Within minutes after President George W. Bush was sworn into office, CNN.com ran this headline: “Clintons Set to Depart Washington After Farewell Ceremony.”
The most relevant and newsworthy story, “Bush Takes Oath of Office as 43rd President,” was listed in much smaller print, much further down the webpage.
In fact, no story reporting on Bush’s inauguration was even listed in CNN’s sidebar “Top Stories” section.
That’s pathetic, but I guess the chronically-leftist editors at CNN just hated to see their “boy” go.
Clinton has gone, however — at least, in the sense that he’s left the White House — formally ending eight of the longest, most scandal-ridden years in U.S. presidential history.
But before he blew out of town, he gave America one last collective smack across the face; he granted pardons to about 140 people — many of whom took the fall for illegal activities perpetrated or, at least, orchestrated by Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.
Yes, yes, I know — outgoing presidents routinely grant pardons to convicted criminals hours before they become private citizens. But 140? And who were some of the convicts the Clinton co-presidency pardoned?
According to CNN:
- “Susan McDougal, a former real estate business partner of the Clintons. She was sentenced in 1996 and released from prison in 1998. She was convicted of four felonies related to a fraudulent $300,000 federally backed loan that she and her husband, James McDougal, never repaid.”
- “Henry Cisneros, who served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development during Clinton’s first term in office. He was convicted of making false statements to FBI agents conducting a background investigation of him when he was nominated to the Cabinet post in 1993. They included misleading investigators about cash payments he made to a former mistress.”
- “Former CIA Director John Deutch. The one-time spy chief and top Pentagon official was facing criminal charges in connection with his mishandling of national secrets on a home computer.”
- “Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old newspaper heiress who made headlines in 1974 after she was kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). She was later photographed, machinegun in hand, helping the SLA in a bank robbery attempt. Although Hearst would later maintain she was brainwashed, she was convicted and sentenced to seven years in jail for the robbery. President Carter commuted the sentence after she served two years.”
- “Roger Clinton, who was convicted of drug-related charges in the 1980s. He was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty in 1985 to conspiring to distribute cocaine. He cooperated with authorities and testified against other drug defendants.” And lest we forget, “Rog” was, at one time, caught on surveillance tape telling a federal drug agent posing as a dealer that he had to buy some extra cocaine “because my brother (that would be Bill Clinton) has a nose like a vacuum cleaner.”
All in all, this list reads like a “Who’s who” of losers, miscreants, shirkers and scumbags. All in all, they also represent the true “legacy” of the Clinton co-presidency: lawlessness. That he even had so many of his own administration officials to pardon should tell us all something.
They say you can often be judged by the company you keep. If that’s true, then the Clintons could not have kept worse company (or vice versa for those pardoned).
I never believed Clinton would simply fade from the scene — he gave two speeches the day he left Washington, D.C. — but this reprehensible last act by a reprehensible man who habitually undermined, marginalized and insulted traditional American values and the rule of law went beyond even my worst and cynical expectations.
It leads me to believe those who say Clinton will be around in the future, aided and abetted by his buddies in the press, and that he will not refrain from slapping our faces again in the future. He seems to like that, for some perverse reason.
Nevertheless, there is one way to mitigate his damaging effects.
Calling on the press to ignore him is like calling on Barbra Streisand to support oil exploration or Rosie O’Donnell to pass out free semi-automatic rifles on her talk show. They won’t do that; anytime Clinton slimes back to the surface, they’ll be there with giddy groupies cleverly disguised as impartial reporters to cover his every word, his every statement, as though they still mattered.
But we can ignore Clinton — and should. He hates that worse than anything.
Short of publicly renouncing the whole of his awful presidency (don’t hold your breath), there is little to nothing Clinton could say from here on out that is relevant, important, or noteworthy.
Despite the wall-to-wall coverage he’ll get whenever he does emerge, listening to his blather is still an option in this country.
I will choose to turn the channel or pick a different newspaper.
