Date: Thu, 13 Jun 1996 08:23:56 -0600
From: "Howlin' Blue" <[l--oa--l] at [ICSI.Net]>
To: restore our constitution <[r--c] at [xmission.com]>
Subject: Maureen Dowd

LIBERTIES / By MAUREEN DOWD

Boom! Goes the White House

WASHINGTON -- The White House is about to be blown to smithereens. 

In a new movie to be released on Independence Day, called
"Independence Day," the White House is shown quietly at night when
suddenly it explodes into a big orange fireball. It is detonated by
space aliens, not by Republicans.

In movie houses everywhere, audiences wildly cheer the preview when
they see the White House vaporized. It figures. This city has not only
alienated aliens but earthlings too. In fact, alienating earthlings is
what the capital does best.

It is said that people get the governments they deserve, but can we 
possibly be bad enough to deserve this one? 

Here are the Republicans in Congress striving to arrive at a
compromise on the health-insurance bill so they can all vote for it in
perfect confidence that Democrats will hate it and the President will
veto it and the Republicans can therefore blame the Democrats for sick
Americans.

Here is the House Judiciary Committee struggling to avoid sanctifying
homosexual unions with the mantle of marriage and trying to make sure
non-English-speaking Americans can't read their ballots.

And worst of all, here is an F.B.I. that does not protect its most
sensitive files from politicos digging for dirt and a White House that
constantly forces us to wonder if it is filled with knaves or fools.

Bob Dole had been invoking the spirit of Richard Nixon, being coached
to smile more and visiting Nixon's grave in Yorba Linda, but now Mr.
Dole has stopped being like Nixon long enough to accuse Bill Clinton
of being like Nixon.

"I think it smells to high Heaven," he said about the gathering of
F.B.I. files on prominent Republicans. "I remember Watergate."

The Clinton White House only looks Nixonian. But it is neither clever
nor grandiose enough to qualify. Nixon was all paranoid forests and no
trees. The Clinton crowd is all paranoid trees and no forests.

It's exhausting listening to all their convoluted excuses and
backtracking and lawyerly rationales and demands for executive
privilege and mishaps with documents. This is the gang that couldn't
file straight.

The place is so overpoliticized that it might turn out to be the first
White House in history to be guilty of a cover-up and not a crime.
Sort of like smoking and not inhaling.

The President said yesterday that the White House collection of F.B.I.
files on Republicans was an honest mistake that wouldn't recur. But it
had already made the same mistake, drawing the F.B.I. into politics to
help justify the firing of the travel office staff in 1993, and
promised it wouldn't happen again. The White House put in place
safeguards to make sure aides would go through the Justice Department
in their contacts with the F.B.I.

Just a few months later, if you believe the White House, a low-level,
temporary employee (apparently unfamiliar with the name James A. Baker
3d) was collecting private files on hundreds of Republicans.

Safeguards, shmafeguards. 

Bill Clinton's style of casuistry and prevarication has been writ
large on his Administration. Blaming the computer is a little cheap in
a White House that boasted it would be the most wired in history. And
since when did large numbers of Republicans ever have access to a
Democratic White House -- or vice versa?

"If you accept the Clinton explanation that they needed to look at our
files to give us clearance, where are our invitations to state
dinners?" said Marlin Fitzwater, the Bush press secretary. "The scary
part is the vindictiveness of this Administration. They could have
fired the travel office people for political reasons but they chose to
make criminals out of all of them."

Kenneth Duberstein figures that all they learned from his F.B.I. file
was that "I'm a right-handed guy from Brooklyn who likes hot dogs and
pastrami sandwiches." He said that in the Reagan White House, the
President's counsel could only look up someone's file with permission
from that person. "I can't believe they're that stupid. They're always
blaming it on the little guy."

The little guy -- that's exactly who's cheering the preview for 
"Independence Day." 

Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company