Clinton: 'high crimes and misdemeanours'
By Barry Sheppard
The release of independent council Kenneth Starr's report outlining 11 charges against US President Bill Clinton, which Starr says "may" represent impeachable offenses, has set off a media storm. That storm has drowned out other issues from the spreading world economic crisis to the predictable debacle of the US's "welfare reform".
Starr's report was turned over to the Judiciary Committee of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which will recommend to the House whether or not to proceed with impeachment hearings. If after these hearings the House votes for impeachment, which is equivalent to an indictment, the Senate will hold a trial on whether Clinton should be kicked out of office or not.
A high point in this media blitz was supposed to be the release of a videotape, played around the world on CNN, of Clinton's testimony to the grand jury concerning his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. But it turned out to be a dud; nothing new was revealed.
The great majority of people in the US already knew about the affair, and about Clinton's attempts to deny it. A big majority think Clinton lied about it, but also think he shouldn't be forced from office, even if he lied under oath.
What viewers of the videotape were confronted with was a four-hour grilling of Clinton about exactly what kind of sex he had with Lewinsky — how did Clinton's semen get on Lewinsky's dress, etc., etc.
A columnist writing in the New York Times said of the videotape, "The Starr report already resembles the surveillance records of a private detective. The grand jury deposition puts us, aesthetically speaking, in the position of watching a police interrogation.
"Many who watch this spectacle will surely imagine themselves in the same chair and wonder just how forthrightly they would react to similar grilling.
"Granted, this is not the trial of the Knights Templar in 14th century France or the Moscow trials of the 1930s. Unlike Jacques de Molay or Nikolai Bukarin, Mr Clinton will physically survive this process, but the intent to destroy him politically is no less evident."
Another NYT writer says, "Today, when you turn on the Sunday 'news' programs, you might be watching Mr Starr's prosecutors rehearsing. They sound like a crowd at an auto-de-fe, a burning at the stake in the Inquisition."
A typical reaction was given by a bar patron to a TV crew: "If they can do this to the president, what could they do to me"? Most people have lied at some time about their sex lives, most are embarrassed about at least some things they have done sexually, and most don't want prosecutors prying into their private affairs.
Christian right
Starr is connected with the Christian right in the Republican Party. That he has zeroed in on the Lewinsky affair, rather than on the Clintons' shady financial deals and so on, probably reflects that he has been unable to come up with a "smoking gun" in these other inquiries.
But there is another side to Starr's motivation. The Christian right wants to shift attention to its "moral" issues, which are often connected to sexuality in one way or another.
They want to completely outlaw abortion. They want to enforce "sodomy" laws against gays, and vitiate equal treatment laws for lesbians and gays.
Divorce should, they argue, be made more difficult — abolished if possible. Women should recognise their husbands as their natural superiors and God-ordained heads of the household.
They are against the separation of church and state, and want to reintroduce religious education into the schools — their religion, of course. Evolution should not be taught. They want the US to become a fundamentalist Christian theocracy.
By raising Clinton's sexual misconduct in these proceedings, they hope to further their concept that the country has gone downhill morally under the influence of the movements that sprung from the 1960s and 70s, including the women's liberation and gay and lesbian rights movements, and the relatively greater freedom from sexual repression that has developed since then.
The decisive Â鶹´«Ã½ of the ruling class have found it convenient to rely on the Christian right as a battering ram against gains made by women, gays, blacks and others, but they by no means wish to put the Christian Right in power now, if ever. After all, Clinton has done a good job from the point of view of big business and Wall Street.
Whether or not Clinton is thrown out of office, (which at this point seems unlikely), the powers that be will also clip Starr's wings, while keeping his particular brand of reactionaries around to help increase the vote for more right-wing politicians, and pull the ideological struggle to the right.
While most people in the US take a dim view of Clinton as "a person", he still gets high marks from most for "how he does his job". Why is this?
Fake left
First, people in the US tend to favour incumbents when the economy is doing good. (The growing economic storm worldwide threatens the US economy, but hasn't come ashore yet for most US residents.) The US is not in a war causing many US soldiers to be coming home in body bags. So — "don't rock the boat".
But also, Clinton has played the "soft cop" to the Republican's "hard cop", while moving the Democratic Party to the right and essentially adopting the Republican's domestic program.
For example, many in his party supported, and he signed, the Republican's law eliminating welfare as a federal right. At the same time, he criticized the harsher aspects of the law, such as requiring the states to throw many immigrants off the welfare rolls. The result is he looks more compassionate about the poor than the Republicans.
The Republicans are seen as anti-union and anti-worker. While doing very little for the unions, Clinton and the Democrats still have union leaders' support.
His support among blacks is especially high. The Republicans make no bones about their disregard for blacks and most oppose affirmative action, for example.
Clinton's close personal friend Vernon Jordon is black, as is his personal secretary Betty Curry, and the president is formally for affirmative action — with caveats about not penalising whites.
But when the issue was on the ballot in California, he said virtually nothing and the anti-affirmative action initiative won.
While the Republicans are on record opposing women's right to choose abortion, Clinton is for it, again with caveats, and has vetoed some very bad bills that many Democrats supported along with the Republicans.
Even many Republican voters think he should not be thrown out of office for his affair, or for lying about it.
The US Constitution says that a president can be impeached and tried for "high crimes and misdemeanours". The present brouhaha about the Lewinsky affair also diverts attention from the real high crimes and misdemeanours that Clinton is guilty of, along with the Republicans.
These include bombing Iraq and threatening to do it again, tightening the blockade of Cuba, sending cruise missiles into Afghanistan and the Sudan, arming dictators like Suharto in Indonesia and elsewhere, and presiding over an imperialist globalisation that is destroying the lives of hundreds of millions around the world, and that threatens the world itself.