House.
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