since January 28, 1998.
The following article is under submission. It is posted for entertainment purposes only and may not be crossposted to any other website, datafile base, conference, news group, or email list, without written permission of the author.
Copyright © 1998 by J. Neil Schulman. All rights reserved.
Excuse me, my friends and fellow citizens, but you people are nuts. Bonkers. Certifiable.
Or, at least you sound crazy based on what you're saying on talk radio and telling the pollsters.
It's finally crossed your mind that William Blythe Jefferson Clinton might not be of the sterling character needed to spend your money, send troops overseas, and have his hand on the trigger of the world's biggest assault rifle? That he likes getting head from pretty young thangs because he's married to a yenta who ain't giving him any 'cause it takes a trillion-dollar federal bureaucracy to get her off? That the first couple will both lie outrageously to cover his ass whenever he once again moons the American people? Well -- as my six-year-old daughter says -- DUH!
Let's talk about this guy's job performance, which most of you seem to approve of. Everybody in the media acknowledges that Bill Clinton ran for the presidency in 1992 by telling the American people that he would govern like a Republican. Isn't that what "New Democrat" means anyway? Then, in his first two years of office, he showed that he'd suckered the American people, by governing like he was a paid agent of the Red Chinese in a John Birch Society nightmare: trying to expand bureaucracy wherever possible, raise taxes, grab more executive power, send the FBI in to burn a church congregation, send American troops overseas as occupying forces under the U.N. flag -- and grab as many of the American people's guns as possible. Then you did something intelligent. You said, "Whoa there!" and elected the first Republican Congress in a generation -- a Republican Congress that ran on the promise that it would put government on a diet and try to clean up after the mess Democrat-run Congresses had made for the last four decades.
Read the Constitution. Article One, Section Nine says, "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time." In other words, once you elected the Republicans to Congress, Bill Clinton couldn't spend a dime of tax money without Congress passing an appropriation for it.
You see, when it comes to running the economy, policy isn't made in the White House, it's made in Congress. That's why when Ronald Reagan was president and the Congress was controlled by the Democrats, spending increased enormously -- and in the subsequent elections the Democrats blamed Ronald Reagan for doubling the national debt. Then the Democrats decided to take the lemon of a Republican Congress and make lemonade. Since they'd already gotten away with blaming Reagan for the Democratic Congress's spending like a drunken sailor, they figured they could let Bill Clinton take credit for the Republican Congress's cutting back on spending and balancing the budget.
And you people let the Democrats get away with that game of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose by re-electing Bill Clinton in 1996. Not that Bob Dole would have been much of a president, but then again, with a Republican Congress, he wouldn't have had to be.
Then you're surprised when it turns out that Bill Clinton was getting money funnelled from the Red Chinese, that there was strong evidence of a conspiracy by federal police agents to burn down that church in Waco, and that someone who might know the truth about what happened to Vince Foster did end up in airplane wreckage with a .45-caliber-sized hole in his skull. But of course we're all nuts to believe in conspiracies -- unless it's one of those "vast right-wing" conspiracies that Hillary Clinton says is attacking her lifeline to power.
And you call this parlor trick -- Bill Clinton's taking credit for the Republican Congress's reviving the economy -- a good job performance?
It was some cynical and wise American -- Mark Twain or H.L. Mencken -- who first said that democracy is the idea that the people get the government they deserve -- good and hard. If you've finally had your illusions about Bill Clinton's character dashed by Monica Lewinsky -- after ignoring Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones saying pretty much the same thing for six years -- then I suppose I shouldn't complain too much.
I think that Bill Clinton will be no great loss to the presidency when he leaves office, and my only fear is that Al Gore -- lacking his Achilles penis -- would be even worse. If you're finally as disgusted with him as I have always been, feel free either to impeach him or to let him serve out his lame-duck second term. I don't much care as long as you keep the purse strings away from the Democrats, let Clinton beat the crap out of Saddam Hussein without getting us sucked into another Vietnam, and don't let Clinton make a conviction for smoking in public the basis for a lifetime revocation of our Second Amendment rights.
But, for heaven's sake, can you at least try to pick a better president next time out? Please?
January 28, 1998 ##
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