Are you a right-wing conspirator?

National Review, Feb 23, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, JANUARY 30

There is much revelry in the land of the American Right over the charge by Hillary Clinton that the case against her husband is the doing of a "vast right-wing conspiracy." A conspiracy is "an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act." If you study the charge carefully and apply strictly the laws of logic, you would have to ask the question, How did the American Right conspire to cause Bill Clinton to engage in illegal fundraising practices, wrongful adulterous acts, and subversive attempts to suppress testimony? ... No no, of course she did not mean it that way, but she ought to worry a little about the applicability of sound reason to her harried defense.

What is easy to acknowledge is that the right wing opposes her husband, as why should it :not? He is a Democratic President with the conventional enthusiasms for more and greater government, and shortsighted in foreign and military policy. The rhetorical effort is to identify aberrational right-wing activity as essential to the case against President Clinton, but it isn't.

Frequent references are made to a privately produced film about Clinton which is disreputable. It tells the viewer that in all probability Clinton knew about the killing of Vincent Foster, which was almost certainly done by another hand than Foster's. It suggests that Little Rock was a drug laundering center etc., etc., etc.

On such matters a little perspective is in order, a) There is always an irresponsible right wing, and b) there is always an irresponsible left wing. Right-wing kookism flourished in the late Fifties and Sixties under the banner of the John Birch Society. Its founder, Robert Welch, convinced himself, and a few others, that Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Soviet Union. Before that, the misguided Right tended to think that Jews were engaged in conspiracies of various kinds to damage the United States. There isn't much evidence that these conspiracies bore fruit. Jewish-Americans prospered through it all, and every call by the John Birch Society to impeach Earl Warren enhanced his prestige.

The kooky Left was rather more mischievous in its effects on history. Conspiratorial is exactly the way to describe American Communists and their fellow travelers, who did everything from infiltrating government to stealing the secrets of the atom bomb. Every now and again we hear about people who disclose that Wall Street is planning another depression, or that AIDS was an invention of the CIA to arrest the growth of the black population.

It is unquestionably true that the extreme Right is taking pleasure from the difficulties Bill Clinton is having. That's human nature, isn't it? Put it this way: Suppose that a Magic Fairy with a wand had volunteered in June 1972 to visit President Nixon and dissuade him from his mortal conversation urging the CIA to quiet the FBI--the smoking-gun moment. Would the far Left have been pleased that this subversive moment in American history had been expunged? Answer: No. What the Left most wanted was to discredit Nixon and get rid of him. If the same magic lady were to appear tomorrow and offer to restore Miss Lewinsky's virginity, do we suppose that the right wing would be pleased? One more virgin in exchange for the removal of Bill Clinton's tenure? ... You're right.

Does it really matter that the independent counsel is a right-winger? It would matter terribly if it could be established that he had engaged in improprieties. Some reasonable people believe that he has; that he is to be compared not to the Internal Revenue agent who gets wind that John Jones had a million dollars of unreported income, but to the Internal Revenue agent who is told to target John Jones and find something he has done wrong, no matter what. We have plenty of time ahead of us for a rational discussion of the question of Mr. Starr's extending his mandate. Was this ideological aggression? Or an act of thoroughness consistent with the responsibilities of an independent counsel?

Mrs. Clinton is a trained lawyer, and to disparage the motives of the prosecution is standard Defense Tactics 101. She knows it, even if it's true that some of the right wing salivates over the problems of a Chief Executive who has not always been kind and understanding about the problems and desires of the right wing. The whole business was handled rather neatly by Mr. William Ginsburg, the attorney for Monica Lewinsky. He said at a press conference, "I'm not a member of the right-wing conspiracy. I'm not even a right-winger."