Why they defend Clinton

Think of the all the core principles that Clinton defenders have
sacrificed to defend the disgraced White House. There was the ironclad
moral
condemnation of sexual harassment. Gone. There was their insistence on
“good government,” “public ethics,” and “honesty” in government. All
gone.

Liberals were once suspicious of rampant militarism and called for a
“peace dividend” after the collapse of the Soviet basket case. But
Clinton’s
murderous foreign adventures and proposed ballooning of the military
budget
have forced them to scrap even those supposed principles.

If the pundit class is slavish, the organized special interest groups
that
back Clinton are even more so. For example, Patricia Ireland of NOW felt

she had to admit that the allegations that Clinton is a rapist are
credible and
frightening, but we must not “hound him out of the White House,” since
the
charges “can really go nowhere.”

The media too have tossed out even the pretense of objectivity in
defense
of Clinton. They are allowing what little remains of their credibility
to
be destroyed by permitting Internet sites to scoop them on negative
Clinton
news.

Not even the need for higher ratings has overridden the mainstream
media’s dogged adherence to the Clinton line. They have been more
reliant servants of the ruling regime than Stalin’s party newspapers.
And TV network heads wonder why the public is tuning them out.

What would Bill Clinton have to do for liberals to turn against him?
Nothing would accomplish that, apparently. They will never call into
question the competence of their beloved ruler, no matter how degenerate

and duplicitous he may be.

How can we account for this bizarre behavior? One explanation is that
he
is a Democrat, and a master of feeding the ravenous flock of special
interests
that swarm around him. And what gripes Republicans so much about the
escape artist in the White House is that everyone knows that if Clinton
sprang from the GOP, he would have been drummed out of office a long
time ago.

And yet there is a deeper explanation of their loyalty to Clinton,
one
that speaks to the stability, or rather instability, of the ruling
regime
itself. Both the liberal establishment and Clinton himself know that the
future of big government as we know it rests with the present
administration. Without him, they fear that the veneer of public
consensus for the welfare-warfare state would be stripped away.

To understand this requires some background. The New Deal state
erected in depression and wartime has always been alien to the American
ideal, which was that liberty, not government, should be the central
organizational principle of society. The purpose of the American project
was to demonstrate that the Old World’s focus on national destiny was
unnecessary and oppressive; society can manage itself so long as
government does not intrude.

A long series of needless wars and crises, beginning in 1861 with
Lincoln’s invasion of the South and continuing through the end of the
cold war in 1989, conspired to turn the sweet land of liberty into
history’s biggest
imperial power. And the New Deal planning state that Clinton
represents — with all its arrogant claims to omnicompetence and all its
imperious ambitions — stands at the center of that betrayal of the
American ideal.

After each war and each economic crisis, there was a partial decline
in
state power, if never to the prewar or precrisis level. The public
demanded, in the famous slogan of Warren G. Harding, a “return to
normalcy.” And what is normalcy? Government recedes; individual liberty
increases; taxes fall; public affairs are conducted at a local, not a
national, level; peace and trade prevail internationally.

But normalcy is not what the power elites desire. To stay in power
and to
continue getting their share of the loot requires another crisis. If you

understand that, you understand much about why the U.S. entered the
world
wars and why our allies in the second one became our enemies in such
short
order. And you understand why Clinton continues the search for crises at

home and abroad.

Why must we surrender our liberty and property to a ruling regime
that
cannot be trusted? The rationale changes by the day. There was a health
care crisis four years ago, and today we are told there is critical need
for
every manner of middle-class welfare, lest people suffer and starve. In
international politics, the first Clinton term claimed a crisis in
Somalia,
Iraq, and Haiti, and in the second term, we hear about Kosovo, Turkey,
and
Iraq (again!).

The purpose is to discover some rationale for the power elite to
answer
negatively the abiding American question: Isn’t it time for the
government
to leave us alone? But the tricks do not work like they used to. The
regime
is fragile and frail. It is losing legitimacy on all fronts. The process

began sometime in the mid-1960s, accelerated in the ensuing decades, and

has been the central theme of American life since the Soviet
disintegration.

The mainstream media are in meltdown, and in the process of being
replaced by new media like WorldNetDaily. Legal disputes are
increasingly handled by private courts. The movement to pull out of the
public schools is gaining steam by the day. New technologies make
capital more mobile than ever, which allows entrepreneurs to dart around
regulations.

Contempt for government is increasing at every level of society.
Lifetime
civil servants are finding more rewarding work in private markets. The
military cannot retain pilots and cannot recruit the young. Government
programs fail to keep up with the rewards of private-sector life. No
young
person with talent aspires to be on the federal payroll.

The panic of the establishment is evident. Every proposed major
expansion of government in the last decade has fallen flat. Public
intellectuals
concoct indoctrination programs to convince us of the merit of civic
participation, as fewer people vote every year. The New York Times
pointed
out recently that the food stamp program is losing clients — and spun
it as
bad news!

The media’s trumpeting of spurious polls cannot hide this fact: the
regime
fears for its very life. That is why Washington, D.C., and its outposts
in
the captive 50 states, look like armed camps. The ruling elites, lacking
an
intellectual foundation for its interventionist apparatus, rule by fear
and
intimidation even while they live in fear of the backlash and are
intimidated by public resistance. Clearly, Bill Clinton, dishonest
scoundrel that he is, is the last hope that this police-state liberalism
has.

It is for this reason that the liberals will defend him until the day
he
leaves office. He is the only standard-bearer the regime has, and
without
him, they think, the very foundation of the interventionist state might
shake. When they defend Clinton’s behavior, they are really defending
the
last days of welfare-warfare state.

In the end, it won’t help. No system of government can last over the
long
term if the people have lost faith in the ideological structure that
undergirds it. We will have a return to normalcy and freedom from D.C.
control, and when it happens, today’s defenders of the ruling regime
will
be exposed for what they are: a small group of ideologues willing to
tell any
lie to pump a few last breaths into a dying system of oppression.