The Good Old Days

I got a subscription offer from The American Spectator today. For the low, low price of $39 dollars I can relive the glory days of the 1990s when the Clintons were in the Whitehouse and the Spectator's circulation surged towards half a million. That was before it all blew up. As Byron York described in the Atlantic Monthly a few years back how the magazine was essentially laundering millions of dollars going into a dubious investigation in Arkansas before their backers cut them off, and almost killed the magazine. The offer includes a free gift of a bookmark that has a picture of, the letter helpfully explains, "our famous -- some may say infamous -- 1994 cover of Hillary at the height of the Travelgate scandal."

In light of the scandalous way that the Bush administration conjured up a bogus case for war that they had every intention of fighting anyway, all the while issuing phony terror alerts to further whip up fear, I find it hard to sustain my outrage over "travelgate" and "filegate."

After the administration lied (to fellow Republicans in Congress) about the cost of the new Medicare drug benefit, it puts the whole Monicagate scandal in perspective.

I am in no sense an admirer of either of the Clintons. I reccomend that you read the devastating assessment of the Clinton years by someone who isn't a republican shill. From Waco to Kosovo, Bill Clinton almost always made the wrong choice. But the Spectator crowd, led by their editor, we'll call him Boy Tyrrell, put their collective fingers into the wind before they decide critical issues.