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 left over from the old year.
LEFT-WING CLALAP
• The dangerous demagoguing of the Medicare issue by President Bill Clinton and other Democrats, who seek profit from big lie that the Republicans would destroy the program-when, in fact, they would not cut much more than the president himself has proposed. The Democrats’ tactics may make it politically impossible to avoid budget deficits that are so huge, for so long, as to risk fiscal disaster.
• The Sept. 29 suggestion by Willie Brown-the former speaker of the California Assembly who was elected mayor of San Francisco this month-that students should "terrorize professors you don’t like" to demonstrate displeasure when those professors support the "racist" and "crazy" idea that university admissions should not be based on race.
• President Clinton’s retention of three ethically challenged Cabinet secretaries, whose problems suggest he was too willing to overlook warts when he put a premium on racial minority status in filling the top ranks of an administration then being advertised as a paragon of ethical rectitude. Henry Cisneros, who is still secretary of housing and urban development in the face of proof that he lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about how much he had paid his former mistress, is under criminal investigation for that. Ronald Brown, who is still secretary of commerce, and former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy are under investigation by two more independent counsel for possible federal crimes in taking favors from moneyed interests. And Hazel O’Leary, who is still secretary of energy, has become a laughingstock for her lavish foreign travel arrangements and for squandering federal money on a PR firm to rate reporters’ coverage of her agency.
• The casual invasion of privacy by onetime Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, counsel for Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.), who "undeleted" a private letter to a friend from a computer disk obtained from Whitewater whistleblower Jean Lewis Ben-Veniste then pounced on Lewis at a hearing by trumpeting the not-very-relevant fact that her letter had (ever so plausibly) pronounced President Clinton a liar for denying that he ever had sex with Gennifer Flowers.
• The president’s unctuous effort to avoid responsibility for the stench emanating from the criminal investigation and embezzlement prosecution of Billy Dale, former director of the White House travel office. The case ended in November with a resoundingly rapid jury acquittal. Dale’s troubles had begun in May 1993, when he and the six other career travel office employees were suddenly fired to clear the way for Clinton cronies, including TV producer Harry Thomason. The subsequent FBI probe and prosecution of Dale look suspiciously like a politically driven effort to justify the firings.
• The fawning coverage of the Million Man March by the many news media that-while appropriately respectful of the marchers’ vows to be decent husbands, fathers, workers, and citizens- found it necessary to downplay the racism and antisemitism that infected the occasion from the top; the lunacy of Louis Farrakhan’s 150-minute diatribe; and the grotesque kissing up to this detestable demagogue by leaders like Jesse Jackson, who acted as though Farrakhan were a modem-day Martin Luther King Jr.
• The applause and high-fives at the announcement of (he O J. Simpson acquittal by people like the students at Howard University Law School, who could hardly have been unaware that it was highly probable-at the very least-that the man they were cheering was a vicious murderer.
• The "Advocate for Justice 1996" award, honoring Simpson defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran Jr., by a foundation created by richer-than-Croesus D.C. tort lawyer Jack ("We can all do good when we -do-well-)-Olender.
RIGHT-WING CLAPTRAP
• House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s barbaric proposal to mandate mass executions of small-time drug mules, including nonviolent first offenders; Gingrich’s suggestions that Democratic rule was to blame for crimes like the drowning of two children by their mother, Susan Smith-who had herself been molested as a child by a stepfather active in both the Republican Party and the Christian Coalition; Gingrich’s smarmy evasions of responsibility for the slippery evasions of campaign finance laws by GOPAC, a Gingrich creation; Gingrich’s hypocritical attempts to dodge the kind of scrutiny by outside ethics investigators that he himself employed to drive then Speaker Jim Wright from office; Gingrich’s suggestion that bringing the government to a halt was an appropriate payback for a perceived snub by President Clinton on Air Force One; and other Gingrich outrages too numerous to detail.
• Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole’s shameless political chameleon act in quest of right-wing support for the Republican presidential nomination: Dole, the one-time sponsor of racial affirmative action preferences, now wants to outlaw them (mimicking a similar conversion by California Gov. Pete Wilson); Dole the divorce now preaches family values; and Dole the cultural critic trashes the entertainment industry for churning out disgusting crud while exempting the crud marketed by Republican bigwig Rupert Murdoch.
• Justice Clarence Thomas" worse-than-hyperbolic assertion (in his concurring opinion in Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Pena) that "there is a ‘moral and constitutional equivalence…between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality." Affirmative action preferences for minority contractors are as bad as slavery and apartheid? Get real.
• Congressional Republicans’ efforts to preserve corporate welfare and giveaways of federal lands, water, and timber for big campaign contributors and other moneyed interests, while taking the meat ax to programs for poor people. The same folks who fault welfare-mothers-for not working would penalize the working poor by cutting back the Earned Income Tax Credit.
• The shamelessness of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, who shakes down big PACs by keeping book on their relative contributions to Republicans and Democrats, and who explains that "if you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules."
• The demagogic efforts to desecrate the Bill of Rights by Republican leaders, who ‘ fell short by just three votes this month of getting their anti-flag-desecration amendment through Congress. A prediction: If the flag amendment does eventually, win adoption, the sponsors will get what they deserve-an outbreak of flag-buming (by attention-seeking protesters) the likes of which the nation has never seen.
• Republican family values category: Utah Rep. Enid ("My husband did it") Waldholtz and her husband, Joe.
MISCELLANEOUS CLAPTRAP
• Get-rid-of-those-cameras-before-they- stop-me-from-being-a-jerk department: O.J. Simpson lawyer No. 77 Barry Scheck’s complaint (on a public television program) that the courtroom camera had made him I self-conscious about engaging in the head-shaking-and-grimacing act that he said he habitually puts on for the jury during opposing counsel’s presentations. "It was a little disconcerting that everybody was so aware of what you’re doing," said Scheck.
• O.J. Simpson prosecutor No. 1 Marcia Clark’s chutzpah in demanding more child support from her husband to pay for, among other things, more expensive clothes and hairstyling for the big trial. (The new look more than paid for itself, s judging by the $4.2 million book deal Clark got for her part in blowing the case-with stunts like sponsoring transparently perjured police testimony to justify a warrantless search and hanging the prosecution on the credibility of Mark Fuhrman. And after all that, Clark smugly announced in a speech to a group of professional women that "it was in the course of this trial that I learned to trust my instincts.")
• The refusal by the deadbeat voters of bankrupt Orange County, Calif., to tax themselves a bit more to pay off the bad debts amassed by their elected treasurer in the casino of financial derivatives trading.
• Easy-acts-to-follow department: Jesse Jackson Jr. may have had only one job (working for his father’s Rainbow Coalition) in his 30 years, but after riding the family name this month to a seat in Congress from Chicago’s South Side, he should have little trouble outshining his immediate predecessors: Mel Reynolds, who resigned Oct. I after being convicted of having sex with an underage girl, and Gus Savage, the most virulent black racist and antisemite ever to sit in Congress.
• Ex-senator and aspiring lobbyist Bob "The Tongue" Packwood.
• Judge Lance Ito.