Clinton's The Man!

There was a time, not so long ago, that the thought of reading one more obsequious profile of Bill Clinton was so abhorrent that I'd gladly sit through three consecutive screenings of an Adam Sandler movie instead. However, the media's mass thumb-sucking on Cindy Sheehan's antics at "Camp Casey" in the past two weeks left me actually savoring every word of Jennifer Senior's Aug. 22 New York article about her African trip with Clinton as a prescribed balm from the likes of Maureen Dowd, Eleanor Clift and, need you ask, Frank Rich.

Mind you, this odd occurrence must be understood in context. Senior's mash note to the man she claims "is still adored abroad" and "still considered president by the nation's estranged, bluer half" is indeed rough sledding, but since Clinton doesn't really matter anymore (unless he screws up Hillary's presidential campaign), it's the political equivalent of reading about Jennifer Aniston's hairdo or watching Katie Couric make a fool of herself each weekday morning.

The star-struck Senior recounts an evening with Bill in Mozambique-she's delighted that the alleged leader of the free world gave her "shoulder a squeeze"-in which the atmosphere was richer, and just as nauseating, as a triple-scoop "cookie dough" ice cream cone. She coos: "He's a furious chatterer; talking in uninterrupted spurts; interjections are difficult, rejoinders impossible. His unscripted conversation is a combination of highbrow and bawdy, shrewd and reassuringly profane."

Why profanity is "reassuring" is beyond me-maybe that's a silly dig at perceptions of George W. Bush-but perhaps the writer was afraid that Clinton's weird if calculated buddy routine with the president's father had neutered his Arkansan roots. Watching Bill work a crowd in Zanzibar, Senior makes the following observation: "One gets a perspective now that Ken Starr's cloying legion of moralists could never fully appreciate: To Clinton, the world's a seascape of temptations." Marc Rich and Sandy Berger, of course, acted on many temptations as well, but there's no need to revisit those old chestnuts.

In any case, it's less infuriating to read about Clinton's frolics in Africa, regrets about Rwanda and his preposterous claim that if he'd had just six more months in office, his crack foreign policy team would have nailed Osama bin Laden and perhaps prevented 9/11, than to slog through the current fairy tale that the antiwar movement is back, courtesy of "Mother Sheehan," thus making Bush this generation's LBJ or Nixon.

Never mind that this particular Texan isn't, as opposed to Johnson, running for reelection, or that no Democratic presidential aspirant (with the exception of John "Two Americas" Edwards' wife) has gotten near the Sheehan debate. It's the Summer of Hate, but by all means honk if you love peace, the Daily Kos, $200 blue jeans, Iraqi "insurgents," Joseph Wilson or independent bookstores.

Last Sunday morning I lost a $5 bet to my 10-year-old son-no adult would take the wager-that Sheehan would be the cover gal of either Newsweek or Time, a monetary setback that's still puzzling. I could be out of synch: Maybe the paranoid left-wing pundits are correct in dumping the newsweeklies into the supposed vast right-wing conspiracy.

That's just as well since no one could top Columbia journalism professor Todd Gitlin's escape into fantasy published in the Aug. 21 number of the Washington Post. You might argue that it's unfair to pick on poor Gitlin, an aging hippie who clearly wants to revisit his glory years at least one more time before he's too feeble to shout "Right On!" with any conviction, but his regrettable academic status and access to newspaper opinion pages makes him fair game.

He wrote: "A grieving mother-a mother who now has her own ailing mother's concerns at heart-has put the president at bay? Students will be back at school soon, and Sheehan's camp, should it continue, will likely tug at them, offering a focus for their activity. On Wednesday night [Aug. 17], MoveOn.org claimed there were more than 1,600 candlelight vigils supporting Sheehan across the country. In the small town of Hillsdale, N.Y., I counted 60 protesters; many passing vehicles honked in support."

Sorry to disturb Gitlin's daydream, but I don't think this is quite convincing evidence of what he claims is a "growing antiwar movement." It's certainly sensible to debate the Bush administration's success in Iraq, a war that won't be over any time soon, but the notion of a 1960s revival of marching and charging in the streets is simply naïve. The prof's exultation at 60 protesters in a small town is understandable, but it doesn't strike me as a harbinger of greater demonstrations to come. To state the obvious, there's no military draft today, and anybody who believes that the students who shut down colleges more than 30 years ago weren't acting out of self-interest are deceiving themselves.

Here's an inconvenient reminder to those mired in the distant past. The huge Vietnam protests, some of which numbered a half million attendees, were a lot of fun for college students and those of us in high school. You got to cut class, meet up with buddies and smoke joints, scope the crowd for easy chicks, and call cops "pigs." Had the frightening specter of a letter from the draft board not existed, the numbers would've been minuscule, although still dwarfing today's extravaganzas. I do remember a large gathering in Huntington a few days after the Kent State killings in 1970, easily a thousand people wandering around, a little dazed that students were actually knocked off, but mounting a spirited rally nonetheless. I ran into an older friend there, a sophomore at Kent State, and asked about his reaction: "Are you kidding me? I got the first bus home."

I don't think it's a coincidence that the antiwar movement petered out after those days in May, even as the war, as prosecuted by Nixon, was still going strong. It was just getting too real for kids who weren't likely to do any time in boot camp or Southeast Asia.

Jonathan Chait, who writes for The New Republic and Los Angeles Times, caused a stir before last year's election by writing that he hated George Bush, not just on a policy level, but personally as well, running counter to the general idea that the president, aside from his supposed caveman beliefs, was a pretty nice guy.

His Aug. 19 Times column, was, surprisingly, an even-handed look at Sheehan mania. Have no fear, Chait didn't cross over to the dark side; he branded the conservative response to the theatrics at "Camp Casey" as "pathetic." Yet his conclusion offered no comfort to the Gitlin/Alterman/Herbert crowd: "Sheehan also criticizes the Afghanistan war. One of the most common (and strongest) liberal indictments of the Iraq war is that it diverted troops that could have been deployed against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Are liberals who make that case, yet failed to enlist themselves, chicken hawks too?"

Yet Chait's most valuable service, probably unintentional, is to spank the Times' Maureen Dowd for her writing that "The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq in absolute." As is Dowd's, it goes without saying, even as this sanctimonious statement-disregarding those relatives of slain soldiers who support Bush and the military-might finally be the kind of sloppy thinking that gets her exiled from the op-ed page.