About the same time the anti-abortion fanatics were defacing Dave Letterman’s program with their “Life: What A Wonderful Choice” issue ads, their foot soldiers in the field were busy bombing clinic and shooting at doctors — and patients. A spate of clinic shootings and bombings around mid-1995ish went largely unremarked on by President Bill, as I recall, as Mr. Bill may have been busy trying to provoke Iraq and “reform” welfare (as we know it).
With President Bubba ensconced in the Oval Office, we saw a quickly-established pattern of failure in domestic policy initiatives followed by dick-wiggling and small-scale military intervention overseas — or some bad-assed “criminal justice” action at home — in an effort to appear “Presidential”. This was especially noticeable in the areas of economic stimulus and the last laughable attempt at health care “reform”.
“Economic Stimulus”, medium-res jpg image, 436k; “Health Care Reform”, medium-res jpg image, 492k; “Housing and Education”, medium-res jpg image, 488k; “Reinventing Government”, medium-res jpg image, 428k; “Job-Creation Program”, medium-res jpg image, 516k; “Low-Income Housing Program”, medium-res jpg image, 464k
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Right there it was, smack dab on the front of the Washington Post, this Major, this UN military mission flack, spewing what had to be one of the most twisted, most spectacularly weird and otherworldly excuses ever made for something like spraying unarmed protesters in the streets with machine-gun fire from helicopters and President Bubba, from all reports at the time, being totally OK with that.
One of my friends in one of the crews we had out with this piece tells an interesting story: that night, while saturating Dupont Circle and vicinity with this one, my friend’s crew is beseiged by five or six young College Democrat types whining, “It’s not Bill’s fault!”… sort of a precursor to Chris “Leave Britney Alone!” Crocker at least nine years pre-YouTube. Yeah, that’s right; my pal and his crew were harassed by Liberals for putting up anti-war posters.
Well, here we were maybe a year and a half since the big “victory” parade we gave ourselves, and Daddy Bush’s approval numbers were circling the drain two months before the “election”. Not being able to figure out how a bar-code reader worked, right there on TV in front of everybody and their cat, certainly hadn’t helped matters any. So, there was only one thing for Daddy Bush to do, and that’s — you guessed it, gin up another war scare with a pretext so flimsy that I can’t even remember what it was. Get everybody’s patriotic hard-ons working again, and they’ll forget about the economy, and the looming North American Free Trade Agreement… and the fact that their President was such a sheltered preppie that he never even had the chance to see how a bar-code scanner at the frickin’ supermarket works.
A few mornings after our crews had hit the streets with this one, a scattering of them across Capitol Hill started showing up with a note stuck over them addressed to the local GOP contingents — that is, the Hill’s resident population of beer-guzzling interns working for GOP representatives and Senators — from the local Democratic contingent of young beer-guzzlers, apologizing in the most profusely craven and abject manner for the tasteless cartoon being displayed on Capitol Hill, mere weeks before a major Presidential “election”, implying that Daddy Bush was instigating a war scare to rustle up some votes. Oh, p’shaw. A war scare to win an election? Oh, tut-tut, it is to laugh.
Anyway, said young Democratic partisan beer-guzzling youth ended by swearing all up and down that it was the work of a lone nut — admittedly, half true — and not that of the Democratic Party, which goes without saying as even back then, the Democratic Party was one of the most dickless, craven outfits ever to foul the modern American political stage and could never, ever in its wildest dreams, ever summon up the cajones to publicly suggest that a sitting GOP President — a scheming, lying, conniving, former CIA Director, f’cripesake — would actually whip up a phony war threat in order to win an election.
As we were to find out about a year later, President Bill could give us all a clinic in how that kind of behavior is done right.
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