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March 5,
2001
The Pardoner's Tale
and the Bush Cuddle
Most of the mainstream press is colluding
with the Bush White House in news management as egregious as
anything we saw in the Reagan years. Take the scam pulled by
the Knight Ridder news chain in the run-up to George Bush's speech
to a joint session of Congress on February 27. On Feb 26 Knight
Ridder, which publishes the Miami Herald, put out a story by
one of the chain's writers, Amy Driscoll, to the effect that
if Florida's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, "had
let south Florida's counties complete manual recounts before
certifying the results of November's election George W. Bush
likely would have won the presidency outright."
This story duly allowed newspapers
across the country running the Knight Ridder story to put up
headlines such as the main front page banner used by the Bay
Areas' West County Times: "Recount: Bush still would win".
Very convenient for the White House. The new occupant of the
Oval Office , living refutation of Chomsky's view that linguistic
skills are deeply imprinted in the neuro-cerebral program of
every human, could go before Congress to make his case for giving
money to the rich and to the Pentagon, as a bona fide, democratically
elected president.
But the next few paragraphs
of Driscoll's story made it clear that Knight Ridder was playing
a disingenuous game. The claim that Bush would have won Florida
was reached by focusing narrowly on Miami-Dade and three other
counties where Gore had asked for manual recounts. It ignored
counts taken by other newspapers of other Florida counties, noted
in recent editions of CounterPunch, which showed that votes for
Gore were consistently under-counted. And of course the Knight
Ridder story also ignored the damning accounts of how blacks
and Haitians were frightened or bullied out of voting, and how
a private company hired by Jeb Bush's state government had struck
many black voters off the rolls on the grounds that they had
criminal records. Time and again this turned out not to be true.
The fundamental mission of
the press is to endorse the essential legitimacy of the American
political system. In the current phase, an incoherent and visibly
underqualified claimant to the presidency is being fulsomely
endorsed as a cleansing force after the squalor of the Clinton
years.
Of course the Clinton years
were squalid. CounterPunch has described them in detail. Many
of the pardons were squalid, as they have often been in American
history. You think this is new? You think Denise Rich, Beth Dozoretz
and Hugh Rodham have no antecedents in American political history?
Just to take the immediate aftermath of the Civil War people
known as "Pardon Brokers" swarmed across Washington.
One of the most notorious was
Mrs L.L. Cobb, a handsome woman who boasted to friends of the
ease with which she could reach President Andrew Johnson. General
LaFayette Baker, head of the National Protective Police (the
US Secret Service), spends no less than 100 pages in his memoir
"Secret Service" to a description of how he set up
a sting operation in which Mrs Cobb secured a pardon from Johnson
for a fee of $300.
Despite Baker's warnings, Johnson
delighted in the visits of Mrs Cobb, even as Clinton delighted
in the importunings of Mrs Rich who visited his White House no
less than 100 times. Finally Baker set a detective at the main
entrance to the White House to keep La Cobb out, but she got
to Johnson anyway, through the kitchen. Cobb also bested Baker
in court, successfully hitting him with a false arrest charge.
Hammer
Buys a Pardon
We don't expect the pundits to remember Mrs Cobb and the other
"pardon brokeresses" of the nineteenth century, but
we do think they should have spent some time on the acts of mercy
dispensed by President G.H.W. Bush.
Republicans squawk delightedly
about the Rich pardon and about the vindication of their charge
that Clinton is morally beyond the pale, the worst of the worst.
Who do they think they're kidding? Corruption of the presidential
power to pardon? Forget Nixon's pardon of Jimmy Hoffa in return
for endorsement by the Teamsters' of his candidacy. Let's just
take another look at those pardons issued by Bush Sr at the onset
and conclusion of his presidential term.
In 1989 president Bush used
his power to pardon a longtime Soviet spy who had been prudent
enough to offer $1.3 million to Ronald Reagan's presidential
library, plus a further $110,000 disbursement to the Republican
National Committee, this latter bribe being made in the week
of Bush's inauguration. The pardon duly came a few months later,
on August 14, 1989.
The spy was Armand Hammer whose
ultimately successful maneuvers for his pardon are described
in Edward Jay Epstein's brilliant 1996 book on Hammer, "Dossier."
Epstein narrates how Hammer had bizarrely hoped he would be in
line for a Nobel Peace prize for his efforts to foster US-Soviet
understanding. To this end he lobbied both Prince Charles and
the then Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, who duly nominated
him for the Peace prize. But Hammer discovered that no one with
a criminal conviction had ever won the Nobel award. On his record
there was the embarrassment (a trifling one given his amazing
career as a spy and oil bandit, eliciting no less than six federal
investigations dating back to 1938) of federal misdemeamor convictions
in 1976 for funnelling cash to Nixon's White House, aimed to
buy the silence of the Watergate burglars in the early 1970s.
So he needed a pardon.
Hammer made his $1.3 million
pledge to the Reagan library and began to agitate for the pardon.
The FBI alerted the Reagan White House to ongoing investigations
of Hammer for attempting to bribe members of the Los Angeles
City Council to the tune of $120,000 to give a green light to
Hammer's company, Occidental, to drill off the California coast.
Nonetheless it seemed that the pardon would come through in Reagan's
parting hours. Then a hitch arose. Hammer had asked Reagan for
a pardon based on innocence. As he had pleaded guilty to the
misdemeanors (in returned for a lowering of the indictment from
felony charges on grounds of obstruction of justice) even the
compliant Reagan White House couldn't oblige.
Hammer shifted gears, secured
an invitation to the Bush inaugural of 1989 and greeted the incoming
president with the request for a pardon based on compassion,
simultaneously handing over $110,000 to the Republican National
Committee. (Ever the businessman, Hammer felt that since Reagan
hadn't come through, he had no obligation to pony up the $1.3
million he'd promised to the library which later unsuccessfully
sued Hammer's estate for the money.) He got his pardon the following
August, though alas not his Peace Prize which in 1989 went to
the Dalai Lama. In Epstein's book there is a picture of Armand
Hammer and his mistress Rosemary Durazo in the company of the
new president and his wife, Barbara.
Those
Bush Iran/Contra Pardons
Now let's go to the other end of Bush time. As he left town,
Bush pardoned, among others, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger,
former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams, former National
Security Council Director Robert McFarlane, and three former
CIA men, Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, Alan Fiers and Claire
George. Abrams, Fiers, George and McFarlane had all been convicted
of withholding information from Congress in connection with investigation
of the Iran-contra scandal. Clarridge was facing trial. Weinberger
had been indicted by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh on the
eve of the 1992 election.
At the time of the pardons,
Walsh said bitterly "It demonstrates that powerful people
with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office
deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence."
But there was more to this pardon than just getting some former
criminal associates off the hook. Walsh said that new evidence
had come to light in the form of notes taken by Weinberger, suggesting
that as vice president Bush had been in the loop on the Iran-contra
deals. Said Walsh, "In light of President Bush's own misconduct,
we are gravely concerned by his decision to pardon others who
lied to Congress and obstructed official investigations."
In other words, Walsh was suggesting
that outgoing president Bush had pardoned Weinberger to ensure
the silence of a man who could testify about his own criminal
complicity in the Iran contra scandal.
These days Republicans are
shouting that it's unprecedented to pardon a man who has not
faced trial, as was the case with Marc Rich. Walsh made the same
point in 1993. Ford pardoned Nixon before the latter was indicted;
and Bush pardoned Weinberger and Clarridge, post indictment but
before trial.
One final point. Clinton is
savagely denounced for using military adventures to distract
attention from his own predicaments. Look at the timing of Bush's
sudden decision to commit US forces to Somalia. The concern with
Somalia was always somewhat bizarre, but it sure did take those
Bush pardons out of the headlines.
And now? Well, all this fuss
about Clinton's pardon of Rich sure distracts attention from
the mountain of evidence that George W. Bush is the beneficiary
of a fixed election. Which offense is greater: pardoning Marc
Rich, or stealing the White House?
Dupes'
Lament:
"We Wuz Duped"
There's nothing more distasteful than listening to a bunch of
dupes suddenly announcing eight years after the evidence was
in that they'd been duped.
The vultures are picking his
bones: Salon, James Carville, Barney Frank, Bob Herbert, Lanny
Davis they've all finally thrown Bill over the side. In the Wall
Street Journal Hamilton Jordan stigmatized Bill and Hillary as
"the First Grifters", the term used for scam artists
preying on the poor and the desperate in the Depression of the
1930s.
"The Clintons," Jordan
sneered, "are not a couple, but a business partnership,
not based on love or even greed but on shared ambitions. Everywhere
they go, they leave a trail of disappointed, disillusioned friends
and staff members to clean up after them." Against the Augean
filth of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Clinton time, Jordan contrasted
the elevated moral tone of the Carter White House.
If he, Jordan, had recommended
something like the Rich pardon, "Carter would have thrown
me out of the Oval Office and probably fired me on the spot."
As for Clinton's hubris after Lewinsky-gate, "if a president
can get caught having sex in the Oval Office with an intern and
committing perjury about it to a federal grand jury, and still
get away with it, what could possibly stop him?".
Yes, this is the same Hamilton
Jordan who is now happy to flail Clinton on the Wall Street Journal's
editorial page, a page which mercilessly abused him and his boss
through the Carter years. And yes, this is the same Hamilton
Jordan who did his bit for high moral tone in Carter time by
leering across a the table during a formal White House dinner
at the wife of the Egyptian ambassador and making a lewd crack
about the pyramids. Jordan further enhanced the White House's
reputation by being accused of snorting coke at Studio 54.
And yes, this was the Carter
White House which opened its doors to Henry Kissinger, who lobbied
successfully for what could be fairly construed as a US government
pardon for the Shah of Iran, allowing the deposed dictator sanctuary
in the United States, thus directly prompting the takeover of
the US embassy in Teheran.
As for liberal Democrats like
the folks at Salon, why now? Salon stuck with Clinton through
thick and thin, never conceding the jaunty corruption that has
been Bill's preeminent characteristic since the day he entered
the gubernatorial mansion in Little Rock, but insisting all the
while on his honesty and innocence on all charges. At the conclusion
of her mournful parting of the ways with Bill, Salon's Joan Walsh
wrote, "If Clinton really abused the power of the presidency
and the power to pardon may be the most sacred, in a way,
beyond the bounds of any other branch of government to reverse
or rectify as part of any kind of quid pro quo, political,
financial, or social, he will have done what his enemies never
could do: tarnish his legacy irrevocably, ensuring that when
the moral accounting is complete, he is judged a failed president.
Failed because he pardoned
Marc Rich? In other words, Salon could take the welfare bill,
the effective death penalty act, the telecommunications reform
bill, Waco, the war on drugs, the doubling of the prison population,
the sale of the Lincoln bedroom as testimonies to a successful
presidency.
But then Clinton spoiled everything
by issuing a pardon urged on him by people normally held in the
highest respect by liberal Democrats, among them Israeli prime
minister Ehud Barak, Shimon Peres, Abe Foxman of the ADL and
Elie Wiesel (if you believe the email traffic flowing through
Jack Quinn's office and no doubt on his billing receipts, though
not Elie Wiesel if you believe Wiesel's recent insistence to
the New York Times that he had compassion in his heart for only
one spy for Israel at a time.)
Yes, they're kicking Bill over
the side. Here's Bob Herbert of the New York Times, another longtime
defender: "You can't lead a nation if you are ashamed of
the leader of your party. The Clintons are a terminally unethical
and vulgar couple, and they've betrayed everyone who has ever
believed in them. As neither Clinton has the grace to retire
from the scene, the Democrats have no choice but to turn their
backs on them."
Yes, this is the Bob Herbert
who only four months ago managed to avert his gaze from the mountain
of evidence about the ethics and vulgarity of the Clintons, and
who lashed Ralph Nader for presuming to raise the standard of
honesty and dignity in government.
Bill has a legitimate gripe. Why now? The evidence in 1992 about
the character of the Clintons and the likely contours of a Clinton
government was in. Sure, you could make a calculation, if you
cared to, that even factoring in this evidence, the Real Bill
and the Real Hillary were a better deal than a second term for
George Bush. And you could say that tacky as Bill's affair with
Monica was, it still offered no sound basis for impeachment.
What you can't say is that you had no idea what the Clintons
were like until he signed off on Marc Rich, or until HRC put
in a good word for those Hasidic Jews.
When it comes to moral calibration,
what's the bigger crime, for the entire liberal establishment
to pardon Clinton and Al Gore for their welfare bill, or for
Clinton to pardon a crooked commodities trader? CP
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