Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

Joe Lockhart, former Clinton press secretary, describes the GOP's SOBS' SOP:
What they'd do is they would use the power of the subpoena to get document after
document out of the White House that they could then distort and leak. And it
was warfare. I mean, it was from the very first day Bill Clinton went in there, there
was a declared war on him.
Why did they hate Clinton so much? I think it's because we—and by that I mean Bill,
Hillary, and myself—I think we represented everything they despised. We were young. We
were charismatic. Bill Clinton, for example, "was tall and handsome ... [and] had a vitality
that seemed to shoot out of his pores." 1 The mauling of Clinton was payback for Nixon, Bork,
Iran-Contra, and Clarence Thomas (every time we caught them doing something wrong, they
got even madder), but more than that, it was payback for the sixties: Freedom Riding, bra
burning, pot smoking, free loving, tree hugging, draft dodging, Woodstock attending, Woodstock
overdosing, God not-fearing, and carrot cake. They've never forgiven us for carrot cake.
I don't defend everything that happened in the sixties. Just as I don't defend everything
that happened in any decade. The current decade, for instance, is not off to the best of
starts. But to the right, the Clintons embodied all of a generation's vices and none of its virtues.
The Clintons' energy, their intellectual intensity, their compassion for those on the margins
of society, their fundamental belief that the world could be made a better place—the
right found all of these extremely irritating.
So they weren't content just to call him a murderer and a rapist. The fact that Clinton
continued to be successful and popular left only one option. Clinton had to be removed. Determined
not to sink to his level and have the President "conveniently" run over by a train, the
Republicans took the high road and impeached him on blow job charges.
The story of Clinton's impeachment has been told many times and in many ways,
though not yet in an opera, which I believe is the form to which it is best suited. One version
of the story came from Kenneth Starr, who made his own perverse contribution to the tone in
Washington with his gratuitously pornographic Starr Report, which my publisher says I cannot
quote if I want this book sold in Wal-Mart.
The tone that Bush had promised to change had been created by his own party. His
pledge to change that tone contained both a promise and a threat. Elect me and the tone will
1 Hillary Clinton, Living History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.