Bill clinton

The right has a cannibalism problem. It gleefully attacks and eats its own. The left silently watches Republican after Republican do their dirty work for them. John Bolton is just the latest example of this problem. Sitting astride their high moral horses, establishment Republicans talk wistfully about the integrity of the presidency and the perceived damage Donald Trump’s personality and style are doing to it — as if Bill Clinton had not already defined the presidency downward.The left never attacks its own leaders in this way, which is why they’ve managed to enact far more of their policies over the last 30 years. The left knew that a morally repugnant Clinton allowed for the placement of thousands of political appointees who got their wish list done.

The Democratic party and the chattering classes are playing a dangerous game with impeachment. Their are two modern precedents — Nixon’s resignation before his probable impeachment in 1974 and Bill Clinton’s actual impeachment in 1998. But neither is comparable to the contemplated impeachment of Donald Trump. All impeachments are partisan, but this one is in doubly bad faith: it has no chance of succeeding in removing Trump, and it has no chance of acquitting him in a way that will strengthen faith in the country’s institutions. The only outcome possible is to confirm for Democrats and Republicans alike the idea that 2020 is a regime-change moment, for reasons that go far beyond Trump.

Ross Perot, who has just died at age 89, is wrongly remembered as the man who cost George H.W. Bush his re-election in 1992. He should be remembered as the man who cost his own populist ideas their chance to remake American politics 20 years before the election of Donald Trump. Perot showed the promise of populism — then betrayed it, bottling it up for the next two decades. As far as Perot was concerned, if populism could win without him, it shouldn’t win at all. And so he made it as difficult as possible for anyone else — Jesse Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and yes, even Donald Trump — to build on what Perot achieved in 1992. And maybe Perot did cost Bush I his re-election, just not in the way most people think.

The day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller arrested and charged me, the Nixon Foundation falsely claimed that I had no relationship with the former president. The Nixon Foundation’s statement is ludicrous. The Foundation is run by people who never actually met Richard Nixon. In 1972, I was a junior member of Nixon’s re-election campaign staff. I have pled not guilty to Mueller’s charges, and am respecting a gag order issued by the judge. But on the question of my warm and extensive relationship with President Nixon, the record must be corrected. In 1972, as the youngest staff member on the Committee to Re-elect the President, I shook the great man’s hand only once, when he toured the re-election headquarters.

There are no necessary truths any more. Everything is contingent. And those contingencies are the consequence not of what happens in the real world, but of the derangement in our own minds. Some will insist it was ever thus. Well, if so, it’s never been more evident. Take an example. We will never know the truth of the Kavanaugh case unless one of the two principal actors ’fesses up — and even then I wouldn’t be too sure. If the case went to court and Christine Blasey Ford were a reliable witness, and several of her contemporaries gave evidence that they witnessed the attempted rape and all Brett Kavanaugh did was mumble his repetitive idiocies, the right would still be insisting that it was a politically motivated put-up job.