In the spirit of the season, and in the hope of a fresh start-with malice toward none, with charity for all-in the new year, I hereby purge myself of various vexations of the old year:
LEFT-WING CLAPTRAP
• The hypocrisy of feminists who airily dismissed former clerical worker Paula Corbin Jones’ claim of sexual harassment against President Bill Clinton this year (Pat Schroeder "It just makes me want to throw up.") after having reflexively embraced law professor Anita Hill’s not-necessarily-more-credible claim against Clarence Thomas in 1991.
• Especially rich was the complaint by then New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen (PC feminism’s George Will) that "[a]bove all, her timing is troublesome," because Jones waited almost three years, until Clinton was president, to go public. Perhaps Quindlen forgot that her heroine Anita Hill waited 10 years to blow the whistle on Thomas, who was voted a federal judgeship (and from whom Hill sought and accepted a few favors) in the interim.
• The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s demagogic claim that the Rev. Pat Robertson’s conservative Christian Coalition (or its antecedents) had been a "strong force in [Nazi] Germany" and was associated with the Holocaust and with slavery in the old South.
• The "Equal Employment Opportunity Handbook" of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologies Evaluation and Research, a formula for quota hiring that warns against inquiry into virtually all of the things that an employer might want to know about an applicant’s qualifications. For example:
"[T]he common requirement for ‘knowledge of rules of grammar’ and ‘ability to spell accurately’ in clerical and secretarial job descriptions" should be shunned because it may impede courtship of "underrepresented groups or individuals with disabilities." Nor should interviews be used "to judge highly subjective traits such as motivation, ambition, maturity, personality, and neatness." The only safe approach, it seems, is to hire by the numbers.
• The New York Times’ April 7 editorial scolding President Clinton for considering "a herd of white male candidates" for a Supreme Court vacancy, along with black, Hispanic, and female types who should obviously be preferred.
• The censorship and intimidation of peaceful protesters by the likes of Assistant Secretary Roberta Achtenberg of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD opened "anti-discrimination" investigations of civic groups and individuals for speaking out against placement in their neighborhoods of group homes for drug addicts, alcoholics, and mental patients. For such sins as sending letters to the editor, protesters were slammed with subpoenas and threatened with $50,000 fines. HUD backed off-but only part way-after its jackboot tactics had been exposed in the press.
• Speaking of censorship, there was also Assistant Secretary of Education Norma Cantu’s March 10 "guidance" for civil-rights investigators on racial "harassment" of students, under which arguably offensive statements alone-whether or not true, and whether made by "a teacher, a student, the grounds crew, a cafeteria worker, neighborhood teenagers, a visiting baseball team, a guest speaker, parents, or others"-can, if "tolerated" by the educational institution, put it in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
• The hand-wringing by many liberal journalists and the complaining by bigshot Democrats-who did not hesitate to smear Republican presidents with utterly phony scandals like "Iraqgate" and "The October Surprise"- about the attention paid to the rather-more-substantial evidence that there might be something rotten about the Clintons’ involvement with the Whitewater Development Corp. or Hillary Rodham Clinton’s miraculous 10,000-percent, $100,000 commodities trading profit.
• The presentation in September of the fifth annual, $25,000 "John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award" to Rep. Henry Gonzalez (D-Texas) ("Gonzo," to his detractors), the flaky but ever-so-cute then chairman of the House Banking Committee, for feats like his relentless, disgracefuly -mendacious flogging of the aforementioned phony "Iraqgate" scandal.
• Benjamin Chavis.
RIGHT-WING CLAPTRAP
• The hypocrisy of conservatives who gleefully embraced Paula Jones’ sexual-harassment claim against President Clinton this year after having righteously raged against Anita Hill’s not-necessarily-less-credible claim against Clarence Thomas in 1991.
• Newt Gingrich’s McCarthyite claim on NBC’s "Meet the Press" on Dec. 4 that "a senior law-enforcement official" had told him that "up to a quarter of the White House staff, when they first came in, had used drugs in the last four or five years." Aside from Gingrich’s inability to cite a shred of evidence to back up this assertion-improbable even in the context of the Clinton teeny-bopper corps-Speaker Newt (The New Republic reminds us) once admitted having done a bit of pot smoking himself, at a time when he was raising two small children and attending graduate school, which he finished at age 27.
• Other Gingrichisms steeped in distortion-e.g., that the Democratic Party is "the enemy of normal Americans," that the Supreme Court has made it "illegal to pray" in public schools, and that Susan Smith’s drowning of her two children just goes to show what happens when Democrats are in charge.
• The posing by Republican leaders in Congress-career politicians all-as crusaders for term limits, even as they seek to slip in an exemption for themselves by grandfathering their own prior service.
• The efforts of Republicans who have long preached against the "corruption" of Congress to perpetuate the most deep-seated corruption of all: the influence of moneyed special interests (like givers to Gingrich’s GOPAC), which finance legislators’ campaigns and subsidize their lifestyles. These are the guys who killed a proposed ban on gifts to members, squelched an effort to tighten lobbying disclosure laws, and helped bury campaign-finance reform.
• The shameful glorification of Richard Nixon-a slimeball who turned the White House into a continuing criminal enterprise-by President Clinton and others after Nixon’s death.
• The president’s firing of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for one of her least offensive and most amusing gaffes. You know-the masturbation one. Maybe the president should have fired her sooner, for really ugly cracks like her indiscriminate trashing of "the un-Christian religious right" (June22, 1994) and her advice that foes of abortion should "get over their love affair with the fetus" (Jan. 19, 1992). But firing her for providing "Saturday Night Live" with its best material in years-an inartful response to an unexpected question about a taboo topic-looked like the craven surrender of a sacrificial lamb to the armies of the right.
• Attorney General Janet Reno’s effort to harmonize with the pols in the White House and hold onto her job by abandoning what had seemed to be her core principles-opposition to mandatory minimum sentences that clog prisons with non-violent small-time offenders, for example-and embracing the phony-tough nostrums in the crime bill that Congress passed last summer.
• The crime-bill demagogy of presidentially aspiring Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), such as his bogus claim that the Democrats’ proposals could let "as many as 10,000 drug felons … back out on the streets."
• The tax-cut pandering by both the Republican touts for "deja- voodoo economics" (in the phrase of Peter Passell of The New York Times) and President Clinton, who are vying to put us on a path to national bankruptcy. Query which is worse: the constancy in dishonesty of the Republicans, who brazenly clamor for a balanced-budget amendment even as they push for budget-busting breaks for the rich, or the naked opportunism of the president, whose now abandoned honesty-in-budgeting approach had been his only solid claim to practicing honesty in any form. Comeback Kid? Flip-Flop Kid.
• Oliver North.
MISCELLANEOUS CLAPTRAP
• The $4.4 million fee petition by 23 lawyers who represented beating-victim Rodney King in his damage suit against the city of Los Angeles (award: $3.8 million), including $650 to attend King’s birthday party, $ 1,300 to join him at the premiere of the film "Malcolm X," and thousands for interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donohue, Larry King, and the like. "To go out there and say that King was not some pervert," former King lawyer Steve Lerman told the press, "took a lot of technique and craft.”
• President Clinton’s incredible claim, through Robert Bennett (dubbed "the lawyer for the President’s penis” by The Economist) that he "has no recollection of ever meeting” Paula Jones, who is suing Clinton for sexually harassing her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1991. (Clinton hopes the electorate will have little recollection of Jones, but the $475-an-hour Bennett-hired largely for his renown as a media spinmeister-helped keep the story in the public eye by popping up on a gaggle of talk shows bragging about what an honor it was to be chosen to fend off the foul Jones.)
• Baltimore County Judge Robert Cahill’s obscenely lenient 18-month sentence in October for Kenneth Peacock, who shot his wife dead with a deer rifle hours after finding her in bed with another man. Showing more sympathy for the killer than the" victim. Cahill suggested that a desire to inflict "some corporal punishment" on a cheating wife was only natural, adding: "I shudder to think what I would do," Shudder, indeed. A judge like that deserves a wife like Lorena Bobbitt.
• The president’s casual assaults on the dignity of his own office, such as his revelation on MTV that he wears not boxers but (ick!) briefs.