Or, if you think the V.P. just had had a little too much Miracle-Gro that day, try reading his book, Earth in the Balance:
The cleavage in the modern world between mind and body, man and nature, has created a new kind of addiction: I believe that our civilization is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of the earth itself.
... A person who is not “grounded” in body as well as mind, in feelings as well as thoughts, can pose a threat to whatever he or she touches. We tend to think of the powerful currents of creative energy circulating through every one of us as benign, but they can be volatile and dangerous if not properly grounded.
Those are from a random glance at pages 220-21 in the tree-wasting, error-clogged paperback edition of EITB.
So Bill and Al are nutty. This brings us to Vince Foster. Foster has no place on the Enemies List. There was no disgrace in what he did. (No one dies of disgrace in Washington; the whole town would be Ur.) And we don’t want to heap abuse on someone who has so recently become a Good Democrat.
But there are no exemptions for those who are deranged and wacky and bad. There’s Jeffrey Dahmer to be considered—and Ellen Goodman. We didn’t declare a truce in World War II just because Hitler needed lithium. We didn’t unilaterally disarm just because Stalin was running with one wheel in the sand.
As Vince Foster said, “Here ruining people is considered sport.” Play ball!
Maya Angelou
Thirty-two years ago, dead, white, European male Robert Frost wrote a poem for a presidential inauguration. It went, in part, like this:
Some poor fool has been saying in his heart
Glory is out of date in life and art.
Our venture in revolution and outlawry
Has justified itself in freedom’s story
Right down to now in glory upon glory.
Hark now to Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning”:
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more.
Such is progress in the Clinton years.
Tipper Gore
The September-October 1993 issue of the new magazine for yuppie breeders, Family Life, quotes Mrs. Gore:
“We were coming home from lunch with their dad, and the kids pointed out a homeless woman on the street,” says Tipper. “They wanted to take her home. I explained we couldn’t do that, but that each of us could do something.” She went on to cofound Families for the Homeless, a nonpartisan partnership of congressional, administration and media families to raise public awareness about homeless people and their needs.
And there you have the morality of liberalism in a nutshell. Help people? No. Give them a buck? Of course not. What the true sanctimonious liberal does is “raise public awareness.” This is the U.N.-in-Sarajevo school of good works. Tipper, America’s bag ladies thank you from the bottom of their, um, paper bags.
The various scads and oodles of children sired by Al (“No goal is more crucial to healing the global environment than stabilizing human population.”—EITB, p. 307) Gore are not on this Enemies List, however. The same article in Family Life has Tipper telling us: “The Halloween the kids like to recount best is when Al dressed up as a carrot.”
Sharp as tacks, those Gore kids—they noticed.
Ron Brown
Clinton’s secretary of commerce is suspected of having engaged in—you guessed it—commerce. The FBI is investigating allegations that Brown received $700,000 from the Vietnamese government in return for promoting free trade. We don’t want any of that—NAFTA or no NAFTA, this is a Democratic administration. Not to worry, Ron, even if the accusations are true, by the time you get done paying Clinton-era income taxes, that bribery offense will be only misdemeanor-sized.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher,
U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, and
National Security Adviser Anthony Lake
According to the August 19,1993, edition of America’s Izvestia, the Boston Globe, these three lukewarm warriors are urging the president to allow U.S. combat troops to regularly serve in United Nations peacekeeping missions under the command of U.N. officers. So, when your boy is ordered into battle backward, armed only with a sharp stick, by Eleventy-Star General Mumbungle Butthole of the Republic of Bulemia, you’ll know where to address your letters of complaint.
Warren Christopher
Again, I refer those with short memories to Daniel Wattenberg’s article “Clinton’s Hard-Line Appeaser” in the February 1993 issue of the American Spectator. Here Mr. Wattenberg described how Delta Force commander Colonel Charlie Beckwith briefed President Carter and the nation’s top security advisers on the plan to rescue American hostages being held by Iranian Revolutionary Guards. “Anyone who is holding a hostage,” said Beckwith, “we intend to shoot him right between the eyes.”
According to Beckwith, who is one of our country’s most highly decorated soldiers, Christopher’s reply was, “Well, would you consider shooting them in the leg, or in the ankle or the shoulder?”
Janet Reno
Addressing the National Black Prosecutors Association, the attorney general said, “We have to do something about guns. If only this nation would rise up and tell the NRA to get lost!” Wait a minute, Stretch, “rise up,” or at least maintaining the option to do so, is why we’ve got those guns. Maybe next time you should try making that speech to the survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, or folks who were in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Bosnia right now. P.S. We didn’t notice any NRA officials shooting people in Waco.
A Whole Bunch of Future Ex-Senators and Soon-to-Be Former Congressmen We know the Democrats love the poor because they just created so many more of them. Landslide Billy’s tax package passed the Senate 51 to 50 and the House 218 to 216. This makes every pol who said “aye” personally responsible for the economic rape of the nation. In Washington it’s being called “The Vince Foster Vote.”
Bruce Babbitt
We remember the interior secretary from his 1988 presidential primary campaign. He’s not protecting plant life, he is plant life.
Marian Wright Edelman
Head of the Children’s Defense Fund and the Fagin of family law. Note how the left has quit trying to be a vanguard to anybody large or healthy enough to punch them in the nose; modern Bolshies pester the crippled, the diseased, and, of course, kids. But kids grow up. And they remember. Take our advice, Marian, and stick to Animal Rights or House Plant Liberation or campaigning for Al Gore.
George Stephanopoulos
Beneath contempt in every sense of the phrase—besides, why bother to attack someone when his haircut is doing it for you? Apparently the President of the United States gets some licks in, too. According to Fred Barnes in the September 6, 1993, issue of the New Republic, George’s principal role in the West Wing is “lightning rod for Clinton’s temper tantrums.” Mr. Barnes quotes a senior White House official as saying, “Every president has a lot of frustration. They have a need to blow occasionally. George is someone the president can do that to.” We certainly hope mere verbal abuse is being discussed here and that the senior White House official was making no innuendos.
Donna Shalala
The January 23, 1993, issue of Human Events reprinted long excerpts from a speech the secretary of health and human services delivered at the University of Chicago on November 15,1991.
Shalala used the speech to describe an ideal world of the future, as seen through the eyes of “Renata,” a typical four-year-old kindergarten student in 2004:
Renata doesn’t know any moms who don’t work, but she knows lots of moms who are single. She knows some children who only live with their dads, and children who have two dads....
[After her kindergarten class is over Renata goes to a small day-care center operated by a] neighbor who takes care of five children in he
r home. The backyard of the home is a playground which has been constructed with grant money from the city.
Sometimes [Renata] and her best friend, Josh, play trucks; sometimes they play mommy and daddy, and Josh always puts the baby to bed and changes the diapers, just like his own dad does at home.
At Thanksgiving time, Renata’s teacher will tell a story about how people from Europe came to the United States, where the Indians lived. She will say, “It was just the same as if someone had come into your yard and taken all your toys and told you they weren’t yours anymore.”
Shalala finished her speech by saying that these things would come to pass because “we made it our top priority in our communities and in our Congress.”
When Shalala was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, she championed a ban on language that would be “demeaning” to any “race, sex, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual orientation, national ancestry or age.” We say, “Hey, Donna, you ofay broad, you crap-worshiping putty-faced Stalinist retard, molester of dogs and honorary citizen of North Korea, you’re old.”
Admiral William J. Crowe
The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the next ambassador to the Court of St. James was the only military man above the rank of idiot to support Bill Clinton. Crowe’s previous bright idea was to use economic sanctions to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. That is, we were supposed to put a money squeeze on somebody who was sitting on top of a third of the world’s oil. In your next lifetime, Matey, a commission awaits you in the navy of Chad.
Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason
“If Mark Twain were alive today, he would be writing in television,” said Linda in an interview in the New York Times.
“It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval,” said Mark Twain in What Is Man?
Robert E. Rubin
That layer of hypocritical slime which coats all liberalism has never been thicker than it is upon this former head of the Goldman Sachs investment house. Ex-bucket shop operator Bob made $29.3 million in 1992, taxed at nice, low Republican rates. Now that he’s got his pile, he’s over at the OEOB stealing money from old people and middle-class professionals. Nor is this his only foray into white-collar crime. Rubin sent a letter from the White House to his former investment banking clients saying, “I also look forward to continuing to work with you in my new capacity.” There’s a place in the federal system for Robert E. Rubin—the place just vacated by Michael Milken.
Mickey Kantor
While we’re on the subject of moral ooze and goo, let us not forget the United States trade representative. We are going to make a rare exception in Mickey’s case and quote a New York Times editorial someplace other than in the “Current Wisdom” section of the American Spectator. The following appeared on May 27,1993:
Mickey Kantor ... is a busy man. He’s in charge of the nation’s effort to reduce foreign trade barriers and increase opportunities for American businesses to expand abroad. He sees nothing wrong with helping the Democratic Party in his off hours to raise money by providing private briefings in his office for big-ticket contributors.
At the very least, the public is owed an accounting of who gets to walk the red carpet.
Strobe Talbott
As comsymps go, the ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet republics gets points for persistence. Even after the Corns went, he kept on symping. In an extraordinarily fatuous piece titled “Rethinking the Red Menace” in the January 1,1990 issue of Time, Talbott opined:
It is a solipsistic delusion to think the West could bring about the seismic events now seizing the USSR and its “fraternal” neighbors. If the Soviet Union had ever been as strong as the threatmongers believed, it would not be undergoing its current upheavals. Those events are actually a repudiation of the hawkish conventional wisdom that has largely prevailed over the past 40 years.
Morton Halperin
Talbott is a mere useful idiot and fellow traveler. Halperin is an actual traitor to his nation. Instead of hanging him, however, the Clinton administration has nominated him to a newly created position in the Defense Department—the (get this for an Orwellian title) assistant secretary of defense for democracy and peacekeeping. The Washington Times, in an editorial on June 28, 1993, described Halperin thus:
He is a former Nixon administration official who had his phone tapped by the FBI because he was suspected of leaking information to the press about the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia in 1969. He is a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who defended the right of the ultraradical Progressive magazine in 1979 to publish a recipe for the hydrogen bomb; who aided and abetted ex-CIA agent Philip Agee in his campaign during the 70’s to expose the identities of CIA agents overseas, which is believed to have resulted in the murder of the CIA’s Athens station chief; who unabashedly avowed, in print and in congressional testimony, his opposition to any and all covert intelligence operations; who, just before the Persian Gulf war, urged federal employees to come forward with any information indicating the Bush administration was withholding the full truth about its actions in the Gulf. He is a former member of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who believes the United States should never intervene militarily anywhere without an invitation from the United Nations.
Joycelyn Elders
You’ve got to love a Surgeon General who’s in such serious need of a StairMaster. If she can hand out condoms in the schools, why can’t we hand out pistols? The guns would be strictly for protection against threats to the students’ health—such as getting shot first. And the kids would be told that abstaining from killing people is always a valid option.
Bernard Nussbaum
The White House counsel advised Clinton to fight for Zoë Baird’s nomination despite her illegal nanny troubles; interviewed Kimba Wood but failed to discover that she had nanny problems, too; countenanced White House staff pressure on the FBI during Travelgate; gave a thumbs-up to Lani Guinier; and waited almost thirty hours before giving Vince Foster’s suicide note to the authorities. Actually, strike Bernie off our list—he’s obviously an RNC plant.
Roberta Achtenberg
The Clinton-appointee Bad Taste Award goes to the assistant secretary for fair housing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In San Francisco’s 1992 Gay Pride Parade, Roberta rode in a white convertible, kissing and embracing her girlfriend, San Francisco Municipal Court Judge Mary Morgan, while Judge Morgan’s seven-year-old son was in the car. The convertible was decorated with a sign reading “Celebrating Family Values.”
As a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Roberta took action against the Boy Scouts of America for their policy of barring homosexuals as scoutmasters. She opposed efforts by then Mayor Dianne Feinstein and city health officials to close gay bathhouses to stem the AIDS epidemic. And (we hope this wasn’t a related development) she obtained city funding for a recreation and counseling center for homosexual youth. Then Roberta had the nerve to claim that Senator Jesse Helms opposed her nomination because of anti-Semitism. Let’s run that convertible by the Wailing Wall, Bobbi, and see what kind of reaction you get.
Ira Magaziner and the Entire Task Force on Health Care
They want us all to be as healthy and long-lived as the folks in Ulan Bator and Minsk. “Managed competition” has a nice ring to it. At the horse track they call it “a boat race.” You’re forty-five, Ira, not getting any younger, and an intense fellow, we hear. How’d you like to have the post office perform your triple bypass?
Laura d’Andrea Tyson
The Capital Research Center has caught the chairman of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers asserting that “there is no relationship between the taxes a nation pays and its economic performance.” Hence the remarkable economic growth in the United Kingdom between the end of World War II and the election of Margaret Thatcher. Go way back and sit down, Laura.
Alice M. Rivlin
Capital Researc
h has also tipped us to the ideology of the Office of Management and Budget’s deputy director:
Rivlin favors higher taxes, especially on energy use; a new value-added tax; and a unified state-level tax on corporations, incomes and real estate to eliminate competition for low-tax states. She argues that “claims made for the advantages of free enterprise in education have no firm basis in actual experience” and praises “centrally planned economies” because they “provide lifetime security for workers.”
In the former Soviet Union they’ve got a word for people like Alice, and, in parts of the former Soviet bloc, Afghanistan for instance, they know what to do with them.
Michael Lerner
When it comes to cordless bungee-jumping into the abyss of bad ideas, it’s hard to beat editor of Tikkun, Hillary guru, and general dispenser of sociopolitical meadow-dressing Lerner.
In reading Michael Kelly’s enormously enjoyable Cuisinart job on the First Lady, “Saint Hillary,” in the May 23,1993, New York Times Magazine, we discover that Lerner pulled no punches when invited to the White House by his heavy-breathing acolyte:
“I proposed that the Clinton Administration establish a policy where, for any proposed legislation or new program, there would have to be written first an Ethical and Community Environmental Impact Report, which would require each agency to report how the proposed legislation or new program would impact on shaping the ethics and the caring and sharing of the community covered by that agency.”
Kelly lists a number of Lerner’s other proposals for the Clinton administration:
These include: that the Department of Labor order “every workplace” in America “to create a mission statement explaining its function and what conception of the common good it is serving and how it is doing so”; “sponsor ‘Honor Labor’ campaigns designed to highlight the honor due to people for their contributions to the common good,” and “train a corps of union personnel, worker representatives and psychotherapists in the relevant skills to assist developing a new spirit of cooperation, mutual caring and dedication to work.”
The Enemies List Page 13