International Socialists

US politics were turned upside down last month by revelations of a sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton.

 

All the politicians' sanctimonious talk about the future of the country was suddenly buried under an avalanche of lurid details about Clinton's tawdry affairs. The scandal revealed the Clinton presidency in all its disgusting hypocrisy.

 

The president who postured as a defender of "family values" when he signed the anti-gay Defence of Marriage Act was accused of having sex with an intern. The man who preached sexual abstinence for teenagers and promoted V-chips to block explicit TV programming was responsible for making oral sex a topic on every news programme. If Clinton's moralistic facade is used to destroy him, he has only himself to blame.

 

But Clinton isn't the only hypocrite in Washington. The investigative reporters and self-important pundits who raked over every detail of the Clinton sex scandal won't take up the real crimes committed every day in Washington.

 

Clinton and the Republicans worked together to plunge one million more children into poverty with welfare "reform." In the spirit of "bipartisan" unity, they slashed away at food stamps and the Medicare and Medicaid healthcare programmes. While corporate America destroyed millions of lives with "downsizing," Clinton cosied up to big business with White House "coffees" that hauled in millions in illegal campaign contributions.

 

No special prosecutor is accusing Clinton and the Republicans of mass murder - the charge they deserve for the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children with economic sanctions since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

 

Even if Clinton can defeat efforts to drive him out of office, he will be permanently wounded by this scandal, perhaps to the point of paralysis. And he has only himself to blame. His hypocrisy and embrace of the conservatives' "family values" rhetoric handed the right wing a weapon to use against him. Now the wealthy conservatives behind Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr are using a moral crusade against Clinton to further their right wing agenda.

 

Technically, Clinton could be impeached, prosecuted or both if Starr proves that he urged Lewinsky to lie about their alleged sexual relationship under oath in a civil lawsuit. But that alone may not be enough to bring down Clinton. So Starr wants to use the threat of more sex scandals to pressure witnesses into cooperating to bring more serious charges against the president.

 

Clinton has made political comebacks before. During the 1992 election campaign, voters dismissed a number of scandals involving Clinton because he seemed to promise change from the twelve years of Reaganism that came before. In 1995, he recovered from the political disaster of the Republican Party takeover of Congress by opposing the harshest elements of the "Republican revolution" - and coopting the bulk of their programme. Now Clinton & Co. are trying to save their own skins by threatening to drag Republican leaders into the same gutter.

 

If all the Republicans and Democrats seem capable of is pursuing charges and counter-charges of scandal, it's because they agree on the fundamentals - advancing a pro-business agenda at everyone else's expense.

 

You might think that the media and official Washington would have more important things to worry about than who the president sleeps with - the Asian economic crisis that threatens to spread elsewhere, for example, or the unraveling of peace deals in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. But smug in their belief that they are beyond challenge, politicians constantly scheme to grab more power and wealth, no matter what the human cost.