Elsewhere there are out-of-the-blue references to "the tawdry pieties of Baptist and Methodist hypocrisy" and to Clinton's making "the most of his Dixie drawl." And in the spirit of the late Albert Goldman's famous reference to Elvis' "uncircumcised ... ugly hillbilly pecker," Hitchens eventually gets around to jeering the presidential member: "Indeed, [Paula Jones] implied that it would have taken two of his phalluses to make one normal one, which could even be part of the reason why he paid her the sum of $840,000 to keep quiet." Not only a lying, whoring, wholly corrupt Bubba but a small-dicked one as well.

Like the Republicans who drove the impeachment machine, Hitchens is motivated by his disgust for the man. Like them he trots out the ludicrous rationale that Clinton's relations with Monica Lewinsky are the public's business both because they took place in a public building, the White House (are the relations between the president and his wife subject to the same scrutiny?), and because Clinton's efforts to involve Vernon Jordan in obtaining a job for Lewinsky amounted to obstruction of justice (though the time line Clinton's lawyers demonstrated in the Senate hearings pretty thoroughly demolished that supposition). And like the right-wingers who were determined to get Clinton, he refers to the president's head inquisitor with the respectful appellation "Judge Starr" -- a correct title, to be sure, but one that tells us a good deal about the person who uses it.

Suffice to say that Hitchens is not concerned with Starr's abuses -- the leaks, the intimidation of witnesses, the smearing of reputations and the burdening of lives with legal bills -- nor with the consistent rejection of Starr's charges by both the public and the juries who heard the cases that were the withered fruits of his investigation. He isn't concerned with Starr's ties to the Jones lawsuit ("It's not much of a riposte ... for Clinton's people to say that the unfashionable nobody [Jones] had some shady right-wing friends. However shady they were, they didn't fall to the standard of Dick Morris") or with the notion that the impeachment was an attempted coup: "a coup refers, properly as well as metaphorically, to an abrupt seizure of power by unelected forces." But what happens when the elected flout the will of the electorate?

Yet perhaps we should be grateful that Hitchens doesn't go too far into the impeachment; we are thus spared further embarrassment. When an unnamed Democratic senator points out that the Republican House managers "haven't presented the case very well," Hitchens' response is "as if the Republicans had really been allowed to present their case at all." What do you do with a claim so far removed from reality?

Perhaps the only place you can venture from there is even further into fantasy, which Hitchens does when, inevitably, he gets around to the matter of the affidavit he submitted to the House Judiciary Committee. Immediately he adopts the language of the victim: "At this point, I became the hostage of a piece of information that I possessed." Hitchens had come into possession of the information that turned him into Fay Wray at a lunch with his friend Sidney Blumenthal, the White House aide, when Blumenthal told him he had learned from Clinton that the president was being threatened by Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens' defense of the affidavit is much the same as it has been since February: that he had already told the story many times, including once in print, and that before signing it he had "made it plain that I would not testify against anyone but Clinton, and only in his Senate trial."

It's hard to separate the sheer deceit in that claim from the self-deceit. A signed affidavit to a Congressional committee is, unlike a press story, a document with legal ramifications, and Hitchens knew it. And he obviously knew that the damage inflicted by an affidavit stating that Blumenthal had lied in his testimony could not be limited to Clinton. The idea that Hitchens wouldn't be hurting his friend was clearly a fantasy -- but perhaps fantasy is where Hitchens has been heading all along. "I would not testify against anyone but Clinton, and only in his Senate trial." Having been denied that opportunity, he has presented us with "No One Left to Lie To," the star turn he didn't get on the witness stand. And as the book builds up to the rhetorical flourishes of its conclusion ("It took no time to make up my mind that I wouldn't protect Clinton's lies, or help pass them along. I wasn't going to be the last one left to lie to"), we can hear music swelling, see the spotlights focusing, take in the camera rolling -- "I'm ready for my close-up now, Justice Rehnquist." The issues Hitchens is writing about are big. It's his ethics that got small.
salon.com | June 7, 1999

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