Two-for-One Clintons Was a Bad Bargain

Buy one, get one free. That's what they told us when they ran for the presidency in 1992, and it seems we've been stuck with the "bargain" ever since. But although we certainly got both of them, we didn't really get either of them for free, did we? We've paid plenty in myriad ways for the eight years that the Clintons inhabited the White House.

Leaving aside his undermining of our national security and his general abuse of power, surely the worst of these costs was the moral cost, the steady corruption of that two-thirds of the American people who insisted on defending Clinton's unspeakable misbehavior with Monica Lewinsky as "private," despite the fact that the affair took place around the Oval Office and had to be facilitated by his secretary, his staff and his Secret Service agents, and despite the fact that the President enjoyed Monica's favors as he spoke on the phone commanding American troops to active duty.

Even more awful was the dizzying decline of the American majority's moral standards in pace with those of their Commander-in-Chief. The adulterous sex was okay, they said, as long as he didn't lie about it; then as long as he didn't lie about it under oath in a deposition; then as long as he didn't lie about it under oath before the grand jury. They reconciled themselves to each worsening transgression, exempted him from testifying truthfully under the feminist-inspired sexual-assault statute he himself had signed into effect, excused him from his oath to uphold the laws and allowed him to disgrace the presidency. Finally, when even a credible charge of rape failed to arouse this insensible cohort of citizens, Clinton realized that there was nothing he couldn't get away with and had himself photographed for the cover of Esquire, crotch-level, legs spread, on a stool that made his genitals seem engorged, as if to say to all of us what he had said to Paula Jones?"Kiss it."

Hillary proved to be his equal, lying and evading accountability about her professional and political life, selling access to the White House in return for campaign contributions, using the perks and powers of her position as the president's wife to net herself a Senate seat, something no previous first lady would even have conceived of doing. Yet a people so coarsened by accommodation to the Clintons' excesses scarcely noted this gross impropriety, and gave her an electoral victory without so much as demanding that she appear on television interview programs, as is automatically expected of every other candidate in this country.

The Clintons' reactions to Sept. 11 should rinse the sawdust out of many eyes. Less than two months after the catastrophe, the former President gave a speech at Georgetown University. Instead of seeing the current crisis as a defense of civilization tout court, he began by invidiously lecturing his audience that "those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless." He cited the marauding of the Crusaders, rehearsed America's historic sins of slavery and harsh treatment of the Indians and even managed to suggest that "hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation" somehow stack up next to the mass murders that have been inflicted on us by Islamist extremists. How reprehensible for an ex-president, in the midst of a national emergency, when a savage totalitarian enemy threatens our survival and way of life, to revisit the errors of his own country and culture.

For her part, in an interview with The New Yorker, Hillary professed herself content that the American people had learned their lesson: how much they need government when danger looms and disaster strikes. She neglected to note that it was massive government failure?in security, in intelligence, in border protection, in immigration and visa oversight, in citizenship education?that had enabled these horrors to occur in the first place. Like a mother who enjoys her child's dependency rather than wanting to see him grow strong, Hillary positively gloated that "the sense of invulnerability that has been a hallmark of the American psychological experience has been shattered." Relishing how we've been knocked off our pinnacle of national self-confidence, she remarked with supreme condescension that we now stand "shoulder to shoulder with...most of the rest of the human race that has ever existed, and that exists now, whose lives are shaped by the hazards of life."

Truly, it seems that the Clintons hate America, unless it be a weakened, vulnerable America, humbled by history, cowed by guilt, bent by fear and in need of government ministrations. Such a demoralized America can give this dishonorable duo the power they crave, the control over other lives that has been the raison d'etre of their ignoble careers.