White House ideologist Sidney Blumenthal flew up to Cambridge, Mass., two Thursdays ago to give a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We are living in history, he reminded his audience. We are witnessing the epic struggle of Bill and Hillary Clinton to fashion something called “one-nation politics” from the ashes of Reaganism. There are, to be sure, “hostile forces that seek to confound and destroy one-nation politics and all that it promises.” But civilization will out, and whether they realize it or not, the barbarian Republicans are defeated already. The president’s poll numbers prove it.
Now, Sidney Blumenthal is a famously annoying and obnoxious man. He sneers a lot, he quotes from his own books, and he has a brain that is more machine than organ of genuine thought — whirring away in overdrive to neutralize any fact or argument that might complicate his schoolboy crush on the First Family. Still, El Sid does have at least one endearing quality. Like certain varieties of venomous snake, he is kind enough to offer physical warning cues whenever he is about to spit and bite.
The nasal whine slows down and drops a tone or two. The maddening grin disappears. The eyebrows arch. The lips purse. It happened at the very end of Blumenthal’s prepared remarks in Cambridge. “And now,” he whispered after a dramatic pause, “I will be more responsive to the question about Mr. Starr.”
Rattle, rattle, rattle. Hissssssssssss.
During Watergate, if someone like John Ehrlichman, speaking with the president’s imprimatur, had launched an assault on Archibald Cox at a major American university, it would have been front-page news across the country. But we have now had five-plus years of “one-nation politics,” and the media’s capacity for astonishment at White House behavior is no longer what it used to be. So only the Boston Globe was on hand to report Sidney Blumenthal’s official pronouncement on the independent-counsel investigation into President Clinton’s Whitewater and Lewinsky crimes. And the Globe‘s account was extremely abridged.
Here, then, in hideous detail, is what the “assistant to the president” actually said:
We are plunged, at least in Washington, into a politics of defamation: a consuming world of innuendo, false witnesses, illusion, leaks, and smears. The abuse of the office of the independent counsel by Kenneth Starr is a transparently disguised attempt to destroy this presidency. The original intent of the office of the independent counsel was to remove it from politics. But Starr is profoundly political in his intent.
The problem is not simply the largesse from Richard Mellon Scaife, the eccentric right-wing billionaire; Starr’s numerous conflicts of interest, ideological and financial; his speeches at Pat Robertson’s university; his alliances — brazen alliances — with individuals determined to inflict whatever damage they can on the president.
It is not simply that he has assembled a crew of prosecutorial pirates with lengthy records of prosecutorial abuse, and installed a deputy, Hickman Ewing, a religious fanatic, who has proclaimed that he operates from a presumption of guilt.
It is not simply that Ken Starr has jettisoned the language of the law, speaking now of “defilers of the temple,” the apocalyptic rhetoric of a zealot on a mission divined from a higher authority.
The ultimate problem is that in his fervor he is waging an assault on American rights, that he is engaged in an anti-constitutional destructiveness.
He assaults freedom of speech and the right to petition the government. He has attempted to impose his very own Sedition Act. He abuses the grand jury to act out his personal temper tantrums and harass critics. He leaks with abandon, in violation of grand jury rules, criminal rules, and legal tradition. He uses the instruments of intimidation and smear without restraint.
Ken Starr is a figure whom the Framers sought in their design to have rendered impossible: an inquisitor of unlimited, unchecked power. Starr, however, lacks any skepticism about his own certitudes, or even any sense of his own unfamiliarity with criminal law. His lack of knowledge of the Constitution is glaring. His doctrine that the First Amendment is “concerned with the truth” is precisely the doctrine the First Amendment was enacted to prevent.
But Starr is sure he knows the truth and that he should be its judge. His self-righteousness, his insecurity, his partisanship, his breathtaking hypocrisy, have fueled an onslaught on rights that is unethical, illegal, and always political. Now he has appointed himself Grand Inquisitor for life.
Ken Starr is on an endless quest — if not for vindication, then of vindictiveness. But I am certain that in historical retrospect this perverse episode will be viewed in its proper perspective, as Jefferson viewed the Alien and Sedition Acts: in his words, a “reign of witches.”
Well. If any senior White House official has ever before uttered something even half as reptilian as this, that utterance remains a secret. Because Hickman Ewing prays each morning, doesn’t drink, and attends the Fellowship Evangelical Church of Memphis, he is a religious fanatic? Sidney Blumenthal is a creature of the dark. Nearly every word out of his mouth is a poisonous lie. The fact that Blumenthal gets paid with public money to slither up and down the eastern seaboard like this is, all by itself, an outrage.
And now, after Harvard, Blumenthal’s continued service in the Clinton White House is more than just outrageous. It represents something of a constitutional problem.
Kenneth Starr, you see, files his courtroom pleadings on behalf of the United States. He is an officer of the executive branch, fulfilling a core executive function — the investigation and prosecution of federal crimes — under legislation signed into law by the chief executive: this president. In other words, Kenneth Starr, too, works for Bill Clinton.
And Bill Clinton has a constitutional duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. If one of his employees, Kenneth Starr, is abusing the laws — as another of his employees, Sidney Blumenthal, now publicly alleges – – then Bill Clinton is obligated to direct the attorney general to fire the independent counsel immediately. If, however, the president rejects this conclusion and chooses to retain the independent counsel, then he imposes to retain the independent counsel, then he imposes on himself an equivalent obligation to fire Sidney Blumenthal immediately. Blumenthal has called a central executive responsibility, the prosecutorial power, into question and disrepute. He has deemed an ongoing criminal investigation, one ultimately supervised by the president, wholly illegitimate. He has thereby encouraged potential witnesses not to cooperate with that investigation, subverting the law’s very purpose, and challenging Bill Clinton’s authority to uphold it.
One of these two men, Blumenthal or Starr, must go. The Constitution isn’t big enough for both of them. And President Clinton will be violating his oath of office if he pretends otherwise.
David Tell, for the Editors
