Excerpts from Joe Sobran's
Hustler: The Clinton Legacy
- Americans have been taught to expect their presidents to be great
men: men of substance, courage, eloquence, and dignity. Clinton has
none of these qualities and hardly pretends to have them. He has no
smack of the hero or man of destiny. On the contrary. He is nothing but
a skilled political specialist, a charmingly unscrupulous improviser,
possessing all the currently necessary arts of raising money, wooing
important power blocs, and getting elected. He has no existence outside
today’s small political arena.
- Bill Clinton isn’t our worst president, just the most degraded — the
first occupant of the Oval Office to inspire zipper jokes and speculation
about possible sociopathic tendencies. Somewhere, George III is
having a good laugh.
- Clinton has achieved the absolute focus that marks the maturation of genius.
Virtually everything he says and does in public is calculated to enhance his own power. Nothing distracts him from this purpose.
- Mrs. Clinton is playing a curious role. She is the senior wife in what amounts to a walk-in harem. As long as
she retains her primacy, she appears not to be jealous of the other women.
- The Democrats don’t look like America. They look like America’s
dying cities, infested with mutually hostile minorities, many of whom
are on the public payroll and the dole while bankruptcy looms and the
most basic public services break down - as the whites, facing the
combination of crime and ruinous taxes, scurry to the suburbs with
their children. Just as the whites know the cities aren’t theirs anymore,
they know the Democratic Party isn’t theirs anymore, either.
- Clinton’s past — and his wife’s — caught up with him. He’d used state
troopers to procure women for parking-lot trysts; both he and Hillary, the priggish scourge of greed, had long records of
shady business dealings. They put their only child into an exclusive private school. He got a haircut on the runway of a busy airport.
- Everything he did was fashionable, according to those who
dictate fashion. National health care seemed to be an idea whose time
had come. A health-care crusade led by the nation’s First Feminist
seemed, at first, irresistibly powerful. The Clintons cultivated all the
right rich people, all the right celebrities, and all the right minorities.
- Clinton may be a sign that the “New Morality” is aging badly.
The idea that a man should be judged by his own principles sounds fine, until you meet the man who doesn’t have any.
- Law making has become a lawless process, and these two are a pair of crooks.
- Stalin, for some reason, reminds me of Hillary Clinton. The general view
is that she is “standing by her man.” My view is a little different. I think
she supports her husband for the same unromantic reason Stalin made his alliance with Hitler.
- Tragically, our nation has now, for the second time in a few
years, seen a president afflicted with Alzheimer’s. Bill
Clinton’s fabled memory has broken down. During his
August 17, 1998 grand jury testimony, it failed him dozens of times.
It’s a shame, because he really needs his memory now. He’s
been the victim of so many lying and designing
women: Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Linda Tripp, and
Monica Lewinsky. He has disputed their accounts of his behavior with as much vigor as a memory-impaired person can, but it’s tough.
On the other hand, one advantage of having Alzheimer’s is that you keep meeting new women.
- There’s one woman Clinton has never accused of lying: Hillary
Clinton. She’s the one who told us we could trust him.
Clinton is the consummate hypocrite of the generation that
has rejected hypocrisy. He speaks for the Culture of Candor that
has afflicted us since the Sixties. Be up front. Tell it like it is.
Get in touch with your feelings. Do your own thing. Question authority.
- The 1994 elections exposed the idiocy of the 1992 Clinton campaign’s
slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid!” No, it’s race, and religion, and parasitical petty tyranny, and social decay.
- If Hustler honored a Man of the Year, it would have to be Bill Clinton.
- More clearly than anyone else, Clinton understands that money
is the key to modern politics. He denounces “greed” only for the purpose
of embarrassing his enemies; he’s not the least bit inhibited by
his own moral strictures on the subject.
- Clinton’s chief significance in our history is that he’s the first president
to make the sexual revolution part of the conscious program, promoting
abortion, homosex, feminism, and the rest, and even weaving
them into the system of entitlements. His Bible has told him that the
kind of sex he likes best isn’t adultery, and he carries that Bible, even
flaunts it, as he comes out of the church with Hillary every Sunday
morning. He’s a good and photogenic family man, right down to his
new dog. It must be symbolic that Buddy has been neutered.
- What saves this president from ruin ... is partly the confusing multiplicity of his scandals; the public can
barely focus on one before another distracts attention from it. There never seems to be a central issue - just a kaleidoscopic serial scandal,
which the public regards with weary cynicism. Just when you get up to speed on Vince Foster, Susan McDougal, Paula Jones, and Craig Livingstone,
out pop John Huang and his friends.
- A lot of people support Clinton even though they don’t doubt that
he committed sexual offenses (not all of them “consensual”), perjured
himself, solicited perjury from others, lied to the public, and generally
broke laws to cover up his offenses. Our traditional morality, public
and private, has seriously eroded. The “idealism” of the Sixties has
rotted into the nihilism that was always latent in it.
- The “nonjudgmental” Democrats feel — or feign — violent moral indignation toward
conservatives who uphold traditional standards. They affect to disapprove of Clinton’s behavior, but they profess to forgive it. The truth is
that they don’t forgive it, because they really don’t disapprove of it. He’s their favorite church-going hypocrite. They love the hypocrites
who profess Christianity while making war on Christian morality.
- It’s inadequate to say the Clintons believe in big government.
“Big” government suggests heavy, solid, bulky machinery, like one
of Stalin’s five-year plans to industrialize Russia. What the Clintons
believe in is something more all-pervasive, like a gas. To them politics
is a dimension of everything, offering the answer to every problem, the salve for every discontent.
- They can’t conceive of the state as a specific institution, one among
many, serving narrow functions like paving streets and arresting criminals.
No, for them it’s central to society, to human existence. Its members
and organs must be infused with a “culture,” which will guide it in “changing people’s lives.”
- What’s surprising is the man’s perverse consistency in the arts of
public seduction. You’d think a politician mocked as “Slick Willie”
and “Pander Bear” would go out of his way to improve on his reputation
and build confidence in his word. Instead Mr. Clinton seems bent
on vindicating his detractors, from Paul Tsongas to Gennifer Flowers to Dan Quayle.
- If “choice,” rather than abortion as such, is the point, you’d think
the Clintons and the feminists would be outraged by the Chinese
policy of forcing women to have abortions after the first (or in some
cases, the second) child. It's hard to imagine a more barbarous tyranny.
- In her syndicated column the week of the trip, Hillary (“It takes a
village”) Clinton wrote about the problems of Chinese women. She
cited jobs, education, workplace discrimination -- but not forced
abortion. Apparently the government’s power to control women’s
bodies with the most total and cruel rigor isn’t an important concern
among them. Neither did feminists at home make any noise about forced abortion.
- Despite all we hear of gay “pride,” nobody wishes the condition on those they love. It’s bizarre to imagine even the most liberal expectant parents hoping their child will be homosexual. People never say: “Susan and I don’t care whether it’s a boy or a girl, as long as it’s gay or lesbian.”
© 2016 Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation