The following editorial was featured on the Editorial Page of the Arkansas-Democrat Gazette , July 30, 2002.
Now we all know where William Jefferson Clinton, suspended Esq., plans to get the money to pay all those legal bills he ran up during the late unpleasantness in Washington.
No, he isn't about to use up the fat fees he collects for speaking around the world - $9.2 million just last year. Last we checked, he was getting between $75,000 and $350,000 a pop.
Nor does Bill Clinton propose to touch his book advance (which has been estimated at between $10 million and $12 million) for what will surely be the most widely unread presidential memoir in American history. Why spend his own money when he can dip into the U.S. Treasury?
That's right. Slick Willie proposed to have his legal bills paid by:
You.
Mr. and Ms. American Taxpayer.
Through his lawyer, who stands to collect a goodly share of those fees himself, the ever impeachable Mr. Clinton has asked a court to direct the U.S. government to pay off the squadrons of attorneys it took to get him off the hook.
Gives you a nice warm feeling, doesn't it? Yes, now you, too, can pay off Bill Clinton's lawyers.
How is that possible? Because Slick Willie is taking advantage of a law designed to protect those who were drawn into the independent counsel's investigation of his presidential circle even though they were never indicted or censured for anything. For example, bystanders like Mack McLarty, who was bound to be questioned when he started hanging out with all that bad company, i.e., the Clinton administration.
A similar law was passed to help poor Billy Dale, the hapless head of the White House Travel Office whose job, along with everybody else's in that office, Hillary Clinton wanted for her own people. To the victors belong the spoils and all that. Which is fine, or at least acceptable by the usual standards of patronage politics. Except that it wasn't enough just to fire Billy Dale; he also had to be humiliated, smeared and then prosecuted on trumped-up charges. Talk about sheer, preening, self-righteous meanness. Once the case got to the jury, Billy Dale was of course promptly acquitted. But by then the cost of his defense had wiped out the poor guy's life savings.
Now comes William Jefferson Clinton, and he wants the pupblic to pay his costs, too, even though he was impeached - the equivalent of being indicted. As we were minded again and again during his trial in the U.S. Senate. Cited for civil contempt, he avoided a criminal indictment by a classic plea bargain: He admitted to testifying falsely under oath - which is as close as you can come to confessing perjury without confessing. And now, after all this, he wants the rest of us to pay for all the distinguished lawheads who got him off. There is a word to describe this kind of brass, moxie, nerve, chutzpah, and greed: boundless.
Yet it's hard to be outraged at this latest caper of Bill Clinton's because it's just what you would expect of him. What in others might be outrageous, is in Bill Clinton only standard operating procedure.
Different presidents respond differently to disgrace: Richard Nixon, hopelessly puritanical, resigned rather than face impeachment, and then spent the next 20 years rehabilitating himself. Bill Clinton has responded by asking the American people to pay his bills.
Whatever you think of that request, it's hard to resist a certain admiration for the sheer, unadulterated nerviness of it. You gotta hand it to the rascal. He keeps setting new records for shamelessness.
We can now all forget any faint hope that, once he was out of the White House and dog house, our prodigal son would turn into some kind of Jimmy Carter in his post-presidential years, traveling the country building houses for the poor. Or settle down in the role of nonpartisan elder statesman a la Gerald Ford.
Fuhgeddaboutit. In or out of office, Bill Clinton remains Bill Clinton. The more he changes, the more he doesn't.
The years have passed, and by now our boy president has become our boy ex-president. He is still the perpetual adolescent, forever striding up Fool's Hill knowing he'll get away with it. And why not? Haven't we let him? He may get investigated, but it's always others who take the rap.
What a show. The effrontery of it never stops. Now we're suposed to take Bill Clinton for a victim of the Clinton Scandals rather than their central figure. If there were any justice in the world, he would be arrested for imitating an innocent bystander.
It was said of Teddy Roosevelt by the British ambassador at the time, in perhaps the most concise and accurate summary of that remarkable personality, "You must always remember that the president is about 6."
When it comes to Bill Clinton, we must always remember that he's about 17 - with the same sure confidence that, whatever happens, somebody else will pay for it. And this time, folks, he's nominated you, his fellow Americans.
We haven't been quite so honored since David Pryor was urging everybody to contribute to the Clinton Defense Fund.
Now it's no longer voluntary. If Slick Willie has his way in court, we'll all get to chip in via the U.S. government.
Shuckins
