 |
Sticks and stones may break his bones, but... All's Well That Ends in the Well? Wrong.By Rick Horowitz I like optimists. Don't you like optimists? Optimists are nice to have around. They brighten up a cloudy day. They put a happy tune on the lips of the world, and a smiley face on even the nastiest of problems. Every once in a while, you want to take an optimist and slap him silly. "Get real!" you want to scream. "You're living on another planet!" Which brings us to the United States Congress, home these days to the some of the world's crabbiest optimists. They're in a perfectly sour mood; can you blame them? They've been mucking around in the Lewinsky mess for almost a year now, and what has it gotten them? Aside from more thoroughly ridiculed and more widely ignored, I mean. It's gotten them -- I'll use the technical term here -- bupkis. Nothing. But -- and here's the optimistic part -- they keep thinking it's going to turn around for them! Any minute now, they keep telling themselves, the country is going to rise up in righteous indignation and march on the White House and call that no-account Bill Clinton to come right out there and tickle them behind the ear. No, that's not it! The country is going to rise up and demand that justice be served, that truth prevail, that standards be respected and miscreants be forced to stew in their own sordid juices. They'll settle for hurting his feelings. They may not be able to kick Bill Clinton out of office; they still think they can make him feel bad. And where they're thinking they can accomplish this is in the well of the House of Representatives. Good luck. Of course, until just a few days ago, some of these same folks also figured that they could trick the same Bill Clinton into admitting perjury. All they had to do was write down those 81 questions, write them all down and phrase them really carefully, and the man wouldn't have a choice. He'd have to spill the beans, and they'd have all the evidence they needed to get rid of him. Kind of heartwarming, isn't it? Full-grown adults -- politicians! -- with that kind of faith? Somehow the prez, whose survival skills (you'd think they'd know this by now) rival certain species of cockroach, didn't do what they wanted him to do. He didn't own up to anything at all. So now a few of these optimists have decided that campaign financing is their ticket to glory, that election scandals will trip the man up where sex couldn't quite finish the job. Don't bet the ranch on it. Meanwhile, some of the other optimists -- and these particular optimists are both Republicans and Democrats -- are looking harder and harder at some sort of censure resolution. They want out of this thing, the sooner the better, and they think censure just might get them there. But they don't merely want to pass a resolution, nosiree. Some of them actually want the president to be there when it happens. They want the president standing front and center, right there in the well of the House, to hear all the ugly things they'll be saying about him. Some of them even want him to have to respond, to offer some brief statement of apology for all the trouble he's caused the country with his free-range libido. That'll really embarrass him; that's what they're thinking. Except, of course, that it won't. Making Bill Clinton stand there and take his medicine won't embarrass him. Making him bite his lip in bad-boy silence or toss off stray platitudes of regret -- that won't embarrass him either. Nothing embarrasses him -- that's what makes Bill Clinton Bill Clinton! If this guy were capable of being embarrassed, he'd have left town in the dead of night the moment the story broke. The President of the United States carrying on with an intern half his age?! They should have been picking him up with a sponge. Never happened. It's not about to happen now. That doesn't mean they won't keep trying. Optimism turned self-delusion -- it's not a pretty sight. Posted
12/2/98. Tell your friends! They'll like you even more.
 |
  |
