Sunday, June 27, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Oh no, he's baaaack

And Bill Clinton has turned confession into a new form of jiu-jitsu

Like one of those science fiction movies in which the telepathic alien tries to hypnotize our brave crew into believing they're safe at home when in fact they're still trapped on his alien world, the psychodrama which was America's encounter with William Jefferson Clinton just goes on and on ... and on.

One would never guess Bill Clinton -- in Las Vegas today for a fund-raiser -- has been retired from public life for years. He's been getting more face time on TV of late than even the current president of the United States -- let alone some hapless second-string Democrat from Massachusetts who's rumored to be running his own campaign for the nation's highest office.

The latest installment of Mr. Clinton's endless unburdening has been fueled by the release of his doorstop of an autobiography, which seems to resemble nothing so much as 30 years worth of transcribed day planners, only with all the hot Saturday night dates carefully excised.

And what is the recurring theme of Mr. Clinton's sanitized mea culpa?

Like a wrestler pretending to take a fall only so he can overbalance his opponent, the former president accepts "full responsibility for what he did" (thus claiming full credit for the first step required by all 12-step programs and pop psychology regimes -- applause, please) ... but then quickly adds that it's really all the fault of Kenneth Starr and the vast right-wing conspiracy.

"You can say I handed them the sword all right, but that does not excuse what they did in trampling the Constitution," the former president said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"And so while I'm responsible for what I did, they're responsible for what they did and they can't make me responsible for what they did any more than I can blame them for the mistakes I made," says Mr. Clinton -- apparently saying his impeachment had nothing to do with his own actions, though it's hard to be sure.

Asked what he was thinking when he began his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton replied, "I'm not sure most people would be entirely rational if they had been bankrupted and seen their friends indicted because they wouldn't lie, seen innocent people sent to jail and seen people in your business cover it up and legitimize what happened. ... So I was pretty wigged out. I was mad. I was mad at myself for losing the Congress because I tried to jam too much change down the American system in '93 and '94. ...

"As I say in my book, I was engaged in two struggles. One for the future of the country and one with the demons I had as a child. I lost the private one."

Ah. And so our hero, caught up in the mighty struggle to save "the future of the country" by pushing for massive tax hikes and a system that would jail anyone resisting his wife's collectivized medicine scheme, fell from grace because of a moment of human weakness, indulged due to the mighty pressures of his day job.

It sounds like something out of Greek tragedy, doesn't it? This to explain a man who cheated on his wife by having a nubile young intern service him under the Oval Office desk as he called congressmen on the telephone to cajole their support for his spending initiatives?

And let us not forget, Mr. Clinton hardly gets credit for finally coming clean due to some attack of conscience. The Clinton White House had already launched the same character assassination team against Ms. Lewinsky as they had against all the other victims whom the president's staff so charitably referred to as "the bimbos" -- until it became known Ms. Lewinsky was in possession of a little blue dress with a stain that might present a very interesting DNA comparison.

Asked about the coverage in his book of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the Whitewater financial shenanigans, Mr. Clinton said on television this week, "I try to deal with it as candidly as I can."

It's still early going, of course. But if we really are to be drawn back into one of the more unsavory cesspits of American political history, perhaps the press corps will finally seek out the responses of one particular group -- a group who might be less afraid of official reprisals today than they were a decade ago -- to ask whether the ex-president has now truly told the story of his life "as candidly as he can."

That would be the group of first-hand witnesses who St. Petersburg Times columnist Mary Jo Melone last year famously told us "wanted" to be molested or assaulted by Bill Clinton: campaign volunteer Juanita Broaddrick, former legal secretary Carolyn Moffet, former Miss Arkansas Elizabeth Ward Gracen, former Arkansas state worker Paula Corbin Jones, former Washington political fund-raiser Sandra Allen James, 1992 campaign plane flight attendant Chrystine Zercher, former White House volunteer (and, at the time, the recently widowed) Kathleen Willey ...

You know: "the bimbos."