http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshireprint021501.html
Mr. Derbyshire is a NR contributing editor
(and a smarmy cock-sucker)
February 15, 2001 10:10 a.m.
A specter is haunting America — the specter
of Clintonism. Yes, the man is gone, off to a lifetime of golfing at all-white
clubs, biting his lip in the pulpits of
black churches while the hallelujahs soar, goosing waitresses, slithering
in and out of
shady business deals, being collared by
showbiz bores at Barbra Streisand's parties, and defending himself in court.
And
yes, his lady has no future beyond the
U.S. Senate. The people of New York, trapped in their little Stalinist
time-warp, still
fretting about why that nice Mr. Adlai
Stevenson didn't get in in '52 (my explanation: WE NEED ADLAI BADLY! was
the
worst campaign slogan ever) will probably
go on voting for her until, like Gagoola the hag in King Solomon's Mines,
"She
has lived so long that none can remember
when she was not old, and always she it is who has trained the witch hunters,
and
made the land evil in the sight of the
heavens above." But given her far-left paper trail and her amazing capacity
to make
people detest her where'er she treads,
Hillary's maxed out: She has no real future.
Yet still the presence of that specter
can be felt, an icy wind blowing to us from the unseeable future, disturbing
our sleep,
arresting us in the midst of our daily
tasks, chilling and warning us. Bill and Hill are history, but Clintonism
may yet rise again,
like Glenn Close from that bathtub. For,
ladies and gentlemen, the tworch has been paaahssed to a noooh genewation
of
Clintons. On February 27th, Chelsea Clinton
will turn 21.
At this point I had better make a confession.
It's a bad one, I know it.
It is low, contemptible and — yes! — mean-spirited.
It may very well place me beyond the pale
of civilized society.
I don't care. Truth will out, I will be
heard.
Brace yourself: I hate Chelsea Clinton.
I admit it's not easy to justify my loathing
of this person. I can pick out causes, but none of them is one hundred
per cent
rational. As an Englishmen, I naturally
start from a base of resentment against anyone with perfect dentition.
This whole area
is mildly radioactive for me right now,
though, having just dug myself out (metaphorically speaking) from under
a heap of
e-mails I got in reaction to my
"double-bagger" piece the other day. So let's leave the young lady's
looks altogether out of it.
I am myself, as numerous correspondents
felt moved to observe, no oil painting. (Note to webmaster: Whose damn
fool
idea was it to put our photographs on
the site?)
Nor does Chelsea have much of a track record
to scrutinize. How could she have? There are some pretty clear indicators,
which I shall get to in a moment; but
she has not looted the White House, lied under oath, bombed an aspirin
factory in
Africa to get her personal legal problems
off the front pages, raped anybody, used public employees to pimp for her,
sold
the Department of Defense to the Chinese
Communist Party for cold cash, taken a fat bribe dressed up as a "commodities
trade," or written a book arguing that
parents cannot be trusted to raise their children. I note, however, that
she doesn't
deserve any credit for not having done
these things; she just hasn't had time yet.
So what's my beef? Well, first there is
the Willie Mufferson factor. You may recall that Tom Sawyer had a schoolmate
named Willie Mufferson, the town's Model
Boy.
He always brought his mother to church, and was the pride of all the matrons.
The boys all hated him, he was
so good. And besides, he had been "thrown up to them" so much. His white
handkerchief was hanging out of
his pocket behind, as usual on Sundays — accidentally. Tom had no handkerchief,
and he looked upon boys
who had, as snobs.
Who, in current public life, has been "thrown
up to us" so much as Chelsea? As originally presented to us in the 1992
campaign, she was a shy pre-teen whose
parents were determined to keep her out of the public eye. This lasted
until the
until the focus groups started reporting
that the public saw the Clintons as a cold, self-obsessed power couple
(imagine!), at
which point People magazine was called
in for a photo-shoot of Hillary and Chelsea in a hammock. Fair enough;
and once
they had got the White House, Chelsea
was indeed kept out of view for the first five years or so of the Clinton
presidency.
Then the gush started.
For one thing, Chelsea had now reached
the age at which it is acceptable to pass public comment on a woman's physical
appearance. I'm not going there myself,
for reasons I have already made clear, but by 1997 we had had a slew of
feature
stories about how Chelsea had "blossomed"
into a "beautiful" and "poised" young woman. ("Poised" is one of those
words
that are inescapable in this context,
but appear practically nowhere else — rather like the special language,
incomprehensible to commoners, by which
Japanese emperors had to be addressed.) Well, fa-di-la. If my parents had
had
as much money as hers have — by stealing
it, never let it be forgotten, or by bribing and lying their way into well-paid
public
offices — I'd be pretty damn "poised,"
too. Class envy? Mmm, not altogether. Sure, my parents lived in public
housing (the
other kind, not executive mansions), but
I don't recall that they stole things, or lied under oath, or raped anybody.
And then there was the Lewinsky scandal,
impeachment, and that famous shot of the three Clintons walking to the
helicopter, Chelsea in the middle, holding
hands with her parents. The buzz at the time was that Chelsea did it for
Mom; was
furious with Dad but was begged by Hillary
— presumably to protect her "political viability" — to stage the whole
phony
performance. The public went Aaaaaah!
I had a different take on it. Chelsea was 18 at this point, coming on 19,
certainly
old enough to make decisions. (Hey, Henry
the Fifth was governing Wales at 16.) This was the point at which she decided
to sign on to the Great Clinton Project.
Which is, has always been, and forever will be, to enrich the family from
the public
fisc, and to lie, bomb, bribe, and intimidate
your way out of trouble when necessary. At that point my hatred of Chelsea
found its feet.
Now, you may say: Come on, Derb, the girl
was just being loyal to her folks. What would you have her do — publicly
denounce them, like some Stalinist brat?
No — though I think a really well-"poised" young lady might very well have
said:
"Dad, I'm with you. You're my Dad, and
I'll love and support you any decent way I can. But the right thing at
this point is
for you to resign the presidency, because
you have done things a president ought not do. I will not do anything that
helps
you stay president." Look, if my Dad was
a Mafioso, I might indeed be loyal to him, and defend him, and help keep
him out
of jail. But then, any decent person would
hate me as much as he hated my Dad, and rightly so. I would be an accessory
to
his crimes, certainly in morality, if
not in law.
But this is all rationalization. More than
anything, I admit, I hate Chelsea because she is a Clinton. Not just genetically
a
Clinton, but in spirit and habit and manner.
The evidence for this is now, I think, sufficient to indict.
Item: Last Christmas Eve, the Clintons
attended Midnight Holy Communion at the National Cathedral in Washington.
Chelsea was the first Clinton to show
up…seven minutes into the introit! Mom and Dad were even later, of course.
But why
did Chelsea have to be late at all? To
Holy Communion! It's just so…Clintonian, the utter lack of regard for other
people.
If you are a Clinton, other people don't
exist, except for the few seconds they are handing over money to you or…well,
you
know.
Item: At the Middle East peace talks in
Camp David last year, Chelsea took dinner with her father and Ehud Barak,
and so
monopolized the conversation, the Israelis
are said to have been offended. Excuse me, but what the hell is Chelsea
doing
inserting herself into extremely delicate
diplomatic negotiations? What position does she hold in the diplomatic
corps? Who
appointed her? We are told that Chelsea
is by far the most traveled presidential offspring in history. On whose
tab? To what
purpose? Did she turn down any of these
junkets? Of course not. Again, it's so Clintonian — the sense of entitlement,
of
sneering, lofty indifference to the fact
that this money I am spending has been ripped from the pockets of hard-working
Americans, most of them much poorer than
me, by force of law. The apple does not fall far from the tree.
Item: When Chelsea went off to Stanford,
we were told that she planned to study to become a pediatric cardiologist.
How
noble! — to give over one's life to curing
the heart problems of little kiddies! Yeah, right. A Clinton, giving over
her life for
anything at all other than…herself. Now
that there is no need for spin, we hear that her next stop is at Oxford
University to
study economics. That's about m-o-n-e-y.
Much more interesting than those damn kids and their stupid messed-up hearts.
Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint;
and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot
be
ignored. All the great despotisms of the
past — I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew
how to deal
with potential trouble — recognized that
the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's
penal code
it was a crime to be the wife or child
of an "enemy of the people". The Nazis used the same principle, which they
called
Sippenhaft, "clan liability". In Imperial
China, enemies of the state were punished "to the ninth degree": that is,
everyone in
the offender's own generation would be
killed, and everyone related via four generations up, to the
great-great-grandparents, and four generations
down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed. (This sounds
complicated, but in practice what usually
happened was that a battalion of soldiers was sent to the offender's home
town,
where they killed everyone they could
find, on the principle neca eos omnes, deus suos agnoscet — "let God sort
'em
out".)
We don't, of course, institutionalize such
principles in our society, and a good thing too. Our humanity and forbearance,
however, has a cost. The cost is, that
the vile genetic inheritance of Bill and Hillary Clinton may live on to
plague us in the
future. It isn't over, folks. Dr. Nancy
Snyderman, a "friend of the family" (how much money did she give them?)
is quoted as
saying that Chelsea shows every sign of
following her parents into politics. "She's been bred for it," avers Dr.
Snyderman.
Be afraid: be very afraid.