Watson is a professor of English.
By Robert Watson
It’s amazing that right-wingers still think the definitive
refutation of any progressive idea is snide remarks about the
consensual sex-life of a president from the previous
millennium.
Ben Shapiro ““ who spent a previous column complaining that
the U.N. lets children have too much fun in refugee camps, and
admonishing these hungry, homeless, hopeless, brutalized kids to
get over being so spoiled (“Procedure promotes sexual
promiscuity, not protection,” Viewpoint, Nov. 19) ““ is
now weighing in on the Enron scandal, to defend poor little George
W. Bush ("Bush
not connected to collapse of Enron, contrary to liberal
opinion,” Viewpoint, Jan. 22).
Shapiro’s analysis of the most costly business scandal in
modern history entails a snicker about “lingerie at a Bill
Clinton birthday bash,” no fewer than three separate
references to ” scantily-clad interns,” then a snide
remark about “what “˜is’ means,” an even
snider one about a “Republican-clean cigar,” and the
breathtaking assertion that Republican politicians “are not
to be bought or sold.”
I’m no admirer of the personal ethics of major politicians
in either major party ““ Clinton modeled himself on John F.
Kennedy in more ways than one ““ but how can Shapiro claim
that the Democrats have a monopoly on scandal, and are humiliated
by “the squeaky clean image projected by
conservatives?”
Without even getting into the televangelists, or the strongly
conservative Gary Condit, let’s remember that Newt Gingrich,
the Republican leader against Clinton, dumped various wives,
including one on whom he pressed divorce papers in the hospital bed
where she was recovering from cancer surgery. During the
impeachment campaign Gingrich was secretly having an affair with an
aide, Callista Bisek, and he was chased out of the Speakership for
illegally exploiting his position.
His Republican replacement turned out to have a nasty sex
scandal of his own and fled office within days for fear of further
exposure.
Henry Hyde, the Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary
Committee, righteously led the impeachment attack on Clinton
““ until the man whose marriage Hyde’s affair had
shattered spoke up (Hyde finally admitted having the affair, but
wanted journalists arrested for reporting it).
“Squeaky” all right, but you couldn’t say
“clean.”
Meanwhile, we can go back to the previous President Bush, who
was generally known in Washington to be having an affair with his
appointments secretary Jennifer Fitzgerald ““ oddly, Linda
Tripp knew about this one too. Along with Reagan (whose own
children testify to his disgraceful family behavior), Bush was
involved in the Iran-Contra (Nicaragua) scandal ““ about which
both Bush and Reagan repeatedly and self-servingly lied.
That scandal, by the way, was ““ ike our attacks on Chile
before it ““ a case of state-sponsored terrorism against a
peaceful foreign nation ““ guerrilla violence that killed ten
times as many innocents as the Sept. 11 atrocities, all because our
big-business interests hated the ideology of these elected
governments to our South and to our left. While posturing against
terrorism as an absolute evil demanding ultimate measures and
international support, Bush has just appointed two of the most
notorious architects of those terrorist campaigns (Otto Reich and
John Negroponte) to high foreign-policy posts in our
government.
The previous big sex scandal in Washington? Bob Packwood, a
Republican, for serial unwanted sexual pressuring of his employees.
The previous big impeachment? Richard Nixon, a Republican, for
crimes which actually had something to do with his functions as
president, and have since been exposed as far worse than even his
accusers realized at the time.
The Republican president before Nixon was Dwight Eisenhower
““ a fine leader by most accounts, but one whose extramarital
affair with his Army driver, Kay Summersby, is well known. Too bad
Shapiro wasn’t around to dismiss D-Day with smutty
jeering.
And now we have the embodiment of honor in the White House.
His daughters keep breaking the law and then using the Secret
Service to spring them and their drinking buddies out of jail. His
wife killed a man by running a stop sign at 50 mph and never got so
much as a traffic ticket because the powerful family shielded her.
Bush himself ““ after using his own family power to dodge
Vietnam and not even show up for his alternative service ““
spent years snorting cocaine, a crime for which he gloatingly
locked up countless fellow-Texans and threw away the key.
So it’s really all about the injustices of power. All this
scandal stuff is just a sideshow. What has the Bushes (and
therefore the Shapiros) of the world worried is that, thanks to the
exposure of Enron, somebody might start noticing the huge crimes
that actually affect people ““ the ones that run tranquilly in
the Wall Street Journal every day, not the ones that occasionally
light up the National Enquirer.
Enron is the epitome of a system of cronyism the trust-fund rich
have established so they can keep robbing from the working poor
““ and can add insult to injury by claiming it is purely the
result of merit. The same transaction takes place between rich and
poor nations. What may have been illegal in the case of Enron was
just an extension of what was already deeply immoral: class warfare
disguising itself as free enterprise. CEOs keep awarding themselves
and each other multi-million-dollar bonuses while cutting off
health care for hard-working employees because the company
“just can’t afford it.”
You can tell how scared Bush’s handlers are by the way
they keep denying involvements with Enron until they know the press
has uncovered them, and by Bush’s own claim that Enron backed
his opponent in the Texas governor race, when in fact it turns out
to have contributed far more to his own campaign. Is this, to
borrow Shapiro’s praise, “what people call, in
colloquial terms, honesty?” I think there are some even more
colloquial terms for it.
It’s impressive Shapiro knows what was and what
wasn’t said in meetings between Enron’s Chairman and
Vice President Cheney ““ who himself has made millions jacking
up the price of energy. Our Congress has been trying to find that
out for months, and met a stone wall.
It’s even more remarkable that, after writing all this,
Shapiro can accuse anyone demanding that Enron be investigated
““ by someone other than Enron’s fellow fat-cats with
whom Bush has packed the government ““ of “trying to
deflect attention” from the important problem, which
apparently is still lying somewhere in Monica Lewinsky’s
underwear drawer.