Q: Let's switch to another one of your friends, Mr. Clinton. Do you find yourself a little
uncomfortable being in bed with all those ``conservative right-wingers'' who hated Clinton so?

A: I was appalled at the way that the conservative movement was so lenient on Clinton....
The right - conservative America - completely failed. They showed no guts, no courage, no principle at all
in trying to get Clinton. The only thing they did, by their stupidity, was give a lot of idiotic liberals
the impression there was a right-wing coup under way ... .

Q: What about the left?

A: The failure of the right is nothing as compared to the failure of the left, which actually supported him,
and said that he had done these things, but that it didn't matter - and was even praiseworthy.

For once, they liked to be on the right side of the opinion polls, which they aren't always.
To use these polls as the reason why having a crook in the White House - a real serious crook,
a rapist, a war criminal, a perjurer, a thief - was no big deal.
Unbelievable.

Q: So Clinton was worse than other presidents? He was an extra-specially craven abuser of power?

A: Well, we're talking very high standards here. I've just been revisiting the Nixon-Kissinger regime.
No, I don't think it was as unvarnishedly wicked as the Nixon-Kissinger regime, partly because Clinton is,
as well as everything else, a complete mediocrity and almost a nonentity.

He had no real political ambitions beyond being in power. So he never dared, unless it involved his own interests,
to do anything dangerous or even interesting. His crimes, as a result, seem smaller, because they are to do with
the fact that though he is a great, gross crook, he is a very petty one.
 

Q: You've said that your experience with eight years of Clintonism and its seamier side has
changed your politics.  Are you still a recovering socialist?

A: (laughs) That actually wouldn't be a very bad description of me in some ways. At least it still has the honorable
name in the title. That's certainly one of the kinds of socialist I am.

The truth of the matter is that my own magazine, The Nation, most of the people on the left who I knew,
organizations like the National Organization for Women, the NAACP, People for the American Way -
people who I had thought of not as heroic, but let's say not indecent influences in Washington - all of them
- became complete lying servants of power without turning a hair.

It's quite impossible for me to think of those people in the same way ever again. I just can't. Some people
might say that was naive of me, but to me, the speed and extent of it was pretty amazing.

Q: Has this caused you readjust your thinking?

A: No. I was in favor of the election of George Bush in 1992, because I saw Clinton coming.
Ever since from the New Hampshire primary onwards, I thought we were dealing with a person who was
actually monstrous as an individual. Not just sleazy, or cheap, or shifty, but a monster... snuffing a mentally
disabled black guy in Arkansas to make himself look tough during the New Hampshire primary
in order to help him lie about Jennifer Flowers.

So a psychopathic connection between sex and death, same as repeated in his bombing of Sudan over
Monica Lewinsky. I really did think we were dealing with a psycho. So I was in favor completely of
re-electing Bush in 1992, and I said the same about voting for Dole in 1996.
So it's not very new for me to find myself in Republican company.

Q: What is next for you? Another book about the Clintons to hold all the new stuff?

A: I decided I wouldn't rub it in. My publishers wanted to reissue my book, but I said, "No, people won't need me
to add in the new stuff. They'll take the new stuff as confirmation that we were right the first time."

I don't think any more needs to be added. Everything that they said they weren't was believed. All the lies that
they told that were believed while they were in office have now been found to be the lies that they were.

It doesn't impress me that people have deserted them when they're out of power. That, I find, is the final
disgrace of the American liberals: That they didn't turn until he lost his power of patronage.