Why Bill Clinton must stay the course -- for us.

Thursday, September 10th, 1998 -- WASHINGTON -- As the dark and unanticipated motorcade wound its way up Constitution Avenue and into the Capitol drive yesterday, one was reminded of Hitler's minions and the dozen or so Mercedes Benzes gliding up to the Reichstag in Berlin -- a sad, stately relic of the Weimar Republic.

Fittingly -- and ghostly invisible -- at the wheel of the lead black van carrying 36 file boxes of one-sided, two-copy, so-called "evidence" against President William Jefferson Clinton was Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Once a respected scholar and jurist, Starr is now destined to be remembered -- just as Adolf Eichmann on trial in Israel decades after Auschwitz -- only as a man with too much power, power he had once been critical of bestowing, and who, through political avarice, sought to murder a president and the presidency -- as surely as if he had held a gun to Bill Clinton's head.

Starr, like Hitler toward his end, hid in his lair, not at the Capitol, to deliver his bullet -- preferring instead to send his Goebbels, Mr. Charles Bakaly, to speak for him. The announcement that was made by this lawyer -- graduate of a fourth-rate law school now transformed into a political hack -- was delivered in a stammering and clumsy manner, reflecting the disheveled mind of a man who finds himself totally unprepared for the filth he has helped create. Mr. Starr, he said, was hereby submitting "substantial and credible information that may constitute grounds for impeachment."

We were struck by the word "information" -- a word used this century mostly by the Soviet KGB or the East German STASI secret police. This was not "evidence" but merely "information." What Bakaly was saying, in essence, was that in the eighteen boxes of words untested were $50 million dollars worth of "ifs" and "maybes," "perhapses" and "could-bes" that were sufficient to convict a man without need for a trial by his peers and without cross-examination or witnesses for the defense.

If was fitting that the files were transferred from one ebony vehicle to another, looking like Hearses for Democracy, by uniformed security guards in broad daylight on the tarmac of what was, until 1996, the greatest site of legislative and social deliberation the world has ever known.

The guards themselves were, like low-level Gestapo agents, merely pawns -- family men who loved their children and wives -- two of whom lie freshly fallen defending this seat of nearly unfettered power. They seemed humiliated to be carrying these documents into some padlocked secret chamber deep within the Capitol bowels and place them, perhaps as one places a poorly baked pie, hesitantly on the wooden tables therein.

The transfer from the vans, like the transfer of great literature and other tomes to the infamous book-burning pyres of Nazi Germany, was tragicomical in it's funereal somber. The Republican leadership, supposedly "caught by surprise" by the delivery, couldn't have orchestrated it better -- and orchestrate it you can be certainthey did.

Goering would have been proud.

Here was the near-culmination of years of effort to undo two elections and take back the country for the gaudy rich (not to be confused with the generous, giving well-off). Here was incontrovertible proof that with enough power over enough proud but television-ignorant Americans, a few men could overturn a valid election.

The scene was only a tad less horrifying than had the army of Kenneth Starr pulled up to the White House with tanks and howitzers aimed at the living quarters in a fascista-style coup.

The press were beside themselves with glee.

They forgot, long ago, why this President had been "investigated." They forgot, or pehaps never knew, that the reason was that he and his wife has dared to suggest a universal health care system that would have cost this nation's businesses billions upon billions -- too high a price for greedheads to pay for the care of the weak or the elderly.

No.

This was to be the decade of "taking responsibility for yourself" -- as if everything was fair to begin with, as if everyone played on the same even field. The Republican platform, nothing much more than a weary twelve-step program for a quarter-billion people --but this time based on the Bible -- and aiming at the unfortunate in some kind of sick "intervention" to "help" them kick the habit of security. Clinton tried to play, but he had no stomach for beating an already hopeless man. It was time to get rid of him, or at least to neutralize him. "Let's see what Ken Starr can do," they said without saying it. "Then we'll decide how best to proceed."

They got lucky. The President was weak with women and had inherited a system of election law that allowed politicians to wage billion dollar campaigns for power. He pushed the envelope in his quest of idealism and to win at all costs. Like the intellectuals of the fifties who explored socialist economics for the general good, Clinton was doomed under the New McCarthyism founded by Newt Gingrich -- himself an admitted manipulator of the system and who himself had sullied his home.

The nation senses this, although they cannot put their finger on the source of their distrust of the right and their hesitance to reject this President.

Now the American people face a difficult and complex problem. Perhaps so complex as to tire them beyond reason and allow them in turn to succumb to what may amount to an assassination of Bill Clinton, and worse -- the end of the Presidency itself as the strongest spokespulpit for democracy and the common man in history.

Will voters allow the party of Nixon and Agnew to destroy the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Turman and Jack Kennedy? And will the media -- now controlled by ten or less greed-filled corporations, join with zeal as the President is sealed in the Tower and beheaded at dawn -- marking, for perhaps decades, the end of social progress, the end of racial tolerance, the end of fair labor practices and the end of social security safety nets in exchange for a mangled share of mismanaged stock portfolios?

You bet they will.

We've stopped thinking. We only watch MSNBC (which we believe really stands for 'Merica Shall Now Be Conservative). We hear, but we don't listen. We see, but we are blind.

Our Democracy -- this is what's at stake my friends, nothing less! Should the Gingrichian Repubicans have their way, they will be undoing YOUR election. They will be, in the most imperial sense, negating your vote. Should they successully impeach the President, which even they doubt they can do, or force him to resign, which they do not in the least doubt they can do, American Democracy will become a sham.

Our predictions, based on dozens of years of capitol watching from inside and out are these:

1. Before Sunday, these documents, supposedly containing "secret revelations," will be published and available to anyone with a few bucks -- this has already been arranged with the cooperation of the Washington Post, itself a big profiteer on the backs of the Clintons -- and before that the Nixons.

2. As early as this evening, details of the reports will begin emerging -- some true, some not -- complete with "new women" and heretofore undiscussed episodes leading to the "patterns" of abuse Mr. Starr so favors in place of actual fact.

3. Discussions of every detail of the 450 page report on television and radio will be followed by calls for indictment, impeachment, resignation and worse -- cajoled by the acquiescent press.

4.The transcripts of Monica Lewinsky's grand jury testimony will leak within the month -- with no regard for whether her statements to the jury are fact or fantasy.

5.Before the month is out, Mr. Starr will indict small and perhaps larger "players" for perjury and other crimes.

6.The men and women Democrats who relied on Bill Clinton to raise the dollars for them to be elected will turn on him in greater numbers and more openly and aggressively -- not for rightious purpose, but to protect their own political skins.

7.If possible the Republicans will leak information slowly at first and then, ten days from election day, launch a salvo of even more damaging innuendo against the President and Democrat candidates in general.

8.No impeachment proceedings will begin before the November elections.

9.Impeachment proceedings will begin in February of 1999 -- just in time for the start of the normal two-year presidential election cycle.

10.Dick Gephardt will emerge as a strong opponent of Al Gore -- openly and rabidly by the Spring of 1999.

11.Bill Bradley will cement his own Campaign 2000 team by next Summer.

12.Republican leaders will pose as triers of fact, and with the wisdom of Solomon. They will go out of their way to praise the President as they simultaneously and not-so-slyly gore him using an army of good soldiers appearing over and over on cable news networks.

13.The Attorney General will appoint an independent counsel, after the mandatory 90 days, on the issue of President Clinton's cooperation with the DNC on what were supposed to be issue ads in the 1996 campaign -- based largely on the testimony of Dick Morris, "a close Clinton friend."

14.The Attorney General will not appoint an independent counsel on Al Gore's fundraising practices.

15.Some surprise indictments of Republican members of Congress will occur before the Summer of 1999 -- most stemming from illegal campaign finance practices.

16.Indictments of DNC and RNC campaign officials serving between 1991 and 1997 will occur sometime late this year or early next year.

Of course, if President Clinton decides to resign before February, these predictions are invalid -- at least some if them.

But no matter: American commercial politics as we know it is dead. Good men and woman running for office is a thing of the past -- why should they expose themselves to what is occuring now and what is coming? Political campaigns will become as they were thirty years ago. The money will come, as it used to, in brown bags and be untraceable -- and it won't be to pay for ads, but for votes, yours and later the elected's. Only a few men, behind closed doors, will choose who'll run and who won't. The system, more open than any other, will be closed. The country, again, will be run by the few for the few.

History -- which has witnessed this drama repeatedly over 5,000 years -- will gain another sad footnote. A nation once so exuberant to do the right thing instead became caught up in intrigue and powerbrokering so extraordinary and appalling that although it was at its zenith, it was blinded by unbridled lust for control. As always, it begins with the "preachers," the "moralizers," the "blamers" and the "taunters."

And, as always, it ends with the Fascists -- who clutch at control until the bitter and usually violent end, inevitably taking down scores of the innocent with them.

The President surely foresees this scenario. He knows that his resignation might only hasten deliverance of our government to zealots and people of weak mind, weaker ethics, and no conscience. He may, nonetheless, resign, hoping against hope that his act will restore faith in our government and the rule of law. What he should do -- and what was pointed out by the right wing radical columnist William Safire today -- is stay the course.

Mr. President: pay the price. Suffer the humiliation of the human condition for us. Maybe, just maybe, some moderate Republicans will vote their conscience and not their financier's wallets. Perhaps they truly will take their one chance and rise to the occasion -- as even now they pretend to do.

We remember the day the Richard Nixon boarded his helicopter and gave that his signature wave in sorrowful defeat. But do not forget that few Americans that day -- no matter how liberal, no matter how idealistic -- were certain, at that moment, whether we had done the right thing. Later, upon reflection, American once again embraced Richard Nixon, read his books, listened to his counsel and afforded him some semblance of dignity.

Nixon, by all accounts, was an out-and-out felon.

...or was he simply human, and not immune from temptation?

--- The Editors