Posted by Dan Ewert : 4/01/2002 12:19:00 AM (Archive Link)
I really dislike Bill Clinton. My distaste has most recently been inflamed by an article I just read on CNN.com about Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich during the 11th hour of his Presidency. Good ole Bill said that given the chance, he wouldn’t do it again. Not because it was an improper pardon in the first place. No, no, of course not. He wouldn’t do it again because the ensuing uproar tarnished his reputation. "It was terrible politics," he said. "It wasn't worth the damage to my reputation. But that doesn't mean the attacks were true." This is terribly Clintonian. Instead of fessing up and saying the pardon should not have taken place since it was clearly wrong and ill-advised for a variety of good reasons, he merely focuses on the damage to his precious legacy. I would have been far more admiring of Clinton during his eight years (well, at least a little more) if he had stopped worrying about how the future would view him and instead just did his job. Funny thing about history… it makes up its own mind about how to perceive you. You can devote all your energy towards building up favorable encyclopedia and textbook entries, but that doesn’t mean it will happen. You will be judged based upon the current values of the times and how your actions relate to them. You’re far better off just doing the job, doing what’s right, and then letting the pieces fall where they may. Clinton was elected to advance America’s present, not his personal future. Besides, the future is the province of the living, and those who will be dead in that future need not be concerned about who has their picture on the wall for inspiration.

Anyway, two other points in the article amused me. Okay, irritated me. Well… both… amused irritation. “Since then, they have been investigated by federal prosecutors and Congress. That scrutiny, Clinton said, made him ‘just angry that after I worked so hard and after all that money had been spent proving that I never did anything wrong for money, that I'd get mugged one more time on the way out the door.’” Again, another beautiful Clintonian statement… particularly because of his word choice, “mugged.” A mugging is a vicious unwarranted attack. The criticism over the pardon wasn’t a mugging, it was appropriate, justified action over an improper last minute pardon with dubious background. However, I guess such a point of view takes away Clinton’s victim status. Sometimes I forget that he never did anything to deserve the close inspection of his affairs (pun intended).
The other quote I liked is this, “’I don't know Marc Rich and wouldn't know him if he walked in the door there,’ Clinton said. But, he added, ‘I was very sensitive to prosecutorial abuse because I had seen it. ... I don't think that's all bad for a president to be sensitive to any kind of abuse of power.’” Two points on this. First, he’s establishing a moral equivalence between himself and Rich. They’re both poor souls caught up in prosecutors’ vindictive zealousness. Neither one of them has done anything to warrant the charges that have been leveled against them. Nevermind the fact that Rich was properly indicted under federal law which meant that a grand jury found enough evidence to go forward. That pesky democratic due process from which Rich decided to excuse himself (you’ll recall he escaped to Switzerland before the trial) can be very inconvenient. My second point is that if Clinton considers himself sensitive to the abuse of power, that’s very understandable. He has plenty of on the job training in seeing what that’s like. In the performance thereof, not the suffering.

On a separate note about this article, I think it’s a fine example of liberal media bias. While I think it present, I don’t harp much harp on the subject. Still, though, I raise an eyebrow from time to time… much like one news article (mainstream news article, mind you, not a commentary) that blatantly referred to Bush’s election as “stealing.” Objectivity abounds. That was an Associated Press article, same as this one on CNN.com. After the article goes on about the Rich scandal, it ends with this paragraph, “On a lighter note, Clinton said he is getting a chocolate Labrador puppy, a descendent of his late dog, Buddy. A frisky retriever often seen at Clinton's side as he jogged, Buddy was killed in January by a car outside the former president's home in Chappaqua, New York.” If you weren’t convinced enough that Clinton’s an ok, hard luck type of guy, you should be reminded about how the poor man’s dog got run over (not by a registered Republican, much to some liberals’ conspiratorial disappointment, I’m sure). You should also be reminded how he’s a swell, beer drinkin’ everyman who’s getting a new dog. This in an article where it had absolutely no place being. Gimme a break.