Skeletons Tumble From Closets

by Alexander Cockburn

The cliche of the week has been that the Republicans hate Bill because he stands for the '60s. Let me tell you, I knew the '60s, and they certainly didn't look like Bill Clinton. Sixties people didn't fret to their draft board officers that they were concerned about their future political credibility. That doesn't mean the cliche is wrong. It means that the Republicans have muddled up the '60s with Bill, which is a libel on that wonderful decade and bad luck for William Jefferson Clinton who, during the '60s, did everything in his power to make sure that he came out the other end looking respectable and ready for life on the larger political stage.

The Republicans were smart to tell Livingston he had to go. The way he first confessed to the adultery- that- strengthens- marriage gave one the strong impression that he had found it necessary to strengthen his marriage by adulteries on a regular basis. Perhaps Mrs. Livingston wasn't quite ready to be propelled in front of the microphone to ratify the strength Bob had imparted by his treacheries to their union. Or maybe Bob's mistresses -- perhaps we should call them "co-strengtheners" -- were about to come forth with other embarrassing revelations.

At all events, the Republicans know that whatever they say about lying and about perjury being the impeachable offenses against the presidential oath, the American people know this is about hypocrisy. Just when Americans had decided adultery in their public servants might be offensive but is forgivable, Republicans have asserted the unforgivability of the whole business, (unless as a last desperate effort to save a failing marriage). And so each time a Republican gets caught with pants or knickers down -- Henry Hyde, Helen Chenoweth, Dan Burton, Livingston -- the whole get-Bill game drops a serious notch in credibility. And since every Republican politician -- just like every Christian evangelist -- has a skeleton somewhere in the cupboard, the Republicans are in for a long period of outing. It's going to be fun.

It was inappropriate for Livingston to suggest that Bill should match him by resigning. After all, Livingston was only a speaker-elect, now headed for the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest holder of that position. Bill is head of state. It would be more appropriate for him to say to Saddam, if you step down, then so will I. But then, Saddam is even less likely a candidate for voluntary resignation than Bill. The Iraqi people know the prime author of their troubles, and Saddam would not get past the first word of a resignation speech before every scrap of flesh was stripped from his bones.

The administration hopes that there will be a rising against Saddam and that then America's dearest wish comes to pass: Saddam-type tyranny, without Saddam. But looking back on George Bush's betrayal of the Shia uprising in the spring of 1991, what Iraqi officer or Shia leader would dare take the risk?

Saddam's hold on power is more tenuous than is commonly supposed. There are plenty of people ready to rise, but why do so if the likely prospect is that American forces will stand idly by, as they did in 1991 and watch you get chopped into pieces by Saddam? What's particularly disgusting about the bombing of Iraq is the aimlessness of the whole exercise, with the aimlessness stemming from the fact that Clinton's administration, just like George Bush's, isn't clear about what it wants. A clear policy aimed at the overthrow of Saddam would have prompted the United States to strengthen ties with Iran, to tell the Turks to move to establish an autonomous Kurdish region, to have a long-term strategy beyond paying the Iraqi National Accord to put bombs in cinemas in Baghdad.

But there is no clear policy; there's nothing beyond the sanctions that have killed Iraqi children by the hundreds of thousands and a bombing spasm that makes life even more unendurable for the very people Clinton says the United States is trying to succor, ordinary Iraqis. So by all means, impeach Clinton for breach of war powers and for being an instigator of mass murder.

For me, as for many others, it's been a divisive week in my own soul. I've been a charter Bill-hater. On the other hand, who can gaze upon the countenance of Bob Barr and want him to have his way? Some time back in the 1950s, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and the others went to visit William Carlos Williams at his place in Rutherford, N.J. He greeted them, gazed morosely out the window, heaved a sigh and said finally: "There sure are a lot of bastards out there." I looked at those smug white Christians howling their pretentious bilge about lying and the sacred oath and felt the same way. There sure are a lot of Republican bastards in Congress. Not decent old farts like Coble of North Carolina. No, I mean the straight-arrow, short-back-and-side Republicans who came to maturity with a burning sense of injury and self-righteousness.

These are men you would never want to be trapped in an elevator with, even for five minutes, the same way you wouldn't have wanted to be trapped in church with the early Puritans. So, I say to the commander in chief, hang in there.