Trying to Have it Both Ways

by Christopher Caldwell

For Republicans, the President's sex-perjury was serious enough to warrant throwing him out of office ("He has broken faith with the American people"), but not serious enough to make us worry about the stability of our institutions (because after all, it's only about sex).

For Democrats, the Republican investigation was too trivial and "partisan" to deserve a serious rebuttal, but serious enough to merit a Machiavellian alliance with Hustler magazine and a murderous bombing campaign in order to stave it off. (We had to destroy the Constitution to save it.)

And here comes the reckoning. The speeches from the final days before Saturday's votes were almost all of them lame -- none lamer than Henry Hyde's much-praised opening of the debate. Hyde began by saying, "Sexual misconduct and adultery are private acts and are none of Congress' business." A laudable sentiment, but one with which his party's conduct over the last six months has been wholly at odds -- also one that, given his own history, happens to be awfully convenient for him.

Then Hyde sneered at the Democrats who "suggest that to impeach the President is to reverse the result of a national election, as though Sen. Dole would become president." Those Democrats are right and Hyde is wrong. There's nothing more alarming than the willful obtuseness, the glibness with which Republicans ignore that overturning an election is what impeachment is all about.

See! Hyde was saying. You can have Gore! So we're not really doing you any harm. The American people elected Bill Clinton president -- twice. They didn't elect "Bill Clinton or Al Gore or whoever the Republican Party thinks is a suitable substitute."

The missile attacks on Iraq didn't provide as much issue-obscuring hocus-pocus as the President might have hoped, but it was not for Democrats' lack of trying. Dick Gephardt found it unconscionable that Republicans could debate impeachment "when our young soldiers, men and women, are in harm's way." And David Bonior asked: "What kind of signal does this send to our troops?" Excuse me, but what "troops?" You mean the guys munching amaretto biscotti in some conference room in the Virginia suburbs, studying aerial photographs and trying to determine which Iraqi villages to incinerate with the press of a button?

I share the broadly held American sentiment that we've got to back our boys in the heat of battle. But it's precisely because the sentiment is so broadly held that Democrats have viewed it merely -- as they seem to view any broadly held sentiment -- as an opportunity to bullshit, defraud and propagandize the American people. The arrogance of the Clintonites' defense of his Iraq policy, the high-handed, Nixonesque calling-into-question of political opponents' patriotism, is evidence that the only lesson the Clintonite Democratic Party took out of Vietnam is the near-inexhaustible bullshittability of the American public.

But it's only near-inexhaustible. A case can be made for bombing Iraq. Even if I wish the Democrats would learn to make it without invoking the name of Adolf Hitler, the case is there nonetheless. But you cannot limit your bombing schedule to (a) a few days after the Lewinsky story breaks, (b) the week Monica Lewinsky testifies before the grand jury and (c) twelve hours before you're scheduled to get impeached without arousing suspicion that the whole "Crisis in the Gulf" is a fiction concocted to make us feel we need Bill Clinton in power. And to Democrats, their staying in power is a matter of such world-historical importance that sending a few Iraqi to Kingdom Come is a small price to pay. I particularly liked the response of George Stephanopoulos in the opening minutes of the bombing to the question of whether Clinton could handle both impeachment problems and war problems at the same time. "In some ways," Stepho said, "work like this is a refuge from the troubles of impeachment." It's nice, given the total failure of the administration to enunciate any other rationale for these raids, to know that they're at least useful as therapy.

When even Paul Wellstone -- that let- the- Soviet- Union- do- whatever- it- wants peacenik -- supports the bombing, you can be certain that non-military considerations are at issue. Once these doubts are aroused, you cannot bomb. The Bay State windbag Bill Delahunt said, "I think we are in a position where we can provide Saddam Hussein a propaganda victory. One only has to turn on CNN and see that split screen with bombs falling on Baghdad, and here we are in the floor of the House where many will be harshly critical of the president, the commander in chief of our military forces. It's just such an incongruity that it has aspects of a Kafka novel, I would suggest." Then they shouldn't have bombed, I would suggest.