A STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE Clinton as the first black president

Thanks to round-the-clock cable, we know what the ex-prosecutors, the right-wing blondes, the teletropic law professors, and the disgraced political consultants think. Thanks to the polls, we know what "the American people" think. But what about the experts on human folly?

This summer, my plan was to do very selective radio listening, read no newspapers or news magazines, and leave my television screen profoundly, mercifully blank. There were books to read, others to finish, a few to read again. It was a lovely summer, and I was pleased with the decision to recuse myself from what had become since January The Only Story Worth Telling.

Although I wanted cognitive space for my own pursuits, averting my gaze was not to bury my head. I was eager for information, yet suspicious of the package in which that information would be wrapped.

I have been convinced for a long time now that, with a few dazzling exceptions, print and visual media have thrown away their freedom and chosen jail instead--have willingly locked themselves into a ratings-driven, moneybased prison of their own making. However comfortable the prison may be, its most overwhelming feature is loss of the public.

Not able, therefore, to trust reporters to report instead of gossip among themselves, unable to bear newscasters deflecting, ignoring, trivializing information--orchestrating its minor chords for the highest decibel--I decided to get my news the old-fashioned way: conversation, public eavesdropping, and word of mouth.

I hoped to avoid the spectacle I was sure would be mounted, fearing that at any minute I might have to witness ex-Presidential friends selling that friendship for the higher salaries of broadcast journalism; anticipating the nausea that might rise when quaking Democrats took firm positions on or over the fence in case the polls changed. I imagined feral Republicans, smelling blood and a shot at the totalitarian power they believe is rightfully theirs; self-congratulatory pundits sifting through "history" for nuggets of dubious relevancy.

I did not relinquish my summer plans, but summer is over now and I have begun to supplement verbal accounts of the running news with tentative perusal of C-SPAN, brief glimpses of anchorfolk, squinting glances at newspaper--trying belatedly to get the story straight. What, I have been wondering, is the story--the one only the public seems to know? And what does it mean?

I wish that the effluvia did add up to a story of adultery. Serious as adultery is, it is not a national catastrophe. Women leaving hotels following trysts with their extramarital lovers tell pollsters they abominate Mr. Clinton's behavior. Relaxed men fresh from massage parlors frown earnestly into the camera at the mere thought of such malfeasance.

No one "approves" of adultery, but, unlike fidelity in Plymouth Rock society, late-twentieth-century fidelity, when weighed against the constitutional right to privacy, comes up short. The root of the word, adulterare, means "to defile," but at its core is treachery. Cloaked in deception and secrecy, it has earned prominence on lists of moral prohibitions and is understood as more than a sin; in divorce courts it is a crime. People don't get arrested for its commission, but they can suffer its grave consequences.

Still, it is clear that this is not a narrative of adultery or even of its consequences for the families involved. Is there anyone who believes that that was all the investigation had in mind? Adultery is the Independent Counsel's loss leader, the item displayed to lure the customers inside the shop. Nor was it ever a story about seduction--male vamp or female predator (or the other way around). It played that way a little: a worn tale of middle-aged vulnerability and youthful appetite.

The Achilles' heel analogy flashed for a bit, but had no staying power, although its ultra meaning--that Achilles' heel was given to Achilles, not to a lesser man--lay quietly dormant under the cliché.

At another point, the story seemed to be about high and impeachable crimes like the ones we have had some experience with: the suborning of federal agencies; the exchange of billion-dollar contracts for proof of indiscretion; the extermination of infants in illegal wars mounted and waged for money and power. Until something like those abuses surfaces, the story will have to make do with thinner stuff: alleged perjury and "Lady, your husband is cheating on us." Whatever the media promote and the chorus chants, whatever dapples dinner tables, this is not a mundane story of sex, lies, and videotape. The real story is none of these. Not adultery, or high crimes. Nor is it even the story of a brilliant President naive enough to believe, along with the rest of the citizenry, that there were lines one's enemies would not cross, lengths to which they would not go--a profound, perhaps irrevocable, error in judgment.

In a quite baffling and frustrating manner, it was not a "story" but a compilation of revelations and commentary which shied away from the meaning of its own material. In spite of myriad "titles" ("The President in Crisis"), what the public has been given is dangerously close to a story of no story at all. One of the problems in locating it is the absence of a coherent sphere of enunciation. There seems to be no appropriate language in which or platform of discourse from which to pursue it. This absence of clear language has imploded into a surfeit of contradictory languages. The parsing and equivocal terminology of law is laced with titillation. Raw comedy is spiked with Cotton Mather homilies. The precision of a coroner's vocabulary mocks passionate debates on morality. Radiant sermons are forced to dance with vile headlines. From deep within this conflagration of tony, occasionally insightful, arch, pompous, mournful, supercilious, generous, salivating verbalism, the single consistent sound to emerge is a howl of revulsion.

But revulsion against what? What is being violated, ruptured, defiled? The bedroom? The Oval Office? The voting booth? The fourth grade? Marriage vows? The flag? Whatever answer is given, underneath the national embarrassment churns a disquiet turned to dread and now anger.

African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and--who knows?--maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us."

For a large segment of the population who are not African-Americans or members of other minorities, the elusive story left visible tracks: from target sighted to attack, to criminalization, to lynching, and now, in some quarters, to crucifixion. The always and already guilty "perp" is being hunted down not by a prosecutor's obsessive application of law but by a different kind of pursuer, one who makes new laws out of the shards of those he breaks.

Certain freedoms I once imagined as being in a vault somewhere, like ancient jewels kept safe from thieves. No single official or group could break in and remove them, certainly not in public. The image is juvenile, of course, and I have not had recourse to it for the whole of my adult fife. Yet it is useful now to explain what I perceive as the real story. For each bootstep the office of the Independent Counsel has taken smashes one of those jewels--a ruby of grand-jury secrecy here, a sapphire of due process there. Such concentrated power may be reminiscent of a solitary Torquemada on a holy mission of lethal inquisition. It may even suggest a fatwa. But neither applies. This is Slaughtergate. A sustained, bloody, arrogant coup d'éat. The Presidency is being stolen from us. And the people know it.

I don't regret my "news-free" summer. Getting at the story in that retrograde fashion has been rewarding. Early this week, a neighbor called to ask if I would march. Where? To Washington, she said. Absolutely, I answered, without even asking what for. "We have to prevent the collapse of our Constitution," she said.

Clinton: First Black President. What?

Dan Frisa

Newsmax.com archives

Monday, March 5, 2001

Can it get any nuttier?

Over the weekend, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume presented X-PREZ with an Image Award at a Universal City, Calif., ceremony, citing his work in improving life for blacks during his eight-year tenure as president.

"That's why I went to Harlem, because I think I am the first black president,'' Clinton responded, referring to plans for his new office in New York, according to an AP report.

What?

This guy has finally gone over the deep end!

What kind of nonsense and drivel is this?

This whole episode is so bizarre and filled with so many surreal aspects that it more than defies logic. But since when has anything involving X-PREZ been normal?

To begin with, how about a little outrage and indignation at the fact that he even had the nerve to attend an NAACP event. Haven’t we been lectured – and screamed at – by the left wing of the mainstream media that to speak before a group is, by implication, to adopt the group’s views and positions?

That’s what they shouted when then-governor Bush was trashed repeatedly for speaking at Bob Jones University during the recent presidential campaign. We were told that it is unacceptable to do so when any position of the organization is deemed questionable.

So where is the outrage at X-PREZ for his appearance at the NAACP?

Remember, it was the NAACP that sponsored those hideous, despicable television ads depicting the horrific and tragic dragging death of James Byrd as being directly linked to George W. Bush.

Clinton, using the left’s own standard, either should have boycotted the NAACP event or he should have attended and lectured the group about their immoral – and possibly illegal – sponsorship of the ad.

(Nonprofit organizations such as the NAACP are prohibited by IRS rules from engaging in electoral advocacy.)

Where was that crooked, wagging finger when it might have actually done some good?

But of course that would have taken integrity and courage and a genuine belief in principle. Enough said here; that takes care of this possibility.

Yet there are a host of other instances of X-PREZ fostering racial hatred and division, any one of which would seem to have disqualified his selection for an NAACP award for supposed good works.

During the troubling spate of burnings of black churches several years ago, X-PREZ not only did not help the "healing" – he went and threw gas on the fire when he came out with a whopper of a lie recalling how "troubled" he was when, as a child, black churches were ostensibly burned in Arkansas.

It never happened.

Investigative reporting following up on these remarks proved there was not a single black church burned as Clinton had falsely claimed. Such an outlandish lie only served to strain, not assuage, racial tensions.

And how about the race-baiting ads run by Democrats in predominately black areas during the 1998 congressional elections, which threatened that the election of Republicans would lead to more church burnings and such horrors as lynchings?

Where was Bill Clinton then to stand up and speak out and order that such ugly tactics be ceased immediately?

He was nowhere to be found, silent as usual when his "great gift" for oratory could have been – for once in his life – lent to a noble end.

Most recently, Clinton himself hand-picked his biggest fund-raiser, Terry McAuliffe, as new Democrat National Committee chairman and went so far as to prevent even the opportunity for a vote to black former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, who sought the post as well.

How does that promote better treatment of black Americans?

And where was Clinton when McAuliffe referred to blacks as colored people? Should he not have publicly ridiculed such insensitive language and demanded that civil discourse cannot tolerate the fostering of racial insensitivity?

Yeah, right.

It will be interesting to see who X-PREZ and Senator Slick Hilly support in the upcoming New York Democratic gubernatorial primary: Andrew Cuomo or Carl McCall, the state’s highest elected black official.

(Insiders know they’ve already committed to back Cuomo, which is their right. But given their posture as having done such wonderful things to advance the cause of blacks in America, is it such a stretch to believe they might support McCall, who, by the way, worked tirelessly for Senator Slick Hilly? Or at least to remain neutral?)

When it came time to select a site for his post-presidential office, where did Clinton decide to settle?

On 57th Street above Carnegie Hall, in the most expensive office space in midtown Manhattan, that’s where.

He only chose Harlem as a means to quell one of the many controversies he created for himself upon leaving office.

Harlem, in short, was an afterthought at best.

Here, again, is the lie X-PREZ spun on that one:

"That's why I went to Harlem, because I think I am the first black president.''

Hard as it may be to fathom, that doesn’t quite pass the smell test.

"Wacko" seems so much more fitting.

* * * E-mail Dan: danfrisa@newsmax.com.

Dan Frisa represented New York in the United States Congress and served four terms in the New York State Assembly.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.