Hating Clinton

But I don't hate him. I wouldn't cross the street to push him out of the path of a bus, but I wouldn't cross the street to spit on his grave, either.

Hating is childish, for one thing, an activity appropriate only to people age nine and younger. And hating is entirely too much work. But worst of all, hating Bill Clinton would accord him much more respect than he deserves. Bill Clinton is a bug, a disease, a virus. Bill Clinton is literally a louse, a parasite of virtually no consequence, and he deserves no more attention than it takes to get him out of one's hair.

But I am a "Clinton hater" as that term is used by the ever-more-irrelevant popular media. I care about what is to them an indiscernible, indecipherable, indescribable something more than I care about mooing in harmony with the herd. And since they can't figure me out and they can't shout me down, I must be a "hater". Karl Marx said, "You can't refute a sneer." The so-very-modern boob-tube blatherers go that one better: "You can't refute a pseudo-psychological diagnosis."

And while I'm not a conservative, not a republican, not a Christian, I think I can speak with some confidence for all the "Clinton haters", all the weary champions of the indiscernible, the indecipherable, the indescribable. I see what they see, I think, and I know what they know. I know what they hate, what they fear, what they pity. And I know what they love.

I think for many people Bill Clinton symbolizes the death of honor. When you peel away the lies historians love to tell each other, almost all governments are founded by elites stacking the deck to their own advantage. By contrast the United States, at least the United States of the Declaration of Independence, was founded by men so profoundly in love with the idea of human equality that they did what they thought was right, even though the status quo better served their own mercenary, pecuniary interests. The deck was already stacked their way, and they gave it all up, pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the idea that all men are created equal.

The "Clinton haters" are indecipherable to the blatherers because they know that the president's political opponents are better off with the status quo. Clinton's high job-approval rating is surreal: The man has achieved almost nothing in his presidency, and nothing at all since this masturbation scandal began. A key factor in the remarkable prosperity propping him up is the legislative gridlock that has blessed Washington for the last six years. Under Clinton we have a de facto Metternichian state: Govern and change nothing. We are not free, far from it, but at least we are free to plan. A President Gore, unstained by scandal and untainted by acquaintance with factual reality, would be a disaster for those seeking Clinton's removal.

Not just indecipherable, inscrutable. Why do they seek it?

The answer is not "hatred". The answer is honor.

We live a certain way and we expect others to live up to our standards and we are dismayed but not surprised when they don't. The Deep Thinkers among the blatherers have suggested that this is a further schism of the hippies and the old fogies, the baby boomers versus the survivors of the depression and the war. It would be more exact to cite Dionysus and Apollo, vigorous deceit versus rigorous truth.

Bill Clinton is not the Big Creep of creeping socialism, he's a cloying kind of Eddie Haskell, an endless fount of oily, flattering lies. People who like to be lied to love this president; he praises all of their most treasured imaginary virtues. Men and women who live by facts and reason despise his cynical pandering.

And those who are convinced that his popularity represents a fundamental change in the American culture--from a country of facts and reason to just another easily-swayed third-world mobocracy--are the "Clinton haters".

We want him out. Not for masturbating in the Oval Office, not for lying about it, not for pressuring others to lie about it. Not for campaign finance law violations, not for treason with the Red Chinese, not for any of the other hundreds of crimes the man has committed. We want him out to cleanse the nation of a loathsome evil.

Not the evil of the man, although he is certainly an evil man. But the evil he represents, the evil idea that a warm and downy lie can smother the truth, that a calculating corruption can ever triumph over honor.

This can never happen, of course. Evil is impotent. Vice cannot steal what virtue has not first created. Honor can never die and corruption can never triumph. Clinton's fate is already sealed, irrespective of any votes or polls, sealed in history and seared into his own rancid soul.

Honor lives when any human being says, "The truth is worth more than my comfort, more than my advantage, more than esteem or fellowship or emoluments. The truth is worth more than my station, more than my prospects, more than my reputation. The truth is worth more than my life, more than an empty life knowing how much I would have betrayed."