"If there's one thing that terrifies the Clintons and sends their spinners into hyperdrive, it is the comparison to Richard Nixon and Watergate."
| I, TOO, AM NOT A CROOK!
The obstructionist's "stonewall" is breached.
Soon "critical mass" will be reached.
Is the "Comeback Kid" fixin'
To pull a "Dick Nixon,"
Resigning before he's impeached? |
The ever increasing similarity between the Whitewater and Watergate scandals is truly eerie. And yet, says Steven Hayward of the Pacific Research Institute, "there is another comparison that is much more apt than Watergate." Hayward points out that August marked "the 50th anniversary of the moment that Whittaker Chambers first testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that Alger Hiss was a Communist. Hiss was firm in his denials of the charge," he recalls. "Freshman Congressman Richard Nixon was practically alone on the Committee in disbelieving the illustrious Hiss."
Then, as now, a perjury case ensued. "Hiss thought there was no evidence that could possibly back up Chambers' charge," Hayward observes, "so he thought the case would dissolve into a 'he said-he said' controversy, just as the President's allegedly illicit relationship was supposed to dissolve into a 'he said-she said' standoff. But, unfortunately for Hiss and Clinton, there was other circumstantial evidence. For Hiss, it was microfilm documents and a typewriter; for Clinton, it is a series of gifts and a dress. And perhaps the most ominous symmetry," says Hayward, "is that Hiss was ultimately indicted after he voluntarily appeared, against the advice of counsel, before the grand jury investigating the matter."
Another similarity is the disparity "between the stature of accuser and accused," then and now. "The evidence of Hiss's guilt was irrelevant to a certain cast of liberal mind that embraced Hiss precisely because he was on the side of the progressive angels," Hayward asserts. "Hiss became the victim-hero, and remained so even after the last shred of doubt about his guilt vanished."
Hayward argues that Clinton is "even more a hero to the cultural left at this moment precisely because the charges against him may be true. For the cultural left, contempt for middle-class values is the chief posture by which they express their superiority over the great unwashed," he explains. "If Clinton can successfully flout the standards of fidelity and veracity, he will become to the cultural left an even greater icon than if he had succeeded in nationalizing health care. If he must leave office, he will become the hero-victim of the left for the next generation."
Authorized, as I am, to speak on behalf of the great unwashed, I wish to inform the loonies on the left that fidelity and veracity remain cherished middle-class virtues, and that it is only our great respect for the office of the presidency that delays the day of reckoning for Bill Clinton, which will surely come.
