January 19, 2001
William Jefferson
Clinton leaves the presidency on
January 20. Far from letting that be the last we will
see or hear from him for a while, the ultimate
narcissist and egomaniac will not observe the
unwritten code of former presidents. He will not
disappear from public view in order to permit his
successor a period of grace in which to establish
himself and his new administration.
Oh, no. Bill Clinton will be
everywhere. Everywhere.
He will be a well-paid “talking head,” probably on
Ted Turner’s Cable News Network. He has a
standing offer to be the chancellor of Oxford
University in England. At one time, rumors even
had it that he was considering a run for mayor of
New York or senator from his home state of
Arkansas. He will be flittering about in the
Hollywood crowd. He will be teaching courses at
universities and law schools. He will be giving
lectures before various groups. He will write articles
galore. He will be everywhere. He will be more
visible than his successor, whose every decision he
will second-guess and seek to undermine.
Clinton will show up at
baseball parks across the
nation. I predict he’ll get himself to every single
Major League baseball park within the first two
years of his ex-presidency. He will do play-by-play
broadcasting on both radio and TV for every team.
He will show up at basketball and football games.
He will serve on the boards of zads of corporations.
He might even show up at parties in New York City
where his former intern, Monica Lewinsky, has
become a regularly invited and quite honored
guest. He will be at the openings of movies. He will
play himself in motion pictures and TV shows and
advertisements. He will travel overseas to
undermine George W. Bush’s foreign policy. He
may even try to launch his own talk show opposite
Rush Limbaugh. Clinton would relish the
opportunity to tell off his critics on the air on a
regular basis. Remember: in 1998 he blasted the
ministers he tapped to “counsel” him once they
started to tell him how he had to reform his life. He
will be the busiest and most ubiquitous former
office-holder in world history, outdoing even former
New York Mayor Ed Koch, who holds down twelve
different jobs (and appears in lots of TV
commercials). Bill Clinton will be everywhere.
Ever the music aficionado,
Bill Clinton will show up
on those purveyors of music videos produced in
Hell by Satan himself, MTV and VH-1. He’ll be a
regular on the Black Entertainment Network (BET).
He’ll host specials on the History Channel.
Exploiting his good ol’ boy background, he’ll be a
frequent guest on The Nashville Network and
Country Music Television. He might even host all
of the major award ceremonies — Oscars, Emmys,
Tonys, Grammys — before he leaves this mortal life.
And he would love to be asked to judge the Miss
America and Miss Universe contests, both of which
he will probably host at some point. Bill Clinton will
be everywhere.
Bill Clinton will show up
in foreign capitals on a
regular basis, seeking the Nobel Prize for Peace
that has eluded Jimmy Carter despite the 39th
president’s incessant efforts to redeem his own
utterly failed presidency by receiving that prize. He
will be hailed by foreign crowds. He will engage in
missions unauthorized by his successor to broker
peace in the world’s hot spots, probably doing so
under the auspices of the United Nations (whose
secretary-general he may very well become in the
not-too-distant future). He will compete with Carter
and the Reverend Jesse Jackson for attention in the
world’s trouble spots. Bill Clinton will be
everywhere.
About the only place he
won’t be appearing for a
while, it seems, is on the letterhead of any law firm.
His deal with independent counsel Robert Ray,
announced January 19, lifts his ticket for five years.
In return for that and a non-apologetic apology,
Clinton doesn’t get indicted. But big deal if he had
gotten indicted. On November 16 I e-mailed a
friend — who was theorizing that Vice President Al
Gore wanted to pull out all of the stops to win the
presidency in order to provide Clinton with a
pardon — to the effect that George W. Bush himself
was likely to pardon Clinton if the latter was
indicted upon leaving office. Bush would do so, I
wrote, in the interests of “national unity,” hoping to
score some points with the Democrats who will be
busy delegitimizing his presidency. Bush would
receive no credit for the pardon, but Clinton would
accept it with glee, saying that he didn’t need it,
would have liked to have rejected it, but accepted it
in order to help the new president get on with the
business of government. We won’t get to see all
that played out now, but there’s no doubt that Bill
Clinton is one of the few people with the capacity of
making the receipt of a presidential pardon (which
he could not refuse) to appear to be an act of
generosity on his part by selflessly refusing to
defend himself against unjust charges.
Clinton will be at the
White House quite a lot. After
all, devoted wife Hillary is now the junior U.S.
senator from New York. She will be invited to
White House dinners for foreign dignitaries. Bill
will tag along in order to hog the spotlight. Bill
Clinton will be everywhere, yes, even back at the
White House — hoping all the while that he can
move back in with Hillary if she is elected President
in 2004 or 2008.
As we know, Bill Clinton is
nothing if not shameless.
The lives of scores of his friends have been
destroyed. He has killed innocent human beings in
foreign countries in order to deflect attention from
various legal events as they unfolded in the Monica
Lewinsky and impeachment sagas. He has
promoted the killing of innocent children in this
country and the world. He has helped to surrender
national sovereignty and to undermine national
security (especially as regards the Communist
Chinese). He has appointed scores of positivists to
every level of the federal judiciary. And he has
championed and refined the practice of the politics
of personal destruction to a state of sophistication
that the late V.I. Lenin would have found truly
ingenious.
And you can ask Pete Rose to help you bet your
bottom dollar that Clinton will use his visibility after
he leaves office to continue promoting all of the
policies he promoted during his presidency — and
doing so in the same manner in which he
conducted himself while he was in the White
House. Enemies and critics will be vilified. Issues
will be distorted. Reality itself will continue to be
assaulted with the same sophistry that gave us, “It
all depends what the meaning of is, is.”
Bill Clinton will be
everywhere all the time.
Although he will never have Blessed Padre Pio’s gift
of bilocation, Bill Clinton will practice virtual
bilocation by means of his omnipresence on our TV
screens and CDs and CD-ROMs and books and
articles. He will be everywhere.
Thus, while January 20
marks the end of the second
term of the 42nd President of the United States, it
will not mark the end of Bill Clinton’s public
visibility. He is only 54 years old. He will be around
for a loooong time. And don’t put it past him to
sponsor an effort to repeal the 22nd Amendment to
the Constitution, which limits a person to serving
two full terms as president, especially if the
Democrats recapture both houses of Congress in
2002 or 2004. He may very well live long enough to
regain his favorite office. Don’t bet against it.
Indeed, I can already hear him saying, “Well, gee.
Ronald Reagan was elected when he was 69 years
old. Why can’t I run again?” Clinton will be 69 in
2015, a year before the 2016 election.
What did the United States
do to deserve this? It’s
really quite simple: a plurality of voters in 1992 and
1996 elected a known liar, relativist, and narcissist
to the presidency. And now we have to live with him
and his ubiquitous presence for the next 30 years or
so. Isn’t it a great country?
We must continue to pray
for the conversion of
William Jefferson Clinton and his wife. Saul of
Tarsus converted. Bernard Nathanson converted.
Bill Clinton’s conversion is not beyond the realm of
possibility, and it is something we are duty-bound in
charity and justice to try to bring about by means of
our prayers, fasting, and sacrifices. However, grace
builds on nature. Even if Clinton does, by the grace
of God, come into the true Faith, he will still be Bill
Clinton. He will thus have the propensity to go on
TV incessantly to talk endlessly about his
conversion.
Face it: Bill Clinton will be
with us for years to come.
He will be everywhere.
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