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COMMENTARY A right-wing conspiracy? You be the judge
NEWS ANALYSIS Unexpected winners likely to be women
IN MEXICO GOP gathering: Forget Clinton, focus on 2000
A special report
YEAR THAT WAS
VICE PRESIDENT
THE GOP
VICTIMS COUNT
THE MEDIA
THE CONGRESS
THE PRECEDENTS
FROM CHAPEL HILL
FROM OXFORD
IN FOCUS
ROBERT A. JORDAN Prior coverage
CLINTON ACQUITTED
THE SENATE
PUBLIC REACTION
CONTINUING PROBE
TRIPP/JONES
THE VOTING
POLL FAVORITE
THE WHITE HOUSE
IN CITY: RELIEF, INDIGNATION
GLOBE EDITORIAL
DEC.19, 1998
BACKGROUND -CHRONOLOGY -WHAT IT MEANS -THE ARTICLES -TERMS GLOSSARY
Full text
Video
NECNEWS.COM
Side-by-side
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COMMENTARY A right-wing conspiracy? You be the judge
By David Nyhan, Globe Columnist, 02/14/99
Article I: Failed (45-55)
Article III: Failed (50-50)
At the anticlimax of this never-consummated sexual dalliance we tote up the damage. Every subsequent president will have to deal with the diminished and devalued presidency. Thanks to the follow-the-headlines-wherever-they-lead gutlessness of various courts and judges afraid to step in the path of the infotainment industry's juggernaut, every future president can be sued while in office on the most trivial of charges.
Some Son-of-Paula-Jones scandal will eventually unhinge some president or some presidency; that 9-0 Supreme Court ruling allowing presidents to be sued is not only daft but dangerous. No president can henceforth accept total loyalty or candor or confidence from his lawyers or bodyguards. We stripped future presidents bare; we'll rue the day we gave the impeachment mob the run of the courthouse.
Republican leaders spent 12 months in a ''collective fog.'' We haven't seen mass self-hypnosis of this scope since Jonestown. The right wing brewed this heady elixir, and the Sun Belt moralists couldn't get enough of the stuff. It was autosuggestion on a vast scale.
So was it the ''vast right-wing conspiracy'' that Hillary claimed? Your answer depends to a considerable degree upon your politics.
In the year of Monicamania that unfolded since Mrs. Clinton's icy allegation, much has transpired. Her husband did what he did, said what he said, somehow kept his day job and his poll ratings while losing much of his personal respect and his personal reputation, which are not the same things. What his family thinks of him, and he of them, is their private business.
But of the ''vast right-wing conspiracy,'' what is one to conclude?
Is it merely a coincidence:
That independent counsel Kenneth Starr hauls down $1 million a year in fees from a law firm representing tobacco interests when Clinton wrought havoc in big tobacco's patch? That Starr's soft landing at Pepperdine Law School is funded by Clinton-hater Richard Mellon Scaife, paymaster to the right-wing scandal machine? That Starr hired a Paula Jones supporter, lawyer Paul Rosenzweig? That Clinton was ambushed in his Paula Jones deposition and grand jury testimony by a suspiciously linked chain involving the duplicitous Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg, a onetime Nixon campaign spy who spoonfed Newsweek and other news outlets like Matt Drudge, the Internet sludge-pot?
That House Republicans rushed to impeachment judgment in December for fear their shrunken majority might choke on removing Clinton? That right-wing mogul Rupert Murdoch, who tried to enrich Newt Gingrich with $4.5 million in book contracts, cranked up his empire to fricassee Clinton at every turn?
That the trio ordered deposed and videotaped by Senate Republicans just happened to include two Jews and a black man, whose words and image, now in the public domain, can be used in Sun Belt campaign commercials?
That Clinton-Gore policies are too green, too tree-huggy, too enviro-friendly for Sun Belt economic interests, stripminers, agri-biz and resource extractors, and the solons who live off their campaign dough? That eight of 10 GOP congressional leaders, and many of the committee chairmen, are from Southern or Western states hostile to Clinton's policies?
That at almost every critical juncture of Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, You-name-it-gate, there were shadowy right-wingers forking over large sums to keep the jackal pack on the hunt? That so many of the lawmakers in thrall to the antiabortion forces were also impeachers? That the dump-Clinton chorus wound up as almost totally partisan, regional, ideological, and even religiously demarked, with the politicized Christian right out front?
If your answer to all of the above is ''yes,'' that all this is merely a coincidence, then you do not believe with Hillary and millions of other Americans that this was some sort of ''vast right-wing conspiracy.''
Me? My own answer is a weak ''sort of.'' I have trouble with conspiracy theories. They are very hard to prove, and even if unproven, they corrode the political process, undermine faith in democracy, and delegitimize opponents' often fairly won triumphs. Millions of Americans, maybe one in three, wanted Clinton out, many for righteous and moral reasons, perhaps some with a less worthy political agenda in mind. I have friends on both sides of the fault line Clinton has imprinted on our body politic.
But the Republicans made it hard on those who don't want to believe in political conspiracies at the highest level of national politics.
The further left or right you go on the political spectrum, the more willing people are to embrace conspiracy theories. And they're not good for your political health.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 02/17/99.
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t was often hysterical but rarely historical; no one bothered to note what they were doing the day impeachment died. What Clinton got caught doing was terribly tawdry but never rose to the required tyrannical. We wasted a year's public business, flattened pine trees and Washington's wandering attention span on this trumped-up political passion play. Clinton started us down this dismal road. His enemies not only enthusiastically joined the parade; they wound up leading it.