Rant: Bimbo Deconstruction

The very idea of meaning smacks of fascism.
-- postmodernist Paul de Man of Yale, ca. 1968
The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.
-- Senator Henry Clay (Whig, Kentucky), 1834

One of the most fascinating phenomena about the whole Zippergate scandal has always been the reaction of the press and the Washington nomenklatura (which largely amounts to the same thing, of course) to new developments and revelations.

Since at least 1992, anyone who has been paying the slightest attention has known two things about Bill Clinton: 1) He is a liar (an unusually good one, according to Senator Bob Kerrey), and 2) he has a serious problem with sex. The Arkansas press has, in fact, known both of those things since at least 1982.

We had plenty of warning. The Washington Post, house-organ of the Beltway elite, reported in the summer of 1992 that the Clinton campaign had assigned Betsy Wright to handle "bimbo eruptions." Gennifer Flowers was given her five minutes of fame, Clinton admitted to "problems in my marriage" on national TV, and thereafter any mention of Clinton's pathological sex life was "old news" and "partisan smears." But Betsy Wright stayed on the job.

Then in the January 1994 American Spectator we learned that Arkansas State Troopers had regularly played the procurer for Governor Bill. "Disgusting, irresponsible right-wing propaganda," of course. The White House spin machine didn't even have to crank itself up; the national press for the most part simply ignored the story. Until Paula Jones appeared.

For the sake of the historical record, here's the paragraph in full from David Brock's article that sent Paula to court to clear her reputation:

One of the troopers told the story of how Clinton had eyed a woman at a reception at the Excelsior Hotel in downtown Little Rock. According to the trooper, who told the story to both Patterson and Perry as well, Clinton asked him to approach the woman, whom the trooper remembered only as Paula, tell her how attractive the governor thought she was, and take her to a room in the hotel where Clinton would be waiting. As the troopers explained it, the standard procedure in a case like this was for one of them to inform the hotel that the governor needed a room for a short time because he was expecting an important call from the White House. (Not a terribly plausible story during the Reagan and Bush years, but it seemed to work like a charm with hotel clerks in Arkansas.) On this particular evening, after her encounter with Clinton, which lasted no more than an hour as the trooper stood by in the hall, the trooper said Paula told him she was available to be Clinton's regular girlfriend if he so desired.

This is in the context of an account of a long series of "brief affairs and one-time encounters from 1987 through early 1993," and Brock includes it simply as an illustrative anecdote.

Paula Jones recognized herself in this story and sued. She didn't like being regarded as a bimbo.

So the Clinton Bimbo Deconstruction Squad went into action. "She's only after the money," whispered White House trial lawyers, who should know all about only being after the money. "Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park ...." hissed James Carville, diving for a dime. "Did you see her on C-SPAN? She's certainly not a cultured person," sniffed the intellegentsia, whose vaunted egalitarianism apparently accords basic human dignity and civil rights only to Ivy League graduates. And the press and the Washington elite dutifully repeated this character assassination, occasionally even being discreet enough to lower their voices as they did so.

Note well: The Democratic Party establishment has for more than a century proclaimed itself the defender of the little guy, the champion of ordinary working people against the powerful and the well-connected. But there it was, devoting itself nearly full time to trashing the character and veracity of a minimum-wage receptionist whose only offenses were decency and self-respect!

It turned out, though, that this was just the warmup. Since then -- doesn't it seem ages ago? -- we've seen the same smear tactics used relentlessly on everyone perceived as a threat to the Clinton regime -- Gingrich, Starr, Linda Tripp, Kathleen Willey, even Henry Hyde -- all with the eager assistance of a fawning national press.

(Those confidential files sure came in handy, didn't they? One of the counts in the "abuse of power" charge against Nixon was misuse of one FBI file; Hillary's enforcer Craig Livingstone kindly provided the Clintons with more than 900.)

The basic all-purpose Bimbo Deconstruction tactics have been used continuously throughout the Clinton presidency, and the national media goes along with it every time.

When someone points out, for example, that the proposed Health Care package makes a doctor subject to Federal felony prosecution for simply accepting a patient on a cash basis, attack the messenger. Accuse him of wanting the poor to die in the gutter of horrible diseases. Point out that his grandmother's hysterectomy was paid for by Medicare. Attack the greedy medical profession. Anything to change the subject and obfuscate the question. And most importantly: never, never address the actual issue. Distract. Cover the complaint with a barrage of verbiage. There is no such thing as meaning, there is only rhetoric. There is no such thing as a fact, there are only words.

Postmodern politics. Derrida with a submachine gun. And the chattering classes are swallowing it whole.

One of the things that most defines the modern intellectual is his comfort in the sophisticated world of abstraction and symbols, words and ideas and grand conceptualizations. Perhaps that's why they seem to be much more easily seduced (if you'll pardon the expression) by the Clinton machine's sophistries.

Everyday working people, though, tend to be much more connected to the real world of things and facts. You can't simply talk your car into running, or distract your toaster from its broken power cord.*

This probably explains why the reaction to the President's first apology (August 17th) was, amazingly, near-universal condemnation from the national media -- The New York Times, for example, came closer to officially frothing at the mouth than ever before in my memory (aside from Anthony Lewis, of course, whose apparent continual frothing is actually just creative drooling) -- while for most of the public it was just "ho-hum." The ordinary citizen had known at least since January that Clinton was lying; only our self-styled elite was dumb enough to be taken in.

But it's been about a month now (as I write this in mid-October) since Apology I, and the pundits seem once again to have become confused by the high-powered thought-jamming transmitters in the White House. So let's try one more time to clarify things for these reality-challenged glitterati:

It's not about sex, if you want to dignify Clinton's activities with that term. (It would be more accurate to refer to it as a particularly dehumanized mixture of immature schoolboy erotic fantasy, incredibly self-centered promiscuity, and the medieval droit du seigneur. But never mind.) And no, everybody doesn't do it. Military and corporate careers have been ended for far less.

It's not even about lying about sex, and no, everybody doesn't do that, either.

It's about lying under oath in a court of law with the specific purpose of depriving another human being of her right to redress as a citizen of the United States of America. No, everybody doesn't do that either; when they do, they're thrown in jail.

It's not about Kenneth Starr's investigative authority, which is the spinners' line this week. It is not about an affair Henry Hyde had thirty years ago, nor some foolhardy liaisons John Kennedy had nearly forty years ago, which were the spinners' lines last week and the week before, respectively.

It's about whether a public employee who has shown such egregious disrespect for the law, for his constituents, and for his office should be allowed to continue to serve as the chief law enforcement official for a quarter of a billion people.

And it's not just a question of semantics.

Still, though, Paula can count herself lucky to have gotten off with only character assassination and an IRS audit.

(Of course, of course, working girls making less than $20,000 a year are prime candidates for IRS audits, didn't you know that? Another one of the counts against Nixon was merely discussing the use of the IRS against political opponents.
By an odd coincidence, the National Rifle Association, the Cato Institute, the Western Journalism Center, the National Review, and a dozen other organizations critical of Clinton's policies were audited by the IRS in 1996. By an even odder coincidence, no think tank or publication sympathetic to Clinton has been audited during his entire administration.)

Kathleen Willey: Goons stole her cat as a warning.

Kathleen Willey, a Democratic activist groped by the President in November 1993, got her tires slashed and her cat stolen. Then a strange man accosted her in a park, asked about her cat by name, and mentioned that the same thing might happen to her children if she wasn't careful.
Elizabeth Ward Gracen, the popular TV actress who has admitted she had an affair with Clinton in her teens when she was Miss Arkansas, was offered acting jobs in return for denying the affair. Once when she was vacationing in the Caribbean her beach cabana was ransacked; she believes it was Clinton goons looking for (nonexistent) incriminating tapes, since $2000 in cash and a Rolex watch, both in plain sight, were untouched.
Another Miss Arkansas, Sally Perdue, was warned -- in front of a witness -- that if she didn't keep quiet about her cocaine-laden 1983 affair with Clinton, something "might happen to her pretty little legs."
Kathy Ferguson, ex-wife of the trooper who brought Paula Jones to the hotel room and a corroborating witness in the case, "shot herself" in her living room in May 1994. With all her suitcases packed and ready for a trip. Apparently sometimes character assassination and intimidation aren't enough. Her boyfriend Bill Shelton, who was investigating Kathy's death, "shot himself" a month later....
Suzanne Coleman had an affair with Clinton twenty years ago, when he was Arkansas' Attorney General. She "shot herself" in the back of the head while seven months pregnant with (according to her) Bill's child -- very awkward, and most female suicides prefer means other than guns.

Bimbo Deconstruction

Craig Goodrich Rant Magazine November 1998

Craig Goodrich
Rant Magazine
November 1998