I voted for Bill Clinton twice. Well, actually, I voted against his opponents. George Bush seemed like a nice enough guy, but he used to run the CIA, and also he lied about the whole Iran-contra thing, and also he looked out upon the sea of faces at the 1988 Republican convention and selected as his running mate the one with a trickle of drool running down his chin, and also he barfed on the Japanese prime minister. Bob Dole didn’t barf on anyone, but he always looked like he wanted to, and besides, I respect his service record and everything, but I have a feeling that he got those war wounds in the Civil War and not World War II, and he really needed to cool it with the Grecian Formula because I don’t think it fooled anyone else either. In fact, whenever I vote, I feel as though I end up voting against the Republicans rather than for, well, anyone in particular. Every time I get a paycheck and I look at the Social Security deduction and I realize that, somewhere in Florida, some oldster I have never met has just made a down payment on a big old Cadillac Seville with money that I earned, I wonder if I shouldn’t start voting Republican and to hell with the environment and the food stamp program and the NEA, and if the spotted owl wants to live on my wages it can get off of its spotted ass and give me some help with the filing over here, but I can never bring myself to do it, because the Republicans want to return to the 1950s, when women stayed home and wore dotted-swiss dresses and had to sneak around to get abortions and nobody had any fun because they hadn’t gotten around to inventing color television yet. So I voted for Clinton.

I would vote for Clinton again, even if I knew what we all know now. Yes, he had an adulterous affair, and yes, he lied about it for months. I do not condone either the affair or the dishonesty, but on the other hand, I find the self-righteously indignant reaction of certain politicians and commentators disingenuous and hypocritical. First of all, Clinton and Lewinsky by all accounts had a consensual relationship – sleazy, but not illegal. I find it very difficult to believe that he took advantage of her in the conventional sense, and the argument that she had no choice as his employee strikes me as specious at best. She did not work directly for him, first of all, and second of all, who else could he sleep with but an employee? He can’t exactly go to Hooters and try to pick up chicks. Furthermore, she could have refused his advances. She obviously didn’t, and she obviously didn’t feel cornered or trapped – women do not generally buy expensive neckwear for their harassers. On the contrary, in all of the endlessly looped video footage we have seen of her, Monica has the Hi-Pro Glow, beaming and tossing her glossy hair about. And don’t give me this “she didn’t know any better at her age” bollocks either. At twenty-one, with another affair with a married man already under her belt, she knew plenty. Suggesting that Lewinsky couldn’t have chosen for herself whether to get involved with the President infantilizes her and demeans the women who really don’t have a choice. She knew exactly what she had gotten herself into, and frankly, if she expected any better from a married serial womanizer who happens to hold the highest office in the land, she deserved what she got.

(By the way, no, I do not consider myself a feminist, because I find that label pretty limiting. I stick up for myself, and I think all women should do the same. I also think that a lot of the women who call themselves feminists in this country need to distinguish the difference between genuine gender bias and the sad fact that life sucks sometimes. Not everything bad that happens to a woman happens to her because she has ovaries; women can, and should, take care of themselves, and all this whining about Clinton-the-sexual-predator strikes me as more anti-woman than anything I’ve said here – at least I believe in women as women and not fragile fluttery beings in need of protection and defense. Until I hear compelling evidence that the President forced her to get down on her knees, I don’t want to hear one more word about Monica’s victimization. A lot of people have thrown around the word “servicing” in connection with this story, but if you think about it, fellatio does not necessarily imply subservience. In this case, it probably translates to convenience. I feel sort of sorry for Monica, because when a woman gets into it with a married man, she always always gets screwed over, but let’s not confuse sexual harassment with bad decision-making.)

“Ah,” you say, “but he lied about it.” Uh duh. Of course he lied about it. Not that we believed him in the first place, but in the second place, wouldn’t you? Most people in his position would lie, I’ll bet, even if they didn’t live under constant media scrutiny and the threat of indictment. If you recall, Monica lied about it too at first. Clinton fucked up, and then he tried to wriggle out of it and hope he wouldn’t get busted. Scummy? Yep. Dishonest? Yep. Human? Yep. This brings us to the question of whether a man with this little self-control and this long a history of mendacity can lead the country effectively. I don’t know quite where to come down on this one. On the one hand, ostensibly, he has to lead the free world, and we should try to get an upright and stable person for the job, a person morally and intellectually superior to most other folks in the US, otherwise we might as well just have elected Sarah D. Bunting instead, and then you’d have to hear Rush Limbaugh bitching about how I stunk up the Oval Office drapes with cigarette smoke and brought a pony keg to a Cabinet meeting. (Well, at least I would get along with Yeltsin.) On the other hand, people make mistakes. Not quite such colossal ones, of course, but I’ve heard worse, I just didn’t read it in the paper. I don’t think he compromised national security; I don’t think it distracted him unduly from the business of running the nation. I mean, let’s say for the sake of argument that he still has sex with Hillary. Would that render him unable to participate in diplomatic talks? Would he stumble around in a fog, incapable of finding the button? Probably not. And if any of you really believe that nobody ever had sexual relations in the Oval Office before, please get back on the turnip truck before you get hurt.

If he had lied about breaking into the headquarters of his opposition, or about shredding sensitive and incriminating documents, or about transferring weapons to our enemies, I would call for his head too. Alas, this country’s Puritan attitudes about sex made it almost impossible for him to tell the truth, and while I wish he had shown better judgment and kept it in his pants, or at least copped to it from the beginning since nobody believed his denials anyway, he didn’t. I don’t know about you, but if I had to face Hillary morning, noon, and night, and I couldn’t even so much as go for a walk alone to clear my head, and everyone on the planet knew intimate details of my sex life, and I couldn’t turn on the television without hearing Jay Leno making jokes about me, I would consider that more than ample punishment. Clinton made his bed, and now he has to lie in it with only his hand for company because his family probably hates his guts, and even Stephanopoulos and Carville have had to give up on defending him because Politically Incorrect won’t have them back if they don’t blather on about how betrayed they feel. Let’s leave the man alone. If Ken Starr continues to pursue this thing, it will rip the country apart, and over what? A perceived insult to the American people? The American people don’t want to hear about this anymore. The American people don’t want to spend any more money on this investigation. The time has come to move on.

One last thought, in the form of a memo to all the Republicans calling for Clinton’s head: please, please, please stop referring with such sanctimonious glee to “the American people.” You don’t care about the American people. You care about harpooning the most prominent member of the opposition, and since none of the Kennedys felt like serving as your morality punching bag this time, you have wasted $40 million of the taxpayers’ money in an ill-conceived attempt to make a Democrat look more corrupt and base than you. You confirmed the nomination of Clarence Thomas, so do not insult the intelligence of the American people by pretending to champion Monica Lewinsky as a downtrodden victim, because you may have hoodwinked some of us into electing you, but we know shameless partisanship when we see it. And for god’s sake get Dan Quayle to shut up. He can’t even spell “resign,” much less ask Clinton to do it.

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