President Clinton Scandal Essay, Research Paper

The name of the book is the death of outrage Bill Clinton and the assault on American ideals. The name of the author is William J. Bennett

The name of the publisher is Thee Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The year published is 1999.

This book has 6 main chapters that deal with

Chapter 1 talks about the SEX between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Another problem is Bill Clinton LIE under the Oath and behavior. Why do we care about that?

Chapter 2 talks about the Character of the Bill Clinton and identify what is the good character.

Chapter 3 talks about the politics and Bill Clinton politics

Chapter 4 talks about the Ken Starr and Bill Clinton

Chapter 5 talks about Laws

Chapter 6 is about the Judgment

Defendant Clinton stands accused in these books of moral turpitude, of “defining public morality down,” and of “assaulting” the ideals and standards of the people of the United States of America. By various means well known to the public, Bill Clinton “has defiled the office of the Presidency of the United States.” Twice elected to the said office, Mr. Clinton “has debased the White House,” claims attorney Ann Coulter in High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case against Bill Clinton. “Instead of reflecting Americans’ virtues and aspirations, President Clinton reflects the country’s dark side. Like a cancer, his own lack of integrity has infected the nation.” Indeed, she writes, “One of the most terrible things Bill Clinton has done to this country is to make it respectable to lie. As to the public-morals charge, my client has entered a plea of nolo contendere and is now touring the country supplicating for mercy. He has agreed to cease and desist from all further spurious and legalistic arguments and to refrain from any further abuses of power, asking only that be allowed to complete the term to which he was elected and that a forgiving public consider not only his own contrition but the sanctimony of his accusers, both Democratic and Republican. Consider attorney Coulter’s injudicious “cancer” comparison. Though, her brief is for the most part a lively and unanswerable case as to the constitutional points, here she employs a threadbare device well known to Republican speechwriters: Take every ill in American culture, and throw in a few age-old vices like lying and adultery while you’re at it, and lay them in a tidy bundle at the door of Bill Clinton. Typically the charge is wrapped, as in Mr. Bennett’s book, in unctuous flattery of the American people themselves, honest, decent, hardworking, and clean-living citizens all, who must surely be offended at these “assaults” on their moral standards. The “infection,” we are led to believe, this “defining down” of public morals, can somehow be stopped if only Mr. Clinton is remanded forthwith to the custody of Arkansas. What is this but an attempt by conservatives to play upon the very themes Mr. Clinton himself has so often manipulated, absolving the people themselves of responsibility, as if they have somehow been victimized by this man they twice elected to the highest office in the land, knowing full well his checkered history as to veracity and probity? For all its wisdom, Mr. Bennett’s case is fraught with contradictions. Like Miss Coulter, he considers the 1978 independent-counsel statute a “bad” and “unconstitutional” law, “undercutting one of the Framers’ first principles,” separation of powers. But bad and unconstitutional laws usually produce bad and pernicious results, a fact of logic he sacrifices to his moral quest against Mr. Clinton. He extols Americans for their unique “moral streak”: “Europeans,” Bennett remarks, “may have some things to teach us about, say, wine or haute couture. But on matters of morality in politics, America has much to teach Europe.” This in a book indicting American culture, “repudiating” America’s twice-elected leader, and sprinkled with quotations by such great American moralists as C. S. Lewis, Vaclav Havel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Pope John Paul II. Miss Coulter, too, ascribes seemingly all the vice and vulgarity of

modern culture to Mr. Clinton. “He has such a mastery of popular psychoses,” she observes, he could be Jerry Springer.” But scan some of the chapter titles in her otherwise thoughtful brief: “Kiss It,” “Blasting, the Bimbos,” “Fostergate,” “Earning Her Presidential Kneepads.” Goaded on, one suspects, by her editors, she describes the President as ” a horny hick,” an O.J.-like character, and a “pervert.” The tone adds title to her case, and indeed she and all the other pundits who have spent the last eight months talking and talking and talking about this scandal would do well to examine their own sense of public decency. That Bill Clinton reminds his critics of Jerry Springer does not give them license to mouth off at the President of the United States in

The tone of one of Jerry Springer’s guests. The “citizen-to-citizen” flattery dispensed with, Bennett closes his essay with the “hope” that Americans will “affirm” public morality,

Realizing that they have been “played for fools” by Bill Clinton. t is an admirable hope. But a hope is not an argument, and a close reading of the book will reveal that deep down his quarrel is with the people themselves. He has found an elegant way of saying that America is in danger of becoming a nation of amoral saps who must be protected from the consequences of their own electoral decisions. Bennett, after all, has been writing about the death of moral outrage and The Devaluing of America (his Bush-era manifesto) since long before defendant Clinton ever arrived on the scene. Now, suddenly, we are to believe that Bill Clinton is chiefly to blame for our moral crisis and that impeaching him might somehow reverse the fall of man. Yes, perhaps my client’s downfall would have a salutary effect on public attitudes-proving that even for him, character is destiny. But that is a moral, not a constitutional, point. Spare us at least the lofty democratic pretenses. The bigger business driving conservatives is not to “affirm” public morality but, by using Bill Clinton as an example, to reform it. Which raises, in turn, the question of why Mr. Bennett’s and Miss Coulter’s own political party twice failed to defeat a man by their own count base, amoral, phony, and manifestly untrustworthy. Perhaps, like Democrats in 1974, Republicans today are seeking to achieve by impeachment what they could not accomplish at the polls, branding as a threat to the Republic a flawed man whose most galling offense was to take advantage of their own failures and to exploit their own political weaknesses-a man who made light work of their incumbent President back when Republicans were congratulating one another on having an “electoral lock” on the White House. Say what you will of my client, but he’s a fighter. More than his obvious faults, maybe it is his perseverance, his raw willpower in the face of attack, that most unnerves his political opponents. Indeed, if there is any figure in the Republican Party to match him, it is Mr. Bennett himself, a man of enormous gifts who in 1996 as offered a chance to put Virtue, Inc., in escrow and make his case against Clinton as a vice-presidential candidate. How much timelier all this moral wisdom would have been two years go. If Mr. Bennett wants to bring morality and civility back into presidential politics-very well, then let our secretary of edification grab a mitt and get into the game. There is, in short, something a little too gleeful and overwrought in both these books. A certain amount of scorn is derstandable.

Bill Clinton has done much to deserve it. If, as seems likely, he leaves office, it will be for a fundamental lack of moral dignity and grace. Perhaps these final days would be a good time for his critics to show him what those virtues are.