I have been, for most of my adult life, a defender of Bill and Hillary Clinton. I believe in the vast rightwing conspiracy because I saw it begin. I was in the military documentary business when the Clinton administration started. When I told people what I did for a living it was like crackpot cred. Clearly, if I was spending my life making television shows about Our Heroic Military, I must be one of them, a true believer in a more pure America.
I spent a lot of time hanging around the Pentagon and military bases and venture capital spawning pools, and most of the people I met were just regular folks. But there was a subculture of nutcases who assumed I was one of them and felt comfortable speaking in plain terms. One thing was clear: they hated the Clintons. I'd never seen anything like the visceral hatred and reality-twisting scorn. They believed every rumor about the Clintons anyone told them. A pert, blond officer's daughter in a Talbot's suit and matching handbag, coming out of college and interviewing for her first job, described in lurid detail the lesbian orgies Hillary Clinton hosted in the White House residence. An eccentric collector of military hardware from South Carolina spat venom while reporting that Bill Clinton's draft dodging constituted treason and that the newly elected President was going to be stood up in front of a firing squad just as soon as Congress could get its act together. On a flight out of Washington National, I sat next to a Congressional aide who talked about the Clintons in terms that made me feel like a coup might be in the offing.
"He's unfit to be Comander-in-Chief," the aide said. "It's our patriotic duty to get him out of office as fast as we can."
That this hatred blossomed into private investigations into the President's personal life and pulp fiction conspiracy theories is no surprise. That it grew into a Constitutional crisis was, I believe to this day, testimony to how close to fascism the far right loiters. I know, because I saw it, that the authoritarian urge of the far right is disturbingly strong and prevalent. Listen carefully and you'll hear it in Dick Cheney and the rest, the belief that We, The People just aren't tough or disciplined enough to act in our own interests, that we need an elite class of superpatriots to keep this country strong.
All of that said, one fact about Bill Clinton lingered. No matter what the right did to him, he ultimately did it to himself. He empowered them by acting, in his personal life, like a rutting pig.
As a Democrat he forced me to defend the indefensible; the alternative was empowering a Republican Party dominated by the kind of far right nutcases I'd met while making military documentaries. I wasn't alone. All across the weird spectrum of the Democratic Party, people were forced to choose between their dismay at Clinton's personal antics and their belief that he was doing a pretty good job as President. The best example of that is the so-called "women's lobby" of feminist organizations, who had to overlook the kind of predatory sexual behavior they normally abhorred in order to preserve a set of policies they desperately believed in.
I defended Clinton, even as I realized his deep flaws, and I defend him still. I'm a believer in triangulation, which seems to me nothing but a branded version of that old and largely forgotten political technique, compromise. He was a mixture of conservative and liberal that in many ways roughly mirrored my own functionally ambivalent politics. And I liked him, I really liked him, and I felt that out of office he grew in stature.
Get a group of Americans together talking about Presidential politics and eventually someone's going to start talking about how screwed up our primary system is. We'll all nod our heads in agreement: yup, screwed up as can be. But one thing our never ending Presidential primary accomplishes is the revelation of character. And, as my grandmother used to say, "Oh my lord!" what I've learned about Bill and Hillary.
Hillary Clinton has lost the primary, her sole hope is a Pyhrric victory that would destroy her party and set back every single cause she claims to believe in. And she's not giving up. She's playing every divisive card she can: race, gender, religion. She's lying and trying to change the rules on the fly. It's not so much that she doesn't care about the results of her scorched earth candidacy, it's that she doesn't recognize them.
I think there are a lot of people like me out there, shocked and awed by the Clintons living up to just about everything the far right ever said about them. (Except for the lesbian orgies, which I would approve of.) You can't imagine the dismay that many Clinton sympathizers feel.
President Bush has largely destroyed the Republican Party. There's no one left but dead enders. The opportunity of this moment for Democrats is unlike anything at least since Watergate, and probably back to the Hoover Administration. And yet, here we are tearing each other apart because a family of lost-cause sociopaths can't let go.
Unless someone steps in to save them, this moment is going to be the Clinton Legacy. They're not going to save themselves by stepping gracefully aside. They're going to fight to the death not just of themselves but of their party. They're going to remembered as the political equivalent of mass murders, gone out in a blaze of gunfire and dying, inevitably, of self-inflicted wounds in some janitor's closet.
I still think Bill Clinton was a pretty good President. I still think his brand of middle-of-the-road politics is where the Democratic Party needs to be. And I still believe that there was a vast right wing conspiracy to get him out of office no matter what the damage might be to the republic.
But here's something else I think, now more than ever: he deserved it. They deserved it. The right's withering scorn may have been irrational, but it wasn't unwarranted. That uncomfortable reality from back in the Clinton years -- the understanding that Clinton empowered his tormentors by his own behavior -- is no longer small. It's looming large, undeniable and horrifying.
These people really are sociopathic scum. They care about nothing and no one but themselves.
