Adversaries of Arkansas’s junior Senator from New York should be of good enough cheer. She will never let them live long without reinforcing their well grounded disdain. Let too long a season pass, following her last dispense of that genius for amplifying wisdom through its fetid opposite, and she arrives in time enough to reassure that all returns to normal, indeed, no matter the atrocity that arrests us.
To The New Yorker does she tell how deeply she understands, how profoundly she knows, that fear plunged into us when “murderous anger” rears in such malevolence as turns civilian airliners into weapons of mass destruction. She got the a-ha in the good old days, as Mrs. President, when she was greeted in travel by that murderous anger of radio host-inspired protestors working the First Amendment briskly, against that which she had come to defend: the Living Truth of her holy crusade to drag America’s health under the State’s sole auspice.
Surely those hosts and protestors feel the favour of God, knowing now that Senator Clinton believes them of patrician enough stock to broach Osama bin Laden. Her husband had thought them of stock no higher than plebeian enough to broach Timothy McVeigh, after all. To inspire the mere parking of a rental truck below a federal office building requires far less imaginative panache, apparently, than curling two sleek airliners around to drill the signature towers of enterprise and commerce.
The Senator herself lacks quite that depth of imagination. But she atones by way of that effrontery which abhors a vacuum to an extent even nature cannot reach. During the same fortnight toward the end of which her grotesque understanding was revealed in The New Yorker, there came a pair of developments which readdressed the Clinton Era explicitly.
Bill Clinton’s privilege to practise law before the Supreme Court was suspended, an act which may seem superfluous given both his rare enough law practise and his Constitutional illiteracy. Earlier in that same fortnight there graduated, from Internet news forum graffiti to serious script, questions grave and sober as to the depth to which his myopic exercises of office might be deemed such as allowed the wiggle room through which the 11 September atrocity could have been executed.
Specifically, and it took the Washington Post of all organs to affirm it, the Clinton Administration might have stopped bin Laden himself when Sudan was evicting him, except that Saudi Arabia didn’t want him and the Clintonistas claimed a lack of evidence to indict him in the U.S. In due course, the Post continued, Mr. Clinton’s national security advisor Tony Lake and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, both of whom seem to have been critical in persuading the President that what they had was insufficient to think about trying, left room enough for bin Laden to reach Afghanistan and withstand an embassy bombing counterattack which amounted to nothing better than vaporising an outhouse and making bin Laden a hero in a world his championship perverts.
“In other words,” says the columnist Andrew Sullivan in observatory comment, “the Clinton Administration let the guy go, then succeeded in cementing his reputation. Way to go, guys…Yes, the first Bush administration needs to take a hit. But the largest responsibility for running our intelligence services into the ground must be the Clinton Administration’s…In the last resort, the only ultimate responsibility of the president of the United States is the security of its citizens from foreign attack.”
Upon such re-examination upon her husband’s foul performances, and their likely imprint upon our incumbent crisis, does Senator Clinton deliver herself. Not even Washington returning only too much to normal, the era of big government coming back with an apparent bang, satisfies this woman whose every emission and act is a tandem calculation, designed to secure the blessings of the State and herself in due course as their dispenser-in-chief.
Richard Nixon, in farewell to his White House staff, had the vile audacity to compare the loss of political office to the loss of a beloved wife. (He appropriated Theodore Roosevelt’s beauteous diary expression, “And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went out of my life forever.”) Hillary Clinton, comparing that which is said to provoke a slaughter of the innocents to that which she thinks animates a protest of sociopolitical policy, has eclipsed Mr. Nixon for rhetorical obscenity.