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The Monica Lewinsky scandal is the best thing to happen to President Clinton since 1996.
OPINIONS ’98
Friday, 11 September 1998
Friday, 25 September 1998
Wednesday, 28 October 1998
If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of medicine, one wonders at what cost we will keep the peace in six months.
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State of Affairs
By Michael J. Ballway ’02
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he Monica Lewinsky scandal is the best thing to happen to President Clinton since his party's overwhelmingly successful misinformation/demonization blitz against what we were supposed to believe was a two-headed "Dole/Gingrich" monster in 1996. There are those who argue that this scandal is hurting the public image, and political power, of the President. This is clearly not the case; Bill Clinton's mandate to rule remains unchallenged because the American public has bought his line that lying and misleading on nationwide TV is a "private" affair. The only group of people doubting the President (as the weekly polls tell us) is the U.S. legislature, where many Republicans and even some Democrats are calling variously for censure, resignation, or impeachment. No matter how much they speak out, though, these legislators dare not move against Mr. Clinton. Even GOP luminaries such as Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, mindful of Mr. Clinton's popularity and unwilling to repeat the fiasco of the 1995 government shutdown, are urging caution. Of course, there is also a small minority of Americans who are outraged at the President's apparent lack of morals and sugar-coated lying, but those people are probably part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and therefore are not relevant to mainstream political discussion. The President's power has not been diminished by the Lewinsky scandal; it has increased. With every broadcast news outlet focusing 24 hours a day, O.J.-style, on Monica et al., the policy blunders that have punctuated this Administration are going unnoticed. Mr. Clinton has been free to mismanage the Republic because his detractors are focused on Monica Lewinsky. There has been one exception to the Monica-to-the-exclusion-of-all-else rule: The African embassy bombings and the Commander-in-Chief's retaliatory strikes against Afghan and Sudanese sites supposedly supporting Osama bin Laden, our current Public Enemy No. 1 (he succeeds "Big Tobacco" in this capacity). Strangely enough, the Department of Defense has yet to release documentation proving, or even alleging, that both of these sites were actually terrorist installations; recent leaks by U.S. intelligence agents seems to suggest that the factory in Sudan was clearly nonmilitary. In the aftermath of the Tomahawk missile attacks, liberal political commentators went on-air to emphasize that this action did not parallel "Wag the Dog"; they are right, since it is the scandal which is now taking pressure off the fabricated (or, to the best of our knowledge, at least poorly researched) war, rather than vice-versa. Case in point, however, of how "Trousergate" is helping Mr. Clinton is the fact that the media are paying relatively little attention to last week's resignation of Scott Ritter, an American who until recently was inspecting Iraqi weapons sites. Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait in 1991 and has taken every opportunity to annoy and insult the rest of the world since then. Unfortunately, U.N. Security Council members Russia, China, and France seem to have taken a liking to him (or his oil) and constantly push for a softening of the U.S. hard line against the man whom many faulted President Bush for not killing only seven years ago. Last March, the U.S. got in trouble for showing backbone in the middle east and was accused of being too "confrontational" with the middle-eastern despot. Our U.N. friends preferred a compromise: They were to go ahead with weapons inspections, and the U.S. was take a time-out to think of whether Saddam was really all that evil, or just misunderstood. Sure enough, the Clinton Administration has been moving toward a "kinder, gentler" approach toward the world's favorite authoritarian dictator. We are now telling our soldiers to inspect only those sites which Iraq says we can inspect, which defies common sense (should a police detective investigate for murder only those who want to be investigated?). Hussein will now have to bear the penalty for violating the weapons-inspection agreements he signed with the U.N. last spring: The rest of the Security Council is now calling for more sanctions against Iraq, as if starving the already-poor Iraqi population will cause a change of heart in their leader. What matters, we are led to believe by our allies, is keeping the peace. One wonders at what cost we will keep the peace in six months, when (according to Mr. Ritter) Iraq will have brought on-line chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons technology.
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s time marches on, articles of impeachment and censure may be offered. Liberal Democrats happy with Mr. Clinton's domestic agenda will continue to spew forth the explanation that Mr. Clinton's possible perjury is none of our business, and hard-line Republicans will denounce the President at all opportunities. Across the sea, however, doubts will remain -- doubts about what was being made in the recently-bombed Sudanese chemicals plant, doubts which can only be allayed by so-far-hesitant Defense Secretary Cohen; and doubts about our policy toward Iraq, whether coddling the butcher of Baghdad will work in or against our favor, six months from now. This article ran in the 11 September 1998 edition of The Crusader, on page 8 (first page of Opinions). |