Bill Clinton corrects the record

Bill Clinton took a break from fundraising for AIDS, tsunami victims, hurricane victims, childhood obesity, breast cancer and his presidential library to speak Thursday at a Hofstra University conference examining his presidency.

The former president was blistering mad over comments made by historian Douglas Brinkley in a newspaper interview. Brinkley said Clinton would be considered a great president if not for the fact that he was impeached.

"I completely disagree with that," Clinton said. "You can agree with that statement, but only if you think impeachment was justified. Otherwise, it was an egregious abuse of the Constitution and law and history of our country."

The Associated Press account quotes the former president:

"Now if you want to hold it against me that I did something wrong, that's a fair deal," he said. "If you do that, then you have a whole lot of other questions, which is how many other presidents do you have to downgrade and what are you going to do with all those Republican congressmen, you know, that had problems?"

There it is, a gemstone of Clintonism, the sparkling essence of the man who for eight years made it possible for comedy writers to work half days.

It's all there, the rapid response attack, the conversational beginning that suggests reasonable people can disagree and the quick shift to a threat if they do. The appearance of a humble confession and the stabbing attack on the moral conduct of everyone else, dead or alive, in order to prove the victimhood, the martyrdom, the heroic, stoic courage of the man who was singled out for impeachment.

He's Nelson Mandela, unzipped.

Just for the record, President Clinton's impeachment resulted from a grand jury investigation into whether he lied and tampered with witnesses and generally obstructed justice for an Arkansas woman named Paula Jones. He was not impeached for having an office fling with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

Paula Jones, you may remember, sued the president and his aides for defamation after she denied having an affair with him in Arkansas, a claim made by Arkansas state troopers in an interview in the American Spectator. Paula Jones, then a married woman, said that what actually happened was very different. She was a young state employee working at a government conference in a Little Rock hotel when then-Governor Clinton sent his state trooper bodyguards to her table to tell her that the governor would like to see her. She said she went with them to the hotel suite where she thought the governor was conducting state business, and when the door closed and she was alone with him he complimented her appearance and came on to her. Then he dropped his pants and asked for oral sex.

Like many young female employees who don't want to look for new jobs, Paula Jones didn't make a formal complaint about it. But she told enough of her friends and family members that when the American Spectator article came out telling the story of "Paula" who was one of the governor's "girlfriends," she went public and told what had really happened in that hotel room.

White House ally James Carville made a few foul comments suggesting that she was trash, a liar, and a woman who was chasing a twenty-dollar bill through the dirt of a trailer park.

Paula Jones sued.

The law allows plaintiffs in cases of this type to attempt to prove the truth of their charges by establishing that what happened to them is part of a pattern of conduct.

You may safely assume that President Clinton knew this. For reasons only he knows, he refused to settle the Paula Jones lawsuit, even after he was re-elected. For reasons only he knows, he decided to let the discovery process go forward.

With Monica Lewinsky's knee-prints still on the carpet in the Oval Office study, President Clinton decided he could withstand or outlast Paula Jones' lawyers and their subpoenas seeking information about his "pattern of conduct."

Was he ever angry when they didn't fold up and go away. He attacked her lawyers as part of a right-wing cabal out to destroy his presidency, a charge which, even if true, explains why they were suing but not why they eventually prevailed.

The grand jury investigation, and the impeachment, resulted from a long list of misleading statements from the president and statements from witnesses that they were pressured to sign false affidavits and to lie under oath to the grand jury. Although Monica Lewinsky never did say under oath that she was told to lie, the picture that emerged was ugly. Bill Clinton had a pattern of hitting on women who were in some way subordinate to him -- he was in a position to get Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky fired, and White House volunteer Kathleen Willey came to him asking for a job -- and then relying on the intimidation factor to make sure they never said a word about it. If he miscalculated in his selection and the young women talked, he stood ready to supply his aides with talking points to destroy their credibility.

You can look up the statements from the Clinton team going back years. Gennifer Flowers was a liar. Paula Jones was trailer trash. Monica Lewinsky was a stalker. Whatever these wild-eyed women were saying, none of it was true.

It was all true.

You can make the argument that philandering is nobody's business and sexual harassment isn't all that terrible and none of these women should have been allowed to hamper a president who was trying to do great things for the country and the world.

You can make the argument, because I'm certainly not going to do it.

I'm going to make the argument that we should take our laws seriously or we should take them off the books. If we don't think it should be a crime to lie about sex, under oath, to a grand jury, we should change the law to say so. If we don't think "pattern of conduct" evidence has any place in a courtroom, we shouldn't allow it in a courtroom. If we think sexual harassment is a perk of the job for men in positions of power, we should stop pretending that we don't.

But what we shouldn't have is one kind of law enforcement for the people who are in government and another kind for the people they are governing. That would be "an egregious abuse of the Constitution and law and history of our country."


Copyright 2005

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