I couldnt have asked

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I couldn’t have asked for a better foil for my Salon article about Clinton-bashers comparing Condit to Bill Clinton in an effort to lay one more layer of spin on impeachment. Tucker Carlson’s column in New York Magazine takes the argument a step further, though. Clinton isn’t the same as Condit; he’s much worse!

From my experience, this sort of thing is like the blue spot appearing on the home Clinton-hating test you can buy at your local drugstore: the ability to compare Bill Clinton to almost any other malefactor and find him not only a far more egregious evildoer but in some degree also contributing to the other fellow’s undoing and suffering.

I remember a former boss once telling me how Bill Clinton was an unpardonable sleaze and (in the same breath) how Jack and Bobby Kennedy were great guys who inspired his generation. Never mind, of course, that Jack Kennedy did so many women in the White House that his exploits make Clinton look like the wallflower at the high school dance. What was even worse about Clinton, he said, was that his peccadillos had retrospectively tarred the Kennedy brothers. (No, I’m not sure I can explain that one either.)

Anyway, in Carlson’s piece the superficial similarities between the Condit and Clinton cases belie the deeper reality: Condit is an essentially blameless rube caught in the headlights of a media firestorm bereft of all of Bill Clinton’s advantages. He has no army of mindless, shillifying defenders, no media machine to crunch the bones of his adversaries, and no army at his beck and call to commit war crimes abroad to cover up his troubles at home. And thus Gary Condit is a sort of tragic figure, paying the price, as we all seem to do sooner or later for Bill Clinton’s sins.

Am I missing something here? Bill Clinton’s ‘crimes’ were manufactured ones; Gary Condit is under legitimate suspicion of involvement in the disappearance of his girlfriend. I’ve noted before that I think obstruction charges should be handed down only very sparingly. But if you want to talk about obstruction, Gary Condit has apparently obstructed a real investigation, not a cooked-up, bogus one headed up by Ken Starr. Could anything better expose the factual and moral myopia of Clinton’s Monica-era critics?

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