PrintJanuary 28, 2008
Who's Afraid of John McCain?
When the New York Times endorsed John McCain last week, the conservative blogosphere was quickly abuzz with the obvious harm the left-wing newspaper would do to McCain's chances of winning the Republican nomination.
Enter Bill Clinton, known to all in the land as a man of the utmost honesty.
According to Honest Bill, if Hillary and McCain face off in November, the election will be perfectly civil and above-board in all respects. Why?
"She and John McCain are very close," Clinton said. "They always laugh that if they wound up being the nominees of their party, it would be the most civilized election in American history, and they're afraid they'd put the voters to sleep because they like and respect each other."
Pardon me for questioning the veracity of this statement.
John McCain may actually be a very forgiving man, and able to bury even the bloodiest hatchet.
I seem to recall, however, from one of the debates earlier this year, Mr. McCain making reference to Senator Clinton's attempt to spend $1 million of taxpayer money on a Woodstock Concert Museum to honor what McCain called a "cultural and pharmaceutical event." His good-natured mockery of the Woodstock Concert ended with, perhaps, the most memorable line uttered by any candidate so far this year:
"I wasn't there. I was tied up at the time."
Now, Senator McCain's reference here to his days as a prisoner of the Viet Cong in the Hanoi Hilton did indeed seem quite cordial, even friendly. And perhaps if Senator McCain and Hillary Clinton do face off in the general election, there won't be even a single low blow thrown by either candidate.
Does Bill Clinton really believe this?
Or he is so afraid of a John McCain candidacy that he is rather transparently trying to dissuade Republicans from giving McCain the nomination?
I'll place my bet on the latter; Bill Clinton is afraid of John McCain.
When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, he somehow wormed his way clear of the facts that during the 60s he was a pot-smoking, anti-war-demonstrating draft dodger.
While the valorous John McCain was "tied up" in Hanoi by some of the most barbarous enemies America has ever faced, Bill Clinton was in England on a Rhodes Scholarship, demonstrating against the war.
Bill Clinton had used his campaign work for Democrat Senator J. William Fulbright to wrangle help from the Senator in bending the Selective Service rules and get him into the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). But after the lottery system was instituted and Bill got a number so high he knew he would never be drafted, he wrote to the head of the University of Arkansas ROTC that he wanted out of the program. Bill wrote that he was in the difficult position of those "loving their country but loathing the military." He added that he needed to "maintain my political viability within the system."
What a hero.
For Bill's 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary hired an old friend from Chicago, attorney Kevin O'Keefe to deal with Bill's draft dodging and spin it into a non-issue. Perhaps it was O'Keefe who engineered the theatrical reconciliation between Bill Clinton, draft dodger, and a Vietnam War POW, Ronald Patrick Murphy, at a University of Nevada campaign rally.
Murphy, one in a crowd of thousands, completely by happenstance, caught the eye of Bill Clinton because he was wearing a military veteran's cap. In a moving moment, with cameras rolling, Murphy embraced Bill Clinton as they both wept, while Murphy told Bill, "I would rather have your name on the presidential ballot than on the Vietnam wall."
The media response to this emotional scene was predictably overwhelming and positive. Murphy was depicted as a former POW and Vietnam veteran, who had been wounded in action. And just as predictably, Bill Clinton's draft dodging slipped into the annals of forgotten issues.
Only problem was that Murphy's actual military record showed a different story. He was never a POW. He was never wounded. And rather than being involved in combat, he was a data processing repairman, serving in a secure, air-conditioned building.*
Our watchdog media, however, failed to unearth this truth before Bill Clinton was ensconced in the White House.
Call me a skeptic, but I really don't think Bill Clinton believes that John McCain is going to let these little details slide by him in 2008.
And what patriotic endeavors were occupying Hillary Clinton's time and attention while John McCain was "tied up" in Hanoi?
Well, I don't know if Hillary actually made it to the Woodstock Concert, but she certainly wasn't serving America's war cause either. She was making a name for herself among the anti-war left. She was being indoctrinated into the anti-America cause at the elite, all-female Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
For publicly upbraiding the distinguished African-American Senator Brooke in her commencement speech, she was given fawning press coverage in Life magazine, which even featured a photo of the young radical in her coke-bottle glasses, wearing striped bellbottoms and sporting the tangled, unkempt hairdo so common then among those rabid, rebel feminists.
And what was Senator Brooke's "crime"? He was both a Republican and a supporter of our efforts to defeat the North Vietnamese.
When Hillary turned down a job offer by Saul Alinsky and opted for Yale Law School, she wasn't rejecting the socialist doctrine, she was simply opting for a different method of pursuit. While at Yale, Hillary didn't write for the traditional Yale Law Journal. Instead, she served as one of the initial editors of the newly formed Yale Review of Law and Social Action, a now-defunct publication committed to showing how the law could be used as a vehicle for dramatic social change.
One of Hillary's progressive social-change causes became the Black Panthers, some of whom were on trial in New Haven for an especially brutal murder of one of their own. During the trial, Hillary's journal published cartoons depicting the police as pigs with wet snouts, who uttered extreme racial slurs. One cartoon asked the question, "What is a pig?" with the answer, "A low natured beast that has no regard for law, justice, or the rights of people; a creature that bites the hand that feeds it; a foul depraved traducer, usually found masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack." "Pig" was 60s radical nomenclature for a police officer.**
Hillary was so enamored by the Black Panther cause that she took an internship in the law firm of Robert Treuhaft, a former lawyer for the Communist Party, who also represented a number of Black Panthers. Bill and Hillary spent that summer of 1972 in an apartment in Berkeley, the undisputed hotbed of the radical leftist movement. While John McCain was still imprisoned by the Viet Cong enemies of the United States, Hillary and Bill were enjoying the view from the Berkeley Hills, learning how to use American law to fight for their cause of socialist revolution.
In light of all this past history, I'm inclined to believe that Bill Clinton would prefer that he and his wife not have to re-visit any of these troubling issues during another presidential campaign.
Neither the public, nor John McCain, is liable to let all of this go during 2008, when the nation is at war.
So, when Honest Bill says what a virtual love fest a Hillary/McCain match-up would be, he is:
A. pulling our legs; or
B. calculatingly trying to dissuade Republican voters from giving John McCain an opportunity to re-visit the Clintons' radical pasts.
I'm going with B.
*These details are from Stolen Valor, by B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley; pp. 523-524.
**Information on Hillary Clinton at Yale Law School is from Hell to Pay, by Barbara Olson; pp. 59-61.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver@yahoo.com.
