9. Clintonian Ugly

CLINTONIAN UGLY

THE CLLNTONIANS:
“LOOKING LIKE AMERICA”

February 1993

Well, we learned one thing from the horribly odious process of Slick Willie’s selecting his cabinet and sub-cabinet: the hysterical love affair that the media has been conducting with Bill Clinton is not love for himself alone. Let Willie slip once, and his media worshippers are on his neck in a minute, howling about betrayal. The general media reaction to Clinton’s selection of his economic and foreign policy team: shrieks of horror: “Yaagghh! White males! You gave us white males. Unclean! You promised us di-ver-sity! You said they’d Look Like America. Where are the women?”

For a moment, Clinton was peeved, to see his adoring fans turn on him so quickly and savagely; and he pouted about “quotas” and “bean counters.” But that was only for the record; very rapidly, Slick Willie knuckled under, scrambling to find more women. In the tremendous pressure and counter-pressures of all the petted groups scrambling at the public trough, poor Senator Wirth, darling of the environmentalists (hey, did you notice that environmentalists are almost all white, and mostly male?) got clobbered to find himself ousted as Secretary of Energy by yet another woman, and a “black” to boot: the unknown Hazel Rollins O’Leary. The women shut up for a moment, though still grumbling at Clinton’s brief outburst (for which he can be expected to pay and pay), but the Hispanics then took over. What? Only one Hispanic in the cabinet? Shame! And so poor William Daley, brother of Chicago Mayor Richard, got suddenly shafted at the Transportation post, to be shoved aside by a certified Hispanic, Federico Pena. For a while it seemed that yet a third Hispanic, Representative Bill Richardson (D., N.M.) was going to get the crucial Interior spot, but the environmentalist lobby put their foot down—Jeez, they had to get something, or, Mr. Clinton, are you really soft on the Environment? And it was in vain that the Clinton people said, look, we appointed a splendid environmentalist, and a Woman, to head the EPA (Carol M. Browner), because it was not a cabinet post. And to the Clintonian assurances that the EPA (along with the other female-headed Council of Economic Advisors) would be treated like the cabinet, and would be “Cabinet-level” (as will the female UN representative): “No, when we demand cabinet it’s gotta be cabinet!”

This was an unprecedentedly repellent case in American history. Up till now, at least lip-service was paid to finding the best person for each job, to the old American ideal of position according to merit. All this has now frankly been tossed overboard. Talk about your “beancounters!” The newspapers actually kept a running score, like a basketball game. White males 4, black males 2, black women 2, Hispanic males, 1. Etc. Black columnist William Raspberry actually came out and said it: merit, shmerit, everyone’s merit is the same anyway, so the key is getting a balance of groups, of insuring glorious diversity, of looking like America. And no one objected. American culture, dominated by left-liberalism, has truly descended into the snakepit.

OK, so let’s play the bean counter game. If you want a cabinet “looking like America” you’re not going nearly far enough. The beans are not classified with near enough precision. What is this “white male” nonsense? This portmanteau group must be disaggregated, and fast. For example, where are the Irish-American males? They are zip. Poor William Daley was bested as Secretary of Transportation, and the result: no Irish. The largest single ethnic group in America is still German–American, and yet there is not a single German–American in the cabinet or sub-cabinet, male or female. How can the Cabinet Look Like America with not a single Irish or German? And where are the Latinas (Hispanic females)? I’m afraid that the fact that black lady Hazel Rollins is married to a (presumptively) white Irishman O’Leary, is not going to be enough. Also: what is this “black” nonsense? There are far more precise groupings needed. For example: it is a fact denied only by white liberals that there is tremendous hatred and resentment between dark and light-skinned Negroes. Don’t we need quotas (oops, I mean balance or diversity) to reflect the proper numbers of dark, light, and medium skinned? Back in the old days of slavery, people were a lot more scientific in their taxonomy; Negroes were given specific names depending on what fraction each one had of Negro and white blood, as well as different names depending on whether the blackness was on the father’s or mother’s side. There were “quadroons,” “octoroons,” etc. All that knowledge seems to have been lost, but our diversity-mongers had better well trot out their old taxonomies if they really want to hold a mirror up to the specific diverse groups that constitute America.

And speaking of Mrs. O’Leary, in what way exactly is she supposed to be “black”? Her skin color is somewhere between Al Gore’s and Bill Clinton’s and lighter than most whites. So what is this nonsense? In the old days, they would have known how to bracket Mrs. O’Leary: In Harlem high society, she would have been called a “high yaller”; it’s about time that the high yallers came into their own.

And then of course there are the Jews, who are strong in the Clintonian list, and who should hardly be slighted. And although we are told a lot about some of the candidates’ backgrounds (i.e., that Bill Richardson is really an Hispanic), we are not told other crucial information, such as who are Jews and who are not, and who is married into a significant ethnic group and who isn’t. Surely, all this is crucial if we are to be really conscientious beancounters. For example, I presume Carol Browner is a WASP female, but I was stunned to find that “Miss” Browner has a little kid named Zachary Podhorzer, she being clearly married to a Jewish male named Michael Podhorzer. (One paper got it wrong and said that her kid’s last name is Podhoretzer, and for a chilling moment I was afraid that Norman had placed another relative into an influential position, but I was fortunately set straight the next day.) Then there is the curious case of Madeleine K. Albright, female, eminent Democrat insider, and the new Ambassadress to the United Nations, raised back in her honor to cabinet-level rank. Sounds like a WASP female, right? But no, it turns out that Mrs. Albright is divorced from Mr. Albright, and that she is a Czechess born in Prague, and daughter of Czech dissident Josef Korbel (hence the “K”). But Czech what? Was Josef a Catholic? Protestant? Or Jew? If Jew, then we can add a Jewess to the top-level Clintonians. But who knows? Once again, the media have been deficient, and I must await further clarification from my Czech sources.

While we are on the Jewish Question, we can now deconstruct the alleged “white male” nature of the Clintonian “economic team.” We have, so far, on the economic team the following: Secretary of Treasury Lloyd Bentsen, elderly white male Texan (surely Texas is big enough and brassy enough to deserve its own category); Leon Panetta, director of Office of Management and Budget, Italo-American male; Laura D’Andrea Tyson, head of Council of Economic Advisors, WASP female; still the remaining four top-level economic teamsters are all Jewish: Robert Rubin, co-head of Goldman-Sachs, head of the new National Economic Council, Jewish male; Roger Altman, of the Blackstone Group, Under Secretary of the Treasury, Jewish male; Alice Rivlin, Deputy head of OMB, Jewish female; and Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor, Jewish male. In short, of the seven top people on the Clintonian economic team, we have: one male WASP Texan; one Italo-American male; one Jewish-American female; three Jewish American males. Boil it all down, and shuffle things around, and what looks superficially like white male dominance becomes Jewish dominance.

We are left, of course, with the Sex Question; why are we beancounters not provided with the sexual preferences of all of the nominees? What exactly gives with HHS Secretary, single female Arab Donna Shalala? What gives with Alice Rivlin? And what is the precise marital status of Laura D’Andrea Tyson? Inquiring minds want to know.

And what has happened to the vast American contingent of blondes and redheads (female)? Every single one of the female appointees is a brunette; even if we exempt the alleged Negress O’Leary and the graying Albright, we still have aggressively brunette women: Tyson, Browner, Zoe Baird; why are the blondes and redheads being discriminated against?

And then there is the titanic struggle between two left-liberals on who will become Clinton’s assistant on health policy: Judith Feder (Jewess) and Stuart Altman (male Jew). Add in the very left-wing Arkansas Negress Dr. Joycelyn Elders as Surgeon-General, and we have a very leftish control of the health field.

There are of course other ways to shuffle the Clintonian categories. Rather than gender and ethnicity, it might be more meaningful to consider for a moment that virtually all the foreign and national security biggies are connected with the Rockefeller World Empire (RWE), thereby insuring that foreign-national security policy remains securely in Rockefeller–Trilat-eralist–Council of Foreign Relations hands, Carter–Brzezinski subdivision, of course. Perhaps this is the payoff for the dramatic open RWE support for Clinton, as embodied in David Rockefeller, Jr’s New York Times op-ed endorsement. Warren Christopher, Secretary of State, prune-faced elderly WASP, is a Rockefeller-Carter retread, as is WASP Anthony Lake (Carter and Kissinger [Rockefeller] aide) as national security adviser. Deputy under Lake is veteran Carter-Lake disciple Samuel (“Sandy”) Berger, male Jew. Under Secretary of State under Christopher is none other than Clifton Wharton, Jr., veteran upper-class very light-skinned Negro (though not quite a male high yaller), who—get this—is former president of none other than the Rockefeller Foundation. To wrap up the package, it turns out that Madeleine Korbel (Albright) is a veteran disciple of Carter-Rockefeller foreign policy expert Zbigniew Brzezinski. And CIA head R.J. Woolsey is a disciple of B. Scowcroft (Kissinger). Score 100 percent for the RWE in this crucial area.

I usually end any discussion of group discrimination and group preference by pointing satirically to the age-old suppression of short people by the Tails, and calling for Shorts to rise up against their Tall oppressors. Well, Life has now unfortunately imitated Art, and we have in the Clintonian cabinet an unusually large number of shorties, so much so that one of the 4 foot-eleven contingent (masquerading as 5-footers) either teeny but homely Donna Shalala or equally short and homely Alice Rivlin, I forget which, exulted that she was part of Clinton’s “short caucus”—she actually used the term! Kinglet of this dwarf contingent is Robert Reich, Jewish male, who admits to 4T1 “but is suspected of being 4’8.” The press have already noted rather sourly that the Clinton Cabinet is no younger than the Bush (apparently elderly Bentsen and Christopher have skewed up the average), but they have been lax in telling us about everyone’s height, and in comparing the Clinton cabinet height profile with that of the American masses.

Ahh, what wonderful research is left for the press, satisfying the people’s “right to know” and hammering out the American mirror profile. Do you remember when left-liberals all laughed when poor Senator Roman Hruska (R., Neb), trying to defend one of Nixon’s Supreme Court appointees from attacks as “mediocre” wondered why the mediocre masses of America did not also deserve representation? It turns out that Hruska was really a prophet ahead of his time. If only he had portioned out the mediocre into the proper ethnic, gender, etc. proportions—providing of course that no Irish and no German–Americans need apply. Gee, ain’t Democracy wonderful?

COPING WITH THE INAUGURAL

March 1993

It was an Inaugural from Hell. The big issue that faced me, now that our Jacobin Festival has burgeoned from Inaugural Day to Inaugural Eve to Inaugural Week, was how to stay sane during this living nightmare. As a political junkie, I couldn’t stop reading the papers altogether, but I could skim through my five daily papers, keeping a keen eye out for the lone gripe, the dissenter amidst this veritable avalanche of pap. But as for TV, I had to forswear it altogether, punctuated by a quick daily foray into the half-hour of Limbaugh sanity amidst the hoopla.

Generally, I kept my TV resolve, but a couple of times, forgetting myself for the moment, idly seeking a sports score, the horror struck:

Bam! TV anchorman, standing outside the festivities: “Last week (before the inaugural), the magic seemed to go out of the Clinton story (because of the various criticisms that had piled up during the week). But now,” the anchorguy’s face lights up, “the jets are flying overhead, and the magic is back!”

Bam! Simpering Katie Couric, a huge emerald around her neck, oohing into the camera; “Ooohh! Pres-i-dent Clint-on has gone over to talk to his mother! Isn’t that wonderful?” Byeccchhh! Where Oh where was the death’s head at the feast?

They all gathered at the Potomac, this nightmare vision of America, the whole cruddy coalition, from the Lawn-Chair parade to the Gay and Lesbian Band to the millionaire Hollywood leftists to the rap groups.

The line in my summer LA. Times article for Bush over Clinton that really drew the hate mail was my saying that at least Bush would “hold back the hordes” for four more years. “Who are those hordes, Mr. Rothbard?” my critics chorused. Well, there they all were, the tens of thousands that poured in ecstasy into Washington, for their Inaugural. They all said much the same thing: “Whoopee, now it’s our turn.”

Two of them, these hordelings, put it almost identically: two of my least favorite people in the world: Barbra Streisand and Betty Friedan. Two clones: Betty is shorter, older, and uglier than Barbra, but not by a heck of a lot. (Sign of either a flagrant liar or someone with hopelessly debased tastes, the guy who says thoughtfully: “You know, she (La Streisand) is really beautiful.”) Betty may be shorter and uglier, but at least she doesn’t assault our eardrums with alleged “singing.”

Barbra, overjoyed at the Inaugural: “We did it; we’re responsible for this, we the people of color, the Jews, the women.” Barbra’s joy, however, was momentarily dampened when the adoring anchorguy introduced her as “Miss Barbra STRY-zend.” “No, no, it’s STRY-SAND,” Barbra snapped irritably.

As befits a theoretician rather than an “entertainer,” Betty was a bit more formal, more non-U, in her summation: “I had this indescribable thrill at the speech and the whole thing. I feel it’s our inauguration—all the people I’ve been on the barricades with from 1966 on—all the barricades, liberal, peace, new democracy, feminists, even the Jewish.”

And then of course there was the generation thing. Diane English: “I would have come all the way from Timbuktu if I had to. It was a wonderful exciting moment for my generation.”

And what of those of us of another generation, those of us on the other side of all these barricades, those of who never had “our turn”? Clinton likes to compare himself to Jack Kennedy, that previous revolt of the youth. But miGod, this ocean of crud made one long for Kennedy, for Jackie, for Camelot, yes, even for the thought of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., being playfully tossed into the White House pool.

But the key of course was ideology not generation, and Lauren (“Betty”) Bacall demonstrated that you didn’t have to be a young fool to be a fool. Bacall gushed about how Al Gore, whom she introduced at the Inaugural, offered her his coat to protect her from the cold. Chivalry! But isn’t that profoundly “sexist”? And then Hillary Herself reached out a gloved hand to draw Betty into the singing of the collectivist hooey of “We Are the World.”

Want more of the rebarbative horror? There was Belgian jetsetter Diane Von Furstenburg: “I’m a Clinton groupie,” she burbled and she planned to become an American citizen because of Clinton. Why? “I was so frustrated that I couldn’t vote for him” Aww, poor thing! Actor Ed Begley, Jr., weighed in with this esthetic pronouncement: “The great thing about being here is learning we have a president who can clap on the counts of two and four, he can hit the downbeat. There is hope for the country!” Not while there are people like Begley making such profound observations.

Such events would not be complete without sage statements from the professoriat. There was Avery Andrews, history professor at George Washington University, after getting a glimpse of Clinton on the inaugural walk. “I could see him clearly,” said the professor. “He was looking out the window, waving.” OOOhh, gee. See Clinton and die, professor what more in life could you possibly achieve?

The best comment on the Inaugural was the immortal line from Monty Woolley in The Man Who Came to Dinner: “Are we to be spared nothing?” The answer, of course, was no, for the piece de resistance was the Poem, the drivel emitted by the monster Maya Angelou, she of the phony Brit accent. So beloved was this tripe, this dimwit paean to the multicultural, that even USA Today, the master of the condensation, the paper that would even condense Jesus’s speech at the Second Coming, actually reprinted this junk in full. The Rock, The River, The Tree, the Jew, the Sioux, the Cherokee, well you get the idea.

The Pome reminded me strongly of the Commie Ballad for Americans, put out during the Communism-is-Twentieth-Century-Americanism period of World War II, sung by Paul Robeson in his most portentous and stentorian tones. The Ballad celebrated every conceivable occupation and group: the worker, the farmer, the teacher, the sailor, etc., all groups but one that was carefully omitted: the businessman. The difference between the Reds of that more innocent era and of today is that workers and blacks were about the only two Oppressed Groups they needed to include. But now, of course, Maya had to list dozens: the Jew, the Sioux, etc., all except, as Mona Charen pointed out, the British who actually founded America and gave it its ideals and institutions. Where were the Brits?

And that cretinous “Good morning” with which Maya ended the pome! When Ronald Reagan talked of “morning in America,” he was ridiculed by the sophisticates, but compared to Maya, Ronnie was a veritable bard. But worse than Maya were her legion of groupies. The usually plonky black columnist Barbara Reynolds waved rhapsodic: about the “uplifted spirit,” the “outstretched hand.” Reynolds’s citations about “looking like America” were oddly one-sided: Ray Charles, Whoopie Goldberg, and Marilyn Home. But the toperoo for her, of course, was Maya: “her dignity, her scholarship (sic), her sharing of life” blah blah. And she wound up, burbling about an America where we “can face daylight and, in the ‘poet’ Angelou’s words, say, ‘Good morning.’”

But Miss Reynolds was topped by Neil Simon, who virtually swooned with delight. Maya Angelou’s poem, said Simon, “just swept me away.” “That last line—’Good morning’—I could hardly contain myself.”

Yecchh! How can we go on? And it was all topped by black actress Cicely Tyson, who I guess summed up the Clintonian reaction to The Pome: “God speaks, and will continue to speak, through Dr. Maya Angelou.” Well, that settles that. But what is this “Doctor” nonsense? Isn’t “Doctor King” enough?

The only line I could think of worthy enough to counter this chorus of “Good Mornings” was the great line from Bela Lugosi’s Dracula: “GoodBYE!”

Look as I might, I could find only two bits of surcease in this ocean of Inaugural swill. One was Bob Dole’s statement a bit before. Dole was marvelously prophetic even though of course he had to retract and apologize almost immediately: “Bill Clinton’s honeymoon will be as short as that of the Bride of Lammermoor (who of course killed her husband on their wedding night).”

The other refreshing note was the response to the Inaugural festivities by humorist Fran Lebowitz. Even though Miss Lebowitz is a left-liberal, and voted for Clinton, the great thing about her is that she embodies the spirit of the true New Yorker: the man or woman who works at night, rarely see the day, NEVER “works out,” and hates cant, pretension, and New Age psychobabble with every fibre of his or her being. Miss Lebowitz pronounced herself, in an interview in the New York Times (Jan. 19), “out of my mind, on a new planet of fury,” as she sat watching the inaugural on TV in her Manhattan apartment, watching what she called the televised “Hopi/Cherokee/Hispanic/African–American/college student festival of ring-a-ding-ding-a-long.” Miss Lebowitz perceptively dubbed the entire gang “the religious left.” And while the ditzy Lauren BacalL was so “thrilled by the generosity” of Al Gore and Hillary that she now has “a sense of hope,” and has decided to stay in the U.S. instead of emigrating to Europe (lucky us!), Miss Lebowitz’s reaction was very different. She commented: “If you’re switching back and forth between the inaugural and the (Iraq) war, you think, where would I rather be less? And find yourself thinking, well, it’s not that bad in Baghdad. They didn’t hit the targets.”

As we slog our way through the horror of the inaugural, the Big Question keeps popping up. “Is it too late? Are the American people too debased to bounce back? Or will there be a mighty backlash, as the American masses—sound at the core—storm their way back to sanity and health?” The returns are not yet in, but I am enough of an optimist to believe that Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Justice will eventually triumph.

IS CLINTON A BASTARD?

September 1993

We instinctively knew it all along, but now it looks like it’s confirmed: our beloved president, William Jefferson Blythe IV Clinton, is indeed a bastard. It turns out that old rapscallion Bill Jeff Blythe III was still married to Wanetta Alexander when he allegedly tied the knot to Virginia Cassidy, who bears the enormous weight of historical guilt for giving birth to that Creep in the White House.

But if Bill Jeff III was married when he hitched up with Ginny, this makes him a bigamist, and it makes that Man in the White House a bastard.

Here’s some grist for the office betting pool: when will the next half-brother/half-sister of Bill Jeff IV turn up? Talk about “traveling salesman stereotypes!”

How many Triple R readers don’t know how many siblings they have? Is this a Jukes family in the White House, or what?

Do we want a bastard in the White House? Impeach Clinton!

CLINTONIAN UGLY

May 1994

I have to face it: my loathing of the Clintons and their administration is so intense that it has become absolute, unbounded, almost cosmic in its grandeur. As Clinton’s fortunes have gone on a continuing emotional rollercoaster, mine have been exactly inverse; when he’s up, I’m down, and vice versa. Whenever he takes a nose dive, to quote from the late Ben Hecht in a very different context, I make a little holiday in my heart.

Not that I’ve been a great fan of any of our Imperial Presidents. But looking back, in each one of their administrations there has been something, some aspect, that has been, if not a redeeming feature, at least some break in the overall miasma of evil. I detested Harry Truman, but for a year he had a Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, who was a maverick and a great guy, a real budget-cutter and an isolationist, the last of the breed in that office. Jimmy Carter was a disaster, but he did manage (courtesy of economist Alfred E. Kahn) to push through deregulation of oil and gas, trucking, and abolition of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Jerry Ford was no bargain, but he didn’t do anything catastrophic, and his klutziness in banging into things was rather endearing. The only previous President in my lifetime whom I find as consistently detestable as Bill and Hillary was Franklin and Eleanor. Things, though, were a little different, since I was young in most of the Roosevelt Era, so my full appreciation of FDR’s total evil came a bit after he had passed over to his just reward. After long contemplation, I finally came up with one policy of FDR’s I can agree with: his refusal to be stampeded by the left into intervening on the side of the Reds in the Spanish Civil War. Against sixteen years of un-relieved Rooseveltian horror, it’s not much to put in the balance, but at least it’s something, and the people of Spain can be thankful they were spared the dreadful evil of Communist rule.

But in contemplating the year and a half or so of Clintonian rule, I can’t think of one feature of the regime which I can even contemplate with calm indifference, let alone agree with. Every Clintonian policy in every area has been execrable. But not just the policy; there is the entire style of the administration, what the Marxists refer to as its “style of work”: it’s one abomination after another. Think of it: the demonic energy of Clinton and his young punk advisers, sitting up late in the White House, in and out of each other’s offices, wolfing down Big Macs and planning how to run our lives. Clinton’s incessant babbling, his Everready rabbit “Comeback Kid” persistence; his terribly leftist appointments. I early reached the point where I simply couldn’t stand the sight (or especially the sound) of Slick Willie on TV: those Fatso legs jogging; that unctuous smile; the puffy eyes and nose; that hoarse voice mouthing lies and evasions: the whole bit.

But even I didn’t realize I was missing a key element in my symphony of Clinton-hate. It hit me when I was reading the marvelous article in the April Chronicles by the distinguished Southern literary critic and novelist George Garrett. Garrett points out that each recent president liked to surround himself with certain definite types of people: Truman, down-home laughers and scratchers; Jack Kennedy, Harvard types and “lace-curtain Irish,” etc. “The Clinton pattern?,” he asks. Garrett’s answer: “Ugly. He has surrounded himself with some of the most singularly unattractive people ever collected.”

That’s it, I exclaimed! I’ve never seen such ugly. Clinton promised us he would appoint people who would “look like America.” Look like America? He has surrounded himself with a veritable Freak House, a cornucopia of the grotesque. The collection makes the Addams Family seem like attractive Ken and Barbie Americans.

Think about it: there is Old Prune-Face Warren Christopher; there is the little wispy teenager Stephanopoulos; little Bernie Nussbaum, who looks like one of Satan’s lesser assistants; Dr. Joycelyn Elders with the phony Brit accent; and twisty-faced Mickey Kantor, who might qualify as the ugliest presidential appointee of all time. But the toperoo in the Clintonian stable of deformity is the Gruesome Four, who I offer for the reader’s horrified contemplation: the three hideous midgets—Robert Reich, Donna Shalala, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the latter resembling and talking like nothing so much as a rather small beetle; flanking the six-foot-six Super-Ugly butch geekess, Janet Reno. Ponder those four, looking like genetic mutants of each other. Ugly, ugly!

Now I’m really not asking for much. I’m not asking for pretty, or handsome, in our political leaders. I’m not asking for Ken and Barbie, although they would be like manna from heaven after this diet of Clintonian monstrosities. Just, well, normal. Our leaders shouldn’t “look like America,” whatever that is supposed to mean, they should look like leaders, like successful people in their walks of life. In the looks department, I think back with fondness to the Eisenhower administration.

I wasn’t happy about that administration, but I must say this for them: they looked like leaders are supposed to look: successful, middle-aged, golf-playing businessmen. And Ike’s Secretary of Treasury George Humphrey, not only looked great, he was probably the last good Treasury Secretary: a free-market, budget-cutting type. Yes, yes, I know that looks are less important than the content of policies. But we shouldn’t underrate the aesthetic dimension of our leaders either, especially now that television is inflicting their presence upon all of us, as uninvited guests in our homes. These Clintonian monstrosities are imposing upon all of us what economists call “negative externalities”; their very presence is gravely lowering our “quality of life.”

In short, the Clinton administration has been a horror and a disaster on every level, even the aesthetic.

Impeach Ugly!