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Don't Blame Bubba
By Doug Patton
August 19, 2002

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves..."
-- Cassius, from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," Act I, Scene II

Bill Clinton remains on the stump, relentlessly pursuing any legacy other than that of philandering, obfuscating, deceitful, impeached felon and traitor.

This is not a president who has gone gently and quietly into retirement, and in the midst of his pursuit after any legacy other than the one he earned during his years in the public eye; he still labors under the delusion that anyone cares what he thinks about anything.

Immediately following September 11, before our current president even went to visit Ground Zero, Bubba was there telling us all about how he had "just missed" getting Osama bin Laden "by maybe an hour." (Apparently, America's archenemy was hiding in that aspirin factory Clinton bombed to divert our attention from the Lewinsky scandal.)

More recently, our former miscreant-in-chief was heard to complain that it is unfair to blame him for the current crop of corporate scandals. He cleverly compared it to the magnanimous way he says he had restrained himself and those around him from blaming his predecessor, George H. W. Bush, for the fiasco in Somalia depicted in the movie "Black Hawk Down." Of course, the clever implication was that Bush 41 was responsible, but being a gentleman, Clinton never blamed him. Nice spin from the master spinner.

Anyone who has read anything I have ever written on the subject of Bill Clinton's presidency understands that I have nothing but contempt for the man and his ambitious, scheming wife.

Do I believe that Clinton was a bad influence on our children? Absolutely.

Do I think he diminished the level of political rhetoric in Washington? Probably, although he had to dig deep to lower it.

Am I convinced that putting Hillary in charge of plotting out a socialist future for our nation's health care was an overreaching indication of where they would love to have taken us? Beyond any shadow of a doubt.

And do I think that those in the corporate world who shared his absence of values looked at him and said, "We have one of our own in the White House"? Without question.

Is it true that the corporate shell games began in the 1990s? Yes, and as someone said to me recently, Bubba was golfing buddies with some of those who recently did "the perp walk."

But no one man, regardless of the power he wields or the depth of his corruption, can alter the moral climate of a nation in less than a decade - any more than Ronald Reagan could reverse the course of our national moral decline on his watch.

As Bill Clinton left our White House a year and a half ago, taking with him everything that wasn't nailed down, having just pardoned some of his fellow felons, sixty-some percent of us told pollsters that we approved of the job he had done as president.

We, the people, knew the truth about him when he was in office, and yet we chose to ignore his high crimes and misdemeanors, preferring instead to call them "personal indiscretions."

After Travelgate, cattle futures, Whitewater, Vince Foster, health care, Chinagate, Buddhist temples, Monica (cigars, perjury, new definitions of "is"), pardongate and finally, impeachment, one would think that a free and a moral people would get the message. We knew well his selfish nature and his treacherous tactics by the end of his first term, but because the economy appeared to be good, we refused to examine the record, and we gave him another term.

John Adams was right: "Our Constitution was made for a moral and a religious people, and it is wholly inadequate for the governing of any other."

We cannot say that we did not know. At best, we deliberately averted our gaze; at worst, some of us actually reveled in Bill Clinton's narcissism. Only a people predisposed to immorality could accept such turpitude in a national leader.