The Friends of Bill Have Short Shelf Lives

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 9, 1998 | by Ralph R. Reiland

Whitewater figure Jim McDougal didn't have access to his heart medication in the hours before he died in prison. McDougal, 57, was stricken on March 8, 1998, in what inmates call "the hole" and prison authorities call "administrative detention."

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas, citing a federal government report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reports that McDougal also was not seen by a doctor the day before his death despite his complaints of dizziness and feeling sick.

For someone who had managed the Arkansas campaigns of Sen. J. William Fulbright and John F. Kennedy and made millions in Arkansas real estate, being caged in the hole because he was unable to produce a urine sample during a spot check for drugs was the dead bottom of a long slide, a slide thoroughly greased by McDougal's association with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Only days before his death, McDougal completed his self-portrait, Arkansas Mischief: The Birth of a National Scandal, a good story, as he puts it, about how he became merely the latest victim of the Clinton tornado, joining a long list of associates who were used by the couple and pitched aside when their usefulness ended.

His usefulness, McDougal explains, consisted of picking up ninetenths of the tab of the Whitewater land deal while the Clintons took income-tax deductions for payments they didn't make, placing Hillary Clinton on a $2,000-a-month retainer at Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan as a way to legalize subsidies to her husband, obtaining illegal government loans to keep Whitewater afloat and passing money to Bill Clinton through an under-the-table system of fake invoicing. "A contractor agreed to pad my monthly construction bill by $2,000," McDougal explains. "After I paid the full amount of the invoice, the contractor reimbursed me the $2,000. I turned the money over to Henry [Henry Hamilton, an employee at McDougal's bank] to give to Clinton."

Just days away from death and looking back on how the Clinton tornado had moved through his life, McDougal wrote that he has "no whining or complaining to do because I have lots of company."

And more company, unfortunately, with each passing day as the Clintons' tornado cuts a wider and more damaging path through America. What began as the annihilation of individuals -- Hillary's Rose Law Firm partners Vince Foster and Webster Hubbell, McDougal's ex-wife Susan, former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker and assorted other dead or incarcerated Clinton cronies -- now has widened to wreck the credibility of the American feminist movement, devastate liberalism's claim to be the philosophy of morality in politics, denigrate the legal system, diminish the presidency, replace decorum with vulgarity, force a culture of cynicism and deception upon the nation and ravage the Democratic Party.

Since the day Bill Clinton set up shop in the Oval Office, for instance, the Republican Party has picked up 51 seats in the House of Representatives, 11 seats in the Senate, 14 governorships and more than 500 seats in state legislatures. November promises only more of the same. At last count, 374 elected Democrats nationwide switched to the GOP since January 1993.

With feminism, we were told for decades -- quite correctly -- that the personal is political, i.e., that no wall separates the sexist behavior of an individual from society's overall gender biases. Now, single-handedly and for all the world to see, asserts New York Observer columnist Richard Brookhiser, Bill Clinton has managed to establish "fellatio feminism" i.e., an apathetic and powerless position that maintains that it's all right for a man of power to be serviced by women under his authority so long as he advances their political agenda.

On a smaller and more personal scale, one also could say that Bill Clinton single-handedly has managed to turn an earnest and independent Ms. Rodham into a doormat. The clear pattern, from the earliest days in Little Rock, is that Clinton delivers his most lethal blows to those who are most supportive, loyal and solicitous. It runs the gamut, from the trashing of outspoken Arkansas state troopers to the threats experienced by a horde of Clinton's former paramours to, today, maneuvering his most faithful constituency, African-Americans, into silence as they watch an ithyphallic Boy President shatter the moral legitimacy of his advisory board on race relations, use Betty Currie to facilitate his grimy antics and turn Vernon Jordan into a job pimp.

Liberals who once wailed about an alleged gag by Clarence Thomas about a hair on a can of Coke now find themselves hawking the old "everybody does it" line of teenage America regarding behavior that's a thousand times worse. "Who will ever take them seriously again?" asks Brookhiser. "If a grease monkey hangs a centerfold on his workplace wall, he is an oppressor, but if the president of the United States has an intern kneel on his workplace floor, he is a liberator."

The Clinton legacy? Worse than just a crude soap opera and more than the sorry tale of a flashy flasher and his arrogant and enabling Missus, the Clinton saga has become a national lesson about political duplicity and elitism. It is the story of a counterfeit populist who bellowed against the decade of greed while stuffing his own pockets; a transparent moralizer who preached deliverance and delivered dirt; a self-righteous elitist who flipped a finger to the legal system while calling for more laws and rules for the rest of us; a superficial charmer with more style than substance who stained everything he touched.