The low-down impeachment blues

By Gwynne Dyer

"If the deponent is the person who has oral sex performed on him, then the contact is not with anything on that list (of naughty bits which it would constitute 'sexual relations' to touch), but with the lips of another person. Let me remind you, sir, I read this carefully."

-- Bill Clinton, explaining to the grand jury last month that Monica Lewinsky had 'sexual relations' with him, but he didn't have sexual relations with her.

"I hope that millions of families all over America are, in a way, growing stronger because of this."

-- Clinton, two days before the publication of the Starr Report.

LONDON (JP): I know it's supposed to be serious, but somewhere between the hair-splitting lawyer bit and the sanctimonious patriarch act I just broke up. I'm sorry, but I think it's funny. I mean, if he had stuck to sheep he wouldn't be in all this trouble.

It goes to show what you miss when you lose out on a classical education. The ancient Greeks may have been kinky, but they knew how to combine priapism and public life. As Aristotle (I think it was) put it: "a woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, a sheep for discretion."

But the Arkansas public schools no longer teach the classics, so now the papers, which at this time of year would normally contain mind-rottingly boring analyses of the Congressional mid- term elections, are filled instead with exciting top-shelf reading material. "The boy just doesn't learn, does he?" Gennifer Flowers put it when the Paula Jones story hit the news -- but he does keep us entertained.

He is also contributing, albeit inadvertently, to the embellishment of the language, which is daily being enriched by delightful new phrases like "contrition offensive". However, like Hitler's invasion of Russia, Clinton's contrition offensive got started too late in the season, with potentially fatal results.

There was a famous (but never publicized) catch-phrase in the World War II. Some say it was the British who originated it, others the Australians, but it was what you said when your platoon had spent the whole afternoon working its way closer to a German pillbox, and you had already lost half a dozen killed and wounded, and just as you got close enough to chuck a grenade in through the machine-gun slit -- out came the crew with their hands up.

What you said was "Too late, chum", and shot them down anyway.

That is approximately what is going to happen to Bill Clinton, who has been fatally behind the music at every step of the dance. To get a free pardon in the court of public opinion, you have to get your apology in before they convict you.

Stumbling reluctantly from full-throated denial ("That woman!", February 1998) to mumbled evasions ("not appropriate", mid- August), then to long-range apologies ("Sorry", Ireland, late August), and finally to abject self-condemnation only as the impeachment machinery lurches into motion ("I have sinned", White House, Sept. 11), makes it look as if the boy is insincere.

America is a deeply religious country with maudlin and easily distracted media, so getting all sanctimonious and penitential usually works well for a politician. It is probably not going to work for Clinton, because his contrition has been too slow and too sly. Some time in the next few months, he will probably be forced to resign. But so what?

American pundits burble on about the 'sanctity' of the presidential office -- which is imbued with a quasi-religious quality in the eyes of many Americans -- and fret about how Clinton's impeachment and/or resignation will undermine it. But the truth is that the U.S. presidency is one of the weakest seats of executive power in the world (the "separation of powers", remember?), and that it makes little difference to the real world whether Clinton stays or goes.

Clinton's high approval rating with voters is mostly due to the long boom in the U.S. economy -- which, as any economist will tell you, he can take no credit whatever for. His major initiatives in domestic policy, in six years in office, could be counted on the fingers of one badly mutilated hand. And as for foreign policy -- well, he does bomb places occasionally, but the Pentagon won't let him bomb anywhere more dangerous than Sudan and Afghanistan.

In fact, if a lengthy impeachment crisis completely paralyses U.S. foreign policy, you won't even notice the difference. Nothing will be done to bring the Middle Eastern peace process back from the grave, nobody will stop the Serbs from doing to Kosovo what they did to Bosnia, nothing will be done on a dozen other issues -- but nothing decisive was being done before, either.

So just lie back and enjoy the spectacle. Clinton doesn't exactly deserve what's going to happen to him, in the sense that everybody lies about their sex lives (except eunuchs, perhaps, and even they...). But he's such a cowardly, manipulative hypocrite that you can't really object to the workings of Fate on this occasion.

There's also much entertainment to be had from watching the Republicans squirm as they try to avoid the increasingly likely denouement: a Clinton resignation just after the halfway point of his term in January, and the elevation of Al Gore to the presidency in ample time to bury the scandal, boost his own profile, and dash their hopes of capturing the office in 2000.

And the lasting relevance of this affair (if there is any)? Only a greater reluctance among over-sexed male politicians to believe that 21-year-old women do not discuss their sex lives with their girlfriends, and perhaps a rise in the popularity of sheep.