Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, page 138

American Educational Trust Publishers’ Page

It’s Said That When Hillary Clinton Went...

…To a fortune-teller this week, the woman recoiled when she looked into her crystal ball. “It’s my sad duty to inform you,” the woman said gravely, “that your husband will die a horrible death before the end of the year.” “You’re right,” the First Lady said, “but my question is...

“Will I Be Acquitted?”

Right now Americans are extremely polarized about President Bill Clinton, so for readers who didn’t think that little joke was very funny, let us remind you that some years ago we predicted that he would go down in history as the most morally corrupt U.S. president of the 20th century. Then exactly one year ago, on this page in the October 1997 issue, we wrote that we’d changed our minds and believed he would go down in history as the most corrupt U.S. president of any century. That, we said, was not because we’d learned more about American history, but because we’d learned more about Bill Clinton. And on this page in the previous issue, still before the Starr report, we said “we don’t expect Bill Clinton to finish his second term.” So enough with the predictions.

Where Does the Mideast Come In?

Well, we wrote about that, too, in two articles by Richard Curtiss, one on p. 7 of the March 1998 issue entitled, “With Mideast Peace and Clinton Presidency Both About to Go Over a Cliff, Is There a Connection?” (our answer was yes), and another on p. 6 of the April 1998 issue entitled, “Whether It’s Clinton or Gore in the White House, ‘Mideast Peace Process’ a Casualty of Monicagate.” However we understand more clearly now why, in an off-the-record White House meeting with mainstream U.S. Jewish leaders in late 1997, only Clinton seemed unenthusiastic about the White House taking on Binyamin Netanyahu for sinking the peace process. By then, as the Starr report now makes clear, Clinton had a good idea of what would happen...

…If He Took on Binyamin Netanyahu.

Also well before that, as the Starr report also makes clear, Clinton had told Monica he thought his telephone was tapped “by a foreign embassy,” so she should watch her words. Well, since bribery, not blackmail, seems to be the Chinese style, who would be tapping Bill and Monica for blackmail purposes? The president probably had a pretty good idea.

But Madeleine Albright...

...Who spends a lot of time on the road, was a little out of the loop when she gave Netanyahu a deadline. He said he would “set Washington on fire.” Maybe he did. The very week he came to Washington and visited Clinton nemesis Jerry Falwell was the week Michael Isikoff of Newsweek and The Washington Post broke the Monica story publicly. Now we’ll get letters accusing us of peddling Middle East conspiracies. But maybe anyone planning to write one should go back and read the two stories cited. They drew the same kind of letters only a few months ago.

But They Look Prescient Now.

And please don’t echo Bill Press, Juan Williams, Eleanor Clift and a host of other talking heads by saying “give me an example of how the president’s sex life interfered with his ability to do his job,” because we just did. There was a Middle East peace process when Bill Clinton took office. Now there isn’t, and he’s too politically crippled to put the screws on Binyamin Netanyahu, who came into office on a promise to end “land for peace” and now has done it.

Our Masthead Says...

…“Voices from the sensible center—interpreting the Middle East for North Americans—interpreting North America for the Middle East.” Now we’ll do a little of the latter because we’ve been in a state of shock since our good friend and columnist Mahjabeen Islam-Husain casually suggested that Bill Clinton’s morals might not be much worse than those of a majority of his countrymen. And only a week or two earlier a woman in the Gulf told us she wouldn’t be too prudish in judging America’s president because maybe he’s typical of American society.

Well, He Isn’t.

And now that he no longer enjoys media protection (we told you early in 1996 why he wouldn’t in a second term), the “chattering classes” are reminding us of things which even those who were calling him “Slick Willy” back in 1992 didn’t know or may have forgotten. So, not to condemn but just to explain him, let’s borrow from commentator Andy Rooney’s Sept. 13 thumbnail profile on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes.” Bill Clinton never knew his father, William Jefferson Blythe, who was killed in an automobile accident before Bill was born. When they found Mr. Blythe’s car in the ditch into which he’d driven it, there was a case of whiskey in the back seat. His widow, Bill’s mother, said he was bringing it from Chicago, where he worked, to Arkansas for a friend. She also said that if she’d known William Blythe had been married three times before, she wouldn’t have married him. As a matter of fact, he apparently didn’t get around to divorcing all of those previous wives and she married again—four more times. When her second husband, Roger Clinton, was drunk he was a wife beater. However, when Bill Clinton was running the first time for the presidency, he didn’t mind his mother telling people about how bravely her son had stood up to his stepfather to make him stop hitting her. Then Roger Sr. died of cancer, after fathering Bill’s younger brother, Roger Clinton Jr., and Bill changed his name to Clinton too. The brothers are still close, but Roger served a year in jail for selling cocaine.

Bill’s Mother’s Third Husband...

…Jeff Dwyer, a hairdresser, was accused of keeping prostitutes in his beauty salon but apparently beat the rap. Later, though, he went to jail for swindling investors out of $32,000, which was a lot more money then than it is now. By the time the country got to know Bill’s mother, she was spending much of her time at race tracks and wore too much makeup, but she was a jolly sort and obviously very proud of her son, who’d come a very long way.

But Maybe Not as Far as We Thought!

We won’t pass judgment on Hillary Clinton, since the special investigator is going to do that for us when he finishes looking into charges of stock gifts and some loans in connection with questionable real estate deals from bankers for whom she practiced law, all while her husband was governor of Arkansas. After they were in the White House there were what the media call “File Gate” and “Travel Gate,” the sole purpose of which seemed to be to reward political friends, and punish perceived enemies. In fact, a journalist who flew across the United States with the Clintons in August said that throughout the 3,000-mile trip, all the Clintons talked about were their “enemies.” We hope all Americans aren’t like that.

It’s Hard to Forgive Bill Clinton...

…For the lost Middle East peace. Given her present circumstances, it’s easier to forgive Hillary Clinton—despite her fixation on enemies. And obviously there’s good in both of them, or how do you explain sweet, unspoiled Chelsea who, we’d like to think, proves that, regardless of genes and chromosomes, if you give a child a loving home you’ll probably get a loving daughter or son.

We Think That’s What America’s All About.

So we’ll hope that someday all the good things her father might have done will be finished by someone else. Our job is to make sure that one of those things is settling the Israeli-Palestinian matter in a manner that will enable all Middle Easterners to get on with realizing their own rich potential in friendly cooperation with their many well-wishers in America.

We Hope to Help Make That Happen.

If you agree, we desperately hope that when you receive our second and last funding appeal of the year, you’ll give generously and...

Make a Difference, This Month!