The Last Empire (54 page)

Another of Viguerie’s clients is Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch, a proud and ignorant man who is often mentioned as a possible candidate for President if the far right should start a new political party. . . . “I want,” says Viguerie, “a massive assault on Congress in 1978. I don’t want any token efforts. We now have the talent and the resources to move in a bold, massive way. I think we can move against Congress in 1978 in a way that’s never been conceived of.”

I duly noted that this sounded like revolution.

As it was, the bold, massive move against Congress did not take place until 1994, thanks to the twelve-year Reagan/Bush snooze, capped by Clinton’s political ineptitude. But now that the Man from Hope has gained a personal, if temporary, victory against our would-be revolutionaries, I suggest that before the obligatory Capitol Reichstag fire, a charge of treason be brought against Kenneth Starr. Since all sovereignty rests with We the People, Starr’s attempt to overthrow the presidential elections of 1992 and 1996 constitutes a bold, massive blow at the American people themselves: a unique attempt in our history and one that must be swiftly addressed in order to discover just who his co-conspirators are and how best to undo their plots. Yes, Hillary, there was—and there is—a right-wing plot with deep roots. Meanwhile, Senator Orrin Hatch, do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Moroni?

The Nation

26 October 1998

* 
S
TARR
C
ONSPIRACY

On August 17 the forty-second president of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, will commit what could be a fatal political error by allowing himself to be questioned under oath by a special prosecutor, Kenneth W. Starr, who has taken over four years and spent 40 million taxpayer dollars in trying to prove that Mr. Clinton must be guilty of something or other and so should be impeached by the House of Representatives and tried and convicted by the Senate (as the Constitution requires) for what the peculiar Mr. Starr will argue is a high crime or misdemeanor, like treason or taking bribes or insufficient racial bigotry.

Foreigners are mystified by the whole business while thought-ful Americans—there are several of us—are equally mystified that the ruling establishment of the country has proved to be so mindlessly vindictive that it is willing, to be blunt, to overthrow the lawful government of the United States—that is, a president elected in 1992 and reelected in 1996 by
We the People
, that sole source of all political legitimacy, which takes precedence over the Constitution and the common law and God himself. This last was a concept highly uncongenial to the enlightened eighteenth-century founders but not, we are told, to a onetime judge of meager intellectual capacity but deep faith in all the superstitions that ruling classes encourage the lower orders to believe so that they will not question authority.

First, what is the president guilty of? Attempts to prove that he did something criminal fifteen years ago in Arkansas in a real estate deal came to nothing. Undeterred, Mr. Starr kept on searching for “high crime and misdemeanors” as the Constitution puts it. Had one of Clinton’s associates in the White House been murdered, possibly by Mrs. Clinton, said to be his mistress? This “murder” was found to be a suicide, the result of depression brought on by savage attacks from a fascist newspaper called
The Wall Street Journal
. The restless Starr moved on to other areas. Meanwhile, in 1994, Congress became Republican and political partisans are now reveling in the political paralysis of the Democratic White House. According to Starr, the fate of the Republic now depends upon whether or not Clinton lied under oath when he denied having had sexual relations with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, assuming anyone can define, satisfactorily, a sexual relation. Does a blow job performed
on a passive president, idly daydreaming of the budget, count as intercourse? Finally, semanticists are stuck with the English word “intercourse.”
Inter
means between at least two people.
Intra
would be what we call a gang bang, not practical in the Oval Office unless sturdy Secret Service lads join in. Did they? As I write, the nation awaits the laboratory analysis of what is, according to Monica, a presidential semen stain on her elegant blue dress, carefully preserved so that, when her time comes, she can take her place in history alongside if not Joan of Arc, Charlotte Corday.

A few years ago two pollsters did an elaborate study of a wide spectrum of the American population. Many questions were asked on many subjects. The results were published in a book called
The Day America Told the Truth
, not a confidence-inspiring title when over 90 percent of those polled confessed to being “habitual liars.” That the president of such an electorate should lie about sex makes him more sympathetic than not. Certainly, if so irrelevant a question was asked of George Washington, he would have run Mr. Starr through with his sword while Abraham Lincoln would have thrown him out the window. But irrelevance is now the American condition, both as a global empire and incoherent domestic polity. Two thirds of all the world’s lawyers are American and they have made a highly profitable, for them, mess of our legal system. They could not prove, in the Fifties, that Alger Hiss had been a spy for the Soviet so they sent him to prison on an unconvincing perjury charge. Al Capone was never convicted
of murder or extortion: he was put in jail for income tax evasion. This is law in its decadence.

After four years, Starr has found no crime that Clinton has committed except denying a sexual relationship with Monica which she has already said, under oath, never took place but now says, under oath and with a wink from Starr for her previous perjury, did take place. The president cannot be indicted by a civil grand jury. He need not speak to Starr, who is, ironically, his employee. The president’s attorney general, Janet Reno, with the connivance of two right-wing senators (one is Jesse Helms, tobacco’s best friend) and a panel of three right-wing judges, came up with Starr as special prosecutor to investigate, originally, Whitewater and then anything else that might undo the results of two presidential elections.

What is behind this vendetta against Clinton, a popular president? First, the most powerful emotion in American political life is the undying hatred of certain whites for all blacks. For American blacks, Clinton is white knight. Arkansas is also a southern state where the Ku Klux Klan is still a force. When the schools were desegregated in the Fifties, a battle line was drawn. A former judge and a member of the White Citizens Council known as “Justice” Jim Johnson waged a war against blacks in general and Clinton in particular. “Justice Jim” is also associated with someone
The Observer
(U.K.) calls “a convicted fraudster,” David Hale, in charge of the “Arkansas Project,” funded by a conservative billionaire named Richard Mellon Scaife. This brings us to the Clintons’ other nemesis: the wealthy conservative ruling class. In order to avoid taxation, they have through their lawyers, both in and out of government, placed their capital in tax-free foundations for
“charitable” purposes. But to have such a foundation one must never use it to meddle in politics. But Mr. Scaife does meddle. He gives money to such disreputable papers as
The American Spectator
, which has published numerous wild stories about the Clintons. A year or so ago, Mr. Scaife rewarded Starr with a professorship at Pepperdine University, which Starr accepted and then, as the publicity was bad, he hastily returned to his war on Clinton. Presumably, he will be paid off by Scaife once his holy work is done. Every society gets the Titus Oates it deserves.

Mrs. Clinton is correct when she says that there is a right-wing conspiracy against them. Unfortunately for her, Americans have been trained by media to go into Pavlovian giggles at the mention of the word “conspiracy” because for an American to believe in a conspiracy he must also believe in flying saucers or, craziest of all, that more than one person was involved in the JFK murder. Mrs. Clinton, perhaps, emphasizes too heavily the “right-wing” aspect of her enemies. It is corporate America, quite wingless in political as opposed to money matters, that declared war on the Clintons in 1993 when the innocent couple tried to give the American people a national health service, something every civilized country has but we must never enjoy because the insurance companies now get one third of the money spent on health care and the insurance companies are the piggy banks—the cash cows—of corporate America.

In order to destroy the health service plan, insurance and pharmaceutical companies, in tandem with lively elements of the American Medical Association, conspired to raise a half billion dollars to create and then air a barrage of TV advertisements to convince the electorate that such a service was Communist, not to mention an affront to the Darwinian principle that every American has the right to die unhelped by the state, which collects half his income in life with which to buy, thus far, five and a half trillion dollars worth of military hardware at stupendous—to this day—cost. Then, not content with the political destruction of the Clintons’ health plan, corporate America decided to destroy their reputations. Nothing personal in this, by the way. But how else can the ownership of the country send a warning to other feckless politicians that the country and its people exist only to make money for corporations now so internationalized that they cannot be made to pay tax on much—if any—of
their profits. Starr is now the most visible agent of corporate America wielding a new weapon under the sun: endless legal harassment of a twice-elected President so that he cannot exercise his office as first magistrate.

All sovereignty in the United States rests, most vividly, on the concept of “We the People of the United States” (with the sometime addition of “in Congress Assembled”). The Constitution, the common law, and even the wealth of corporate America or the rage of lumpen white Americans against the blacks must bow to this great engine which could, through a constitutional convention, sweep into limbo all our current arrangements. President John Adams wanted a republic not of men but of laws. He could not have foreseen the madness of our present condition with everyone at law and expensive prisons filling up while a partisan lawyer, through legal harassment, is busy undoing the presidential elections of 1992 and 1996 because his paymasters did not like the results.

Happily when the collapse begins, there may yet be time for that most feared (Pavlov again) rendezvous with destiny—a constitutional convention. Meanwhile, I should not in the least be surprised if yet another “conspiracy,” in the name of We the People, is set in motion against Kenneth W. Starr, who, no matter how meticulously he has observed the rules of the statute creating his monstrous office, did, in effect, attempt to overthrow two lawful elections reflective of the People’s will and he is put on trial for—why not?—treason against the United States. If nothing else, such an exercise might reveal all sorts of highly interesting co-conspirators.

International Herald Tribune

11 August 1998

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B
IRDS AND
B
EES AND
C
LINTON

How time flies! Seven fairly long years have now passed since I explained the Birds and the Bees to
Nation
readers, thus putting the finis to the cold war and, may I boast, more than one case of nervous tic douloureux, which ticked no more [”A Few Words About Sex: The Birds and the Bees,” October 28, 1991]. But since that long-ago October day when I explained the mysteries of sex and scales fell from readers’ eyes, new hordes have grown up in darkness, among them Kenneth Starr, as well as his numerous investigators and co-conspirators on the House Judiciary Committee, as well as in Pittsburgh’s Mellon Patch and Marietta, Georgia, where the nation’s Renaissance Man awaits rebirth as commander of the armies of a sinless America, troops whose powder is kept dry as, nervously, they closely shave hairy palms while their minds slowly rattle into madness from abuse of self and others.

It was not until Mr. Starr published his dirty book at public expense that I realized how far off-track I have allowed these sad dummies to get. Simple truths about the birds and the bees have been so distorted by partisanship that blow jobs and hand jobs are now confused with The Real Thing, which can only be classic in-and-out as Anthony Burgess so snappily put it in
A Clockwork Orange
. I take full responsibility for not providing a booster shot of Sex Ed. So, as the old impeachment train leaves the station, let me demonstrate how the President did not commit perjury when he said he did not have sexual intercourse with . . . surely not Abigail Thernstrom . . . I seem to have mislaid my notes. Anyway, you know who I mean.

First, let us quickly—or “briefly” as every question on CNN now begins—review the bidding from our last symposium. “Men and women are
not
alike.” That was the first shocker I had for you in 1991. “They have different sexual roles to perform.” At this point Andrea Dworkin, with a secret smile, began to load her bazooka. “Despite the best efforts of theologians and philosophers to disguise our condition, there is no point to us, or to any species, except proliferation and survival. This is hardly glamorous, and so to give Meaning to Life, we have invented some of the most bizarre religions that . . . alas, we have nothing to compare ourselves to. We are biped mammals filled with red seawater (reminder of our oceanic origin), and we exist to reproduce until we are eventually done in by the planet’s changing weather or a stray meteor.” Thus, I wrapped up the Big Picture.

Next: Lubricious Details. “The male’s function is to shoot semen as often as possible into as many women (or attractive surrogates) as possible, while the female’s function is to be shot briefly” by Wolf Blitzer . . . no, no, by a male, any male, “in order to fertilize an egg, which she will lay nine months later.”

Seven years ago, apropos same-sex versus other-sex, or homosexuality versus heterosexuality, two really dumb American sports invented by the spiritual heirs of Gen. Abner Doubleday, who gave us baseball, I wrote, “In the prewar Southern town of Washington, D.C., it was common for boys to have sex with one another. It was called ‘messing around’ and it was no big deal.” I went into no more detail because I assumed most readers would get the point.