Bill Clinton to Orrin Hatch:
"Excuse Me, Senator -- Is That My Finger in Your Eye?"
by Mac MacArthur

The President and Bill Lee grin with pride
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16TH, 1997 -- New York (APJP) -- In case you haven't noticed, there's a change at the White House, and it's substantial. The President is fighting back, and we hope to see more following the festive Christmas mood in the Oval Office yesterday as President Bill Clinton, not forgetting old Democrats like me, appointed Bill Lan Lee acting chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Janet Reno, who was there for the announcement, was about to tell "Gentleman Henry" Hyde to forget about his groundless request to expand her Babbitt investigation to include the President as Hyde and his fellow witch-hunters demanded, inasmuch as she yet has no credible evidence that Clinton or Babbitt for that matter nixed an Indian gaming license in exchange for campaign cash donated to the DNC by a rival tribe.

Our own people were thrilled to see the President fighting back on what seems myriad fronts. Now, if he'd move quickly to launch a new and improved health care initiative -- and we think he will -- life was be rosy around the American Politics digs.

1998 promises to a turnabout year for the White House and the Democratic Party where the name of the game will be tit-for-tat.

Doing so will highlight Republican-backed greed and mean-spiritedness which has haunted this nation from the day Clinton beat Bush; Grimness that has paralyzed the GOP controlled congress -- a do-nothing group of men and women more obsessed with personal attacks on the presidency than on serving their constituents.

The mainstream press seems to think that Clinton made an "acting" rather than a "recess" appointment to avoid anger from the Republican leadership, but we suspect that whatever anger was expected among GOPsters is there -- in spades. The anger, however, is not directed at the President, but rather at Orrin Hatch and other loudmouth members of the Republican side who opted to "choose off" the President over an appointee who may be one of the most respected members of the civil rights bar -- on both sides of the aisle.

The President made an acting appointment not our of fear from GOP retaliation and vacant threats of repercussion, but in the good ole Southern tradition of leaving a window open to allow an errant tomcat to get back inside. Face it Orrin, Bill Clinton is a gentleman, and when you learn to stop making decisions based on your warped idea of "fairness" you might be considered on too.

The President believes that Lee will be confirmed by the full Senate eventually, but is prepared to re-appoint, as per the law, every 120 days.

Hatch, who repeats -- over and over -- that he likes and respects Bill Lee so many times that his words became fingernails on a chalkboard, rues the day he started this battle with Clinton. Why? Because the Lee debacle may have been the straw that cracked the camel's back launching an all out counteroffensive of which we've just seen the tip.

Don't make the mistake of including Attorney General Reno in what we're calling the "Counter-offensive Group" inside the Oval Office. She is independent and will stay independent. But, of course it didn't hurt to have her (1) reject GOP demands she appoint a raft of independent counsel for Clinton and Gore; (2) take a vicious beating from the sorry likes of Dan "Cantaloupe Head" Burton and Nuevo Creep Rep. Micah of Florida; and, (3) yesterday; refusal to Republican "requirements" that she expand her Indian casino investigation to the President.

Along with that, witness the remarks of First Lady Hillary Clinton in New York last week where she told the world that the Democrats seem awash in GOP hateful propaganda with few media venues of their own to combat liars and twisters like Rush Limbaugh, Bill Safire, and a host of ultra-right drum beaters who take their orders from RNC headquarters each morning. As an aside, although we may have sources in the White House, we have never contacted, nor been contacted by any quarter of the Administration or the DNC to "spin a story" or "float a balloon" during our history.

Next comes Al Gore's interview where he candidly told the New York Times he hadn't done a single thing wrong he could think of. That story met with all-too-many 'hoo hahs' but was merely the first salvo from the Naval Observatory -- and from the Man himself. Don't think because Al's a nice guy that he'll stand for much more GOP witch hunting in his territory.

Bill Clinton also launched his counter-offensive on more than one front during the past week. First he made a speech attacking the Republican leadership for being "almost pathologically obsessed with personal destruction." Then he appointed Lee, and smiled eye to eye at political extortionists like Hatch & Specter -- the dynamic duo of sleaze.

Arlen Specter - check the hairline.
The President, in cadence-like style, repeatedly referred to Republicans as "mosquitoes" last week.

"How do you put up with mosquitoes in summertime in Arkansas? You just swat them and go on, it's a part of living," he told an Arkansas crowd at Decatur House.

"Sooner or later, some of those people that are trying to tear your guts out and lie about our state are going to have to fess up and admit it. Get over it, the country is in better shape. This is working," he added.

The President labeled the GOP campaign investigation a "calculated, determined effort to use the hearing process and the legal process to force all Democrats... to hire a lawyer every 15 seconds in the hope that we'd never have another penny to spend on campaigns. So, when you go home, and people ask you why you did this, say because they tried to end the two-party system in America by forcing the Democrats to spend all their money," he told the gathering.

Clinton also hit on Malibu Ken Starr and reserved this zinger for wanna-be GOP presidential laughingstock Dan Quayle - He said a friend just sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal editorial page," and added, "it has as much chance of getting published as Dan Quayle does of getting elected President."

Clinton said he won the Democrat nomination because Arkansas friends came to New Hampshire and told primary voters, " 'Don't, one more time, let the kind of negative, hateful, personality-destroying politics that has kept our country back go on, don't do it one more time.' "

A harbinger of what's to come? You bet. This publisher has been carrying that message for more than four years now. We've told our readers that the time will come when the bitter snake of reprisal will turn on men like Fred Thompson and Dan Burton, Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch, and closet conspirators like Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich.

Well, the time has come.

Of course, some Republicans haven't learned Hatch's lesson.

SeNeater Trent Lott lashed out on the Lee appointment saying he didn't believe Lee should be assistant Attorney General because he "advocated racial preferences and timetables." Lott, appealing to the lowest common denominator of American society, hopes his fellow Mississippi red-necks -- who represent the state with the highest rate of illiteracy in America-- will rally to his side claiming they all could have gotten into med school had it not been for racial preferences. Lott also made a wimpy threat to "carefully watch" the action of Lee and the DOJ with regard to racial quotas. Well, that'll be hard since so many Mississippians can't read.

Arlen Specter, the "pie man" from Philadelphia, who stupidly thinks he's a potential candidate for President wasn't more guarded in his comments on Lee written to the President (so he could publish them) Specter wrote in what can only be labeled a blackmail letter, "I'm very much concerned" that it will "poison the water on other important matters which require senatorial concurrence." Specter threatens the President that his move will "seriously jeopardize, if not entirely preclude, judicial confirmations ... In addition, other confirmations may be rejected or held in limbo; and the Senate may reject appropriations for some of your administration's special initiatives."

Smart Arlen. So, you wrote a plain and simple extortion note? Wise. You'd make a great president. And by the way, the only ones you hurt by failing to confirm judges are your own lynch-mob mentality constituents who're packing prisons to the brim with black folk supplying them, the so-called family values people, with recreational drugs.

Don't worry about Bill Lee. He knows how to fight -- and by Marquis of Queensbury rules. His dad was a victim of racists like Lott, Specter and Hatch long ago when he came to the US from China during the depression. Can you imagine what he endured? But Lee made it on his own, attending Yale on a scholarship and spending the next 24 years battling against discrimination in the courts while Mississippians were battling integration with lynch mobs and church burnings.

Lee himself would criticize my characterization of Lott and his pals, but sorry Bill, I just can't pretend that they have some defensible agenda.

They don't.

Reno to Hyde:
"Take a Hike."

Bill Lee
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16TH, 1997 -- New York (APJP) -- Janet Reno, welcoming Bill Lee to the fold yesterday, also told Henry Hyde to take a long walk off a short pier re his demands that she include President Clinton in her investigation into whether to seek an independent prosecutor to examine how Interior Department officials decided to deny a permit for an Indian casino project in Wisconsin.

Reno told Hyde that lobbyists hired by the opposing tribe had mentioned the project to the President and that the President had asked his staff about the status of the project. Some of those staff people later inquired about the issue at Interior.

But Reno added that a President who knows about regulatory matters under review by his cabinet does not a criminal make. If that was the case then Hyde and every congressperson in Washington could be indicted every time they checked up on anything for a constituent.

Reno rebuffed Hyde saying, "Your letter does not identify any alleged conduct by the President or other information that would warrant an inference that the President's unsolicited receipt of information from lobbyists and his subsequent expression of interest in the matter was potentially criminal, or part of any criminal conspiracy."

In short, Put up or shut up.

Bruce Babbitt
Reno continues her investigation of Bruce Babbitt focusing on his correspondence with Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona. She has until February 11th to make up her mind whether to appoint a special prosecutor on that matter.

Reno told Hyde that the she and Justice Department are not "incapable" of arms-length investigations of the White House and are quite capable of investigating the President. The department always has civil and criminal teams working on the same case. She also pointed out that she can, in extreme cases, appoint outside counsel to handle portions of matters.

But Hyde immediately countered her decision and criticized Reno for not opening "a preliminary investigation of the President, saying Reno "continues down a perilous path... I remain convinced that the attorney general has a classic conflict of interest here, one which justifies the appointment of an independent counsel."

In short, Hyde is calling Reno a liar. Will he never learn?

Babbitt is in trouble because there are specific allegations that he lied about the casino decision. In his letter to McCain Babbitt recounted a meeting that he held with Paul Eckstein, a former law partner of Babbitt who represented the tribes seeking the new gaming license. It is the truthfulness of that account that is not under DOJ scrutiny. In the letter Babbitt denies that the White House lobbied Interior or had any impact at all on its decision. But Eckstein said, under oath, that Babbitt had told him about a heavy White House lobbying effort against the new casino project and later told a Senate committee that Babbitt fingered Ickes as wanting a "quick decision" on the matter.

Babbitt claims that he was simply trying to get rid of an annoyingly persistent Eckstein so he invoked Ickes name -- a sure conversation stopper. Adding fuel to the Eckstein fire however is a group of memoranda showing that Ickes's staff discussed the casino project with a top Babbitt aide.

The tribes opposed to the new and rival casino, retained former Democratic fund-raiser Patrick O'Connor, who discussed the casino with President Clinton and White House aide Bruce Lindsey at a 1995 fund-raiser in Minneapolis. Republicans also claim that Lindsey may have called Harold Ickes, then the deputy White House chief of staff. O'Connor also moved to and got the support of then-Democratic Party Chairman Donald Fowler. After the Interior Department rejected the new casino plan, the tribes opposing the casino contributed more than $270,000 to the Democratic Party. The opposing tribes had their own gaming operations in the region.

So, the beat goes on. Republicans, except for Hatch who ate big crow all day Sunday, continue on their own "perilous path" toward electoral destruction. As the polls reveal, America is increasingly bored and angry at a GOP controlled congress with nothing, it seems, better to do than continue it's obsession with the destruction of Bill Clinton - a man who is, on the other hand, admired more and more by the electorate.

Keep it up Republicans, you're digging your own political grave.

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