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Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, editor
4A • Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Corinth, Miss.
Monica, where are thou? I never figured on feeling sorry for Monica Lewinsky. She was too much like an Atlanta Hooters waitress I once interviewed who wanted to file a sex discrimination lawsuit. You asked for it, I thought. I felt much sorrier for the country than I did Monica in 1998, and for a progressive administration being held hostage by Congressional hypocrites who delved into matters Rheta that weren’t really their busiJohnson ness. But I didn’t despise Monica. Columnist There were too many other more repellant creatures on which to heap scorn: Linda Tripp, a Monica “friend” with less loyalty than a gnat; Kenneth Starr, who put one in mind of a backwoods lawman, a Barney Fife on morality patrol. Monica’s recent essay -- she’s decided at age 40 it’s time to speak up and give her version -- made some good points about feminism and its failures. Let’s face it. All great movements have failures. Monica quoted from an old story about a panel of celebrity women brought together at scandal time by The New York Observer. One woman writer, Katie Roiphe said this: “I think what people are outraged about is the way that (Monica) looks, which is interesting. Because we like to think of our presidents as sort of godlike, and so if J.F.K. has an affair with Marilyn Monroe, it’s all in the realm of the demigods .... I mean, the thing I kept hearing over and over again was Monica Lewinsky’s not that pretty. ...” It got worse. Erica Jong (”Fear of Flying”) said she thought Monica had third-stage gum disease, and Nancy Friday said if Monica ever needed work she could “rent out her mouth.” Another called Monica a “not-brilliant” woman, probably a relief as a sex partner after Hillary. So if Monica had been slim, prettier and a movie star with better gums and a degree from, say, Harvard, the jokes would have been less vicious? Women, at least, would have rushed to her side and said, “Wait a minute here, the man deserves half the blame”? Nah. The world doesn’t work that way, never has. Women are the ones who wear the scarlet “A” and the maternity clothes. Men wear smug looks on their way to the locker room. Monica makes the point that even Hillary didn’t blame Bill. She naturally blamed Monica and herself. She said she (Hillary) had been emotionally neglectful. And while technically the affair was consensual (to her credit, Monica never claimed otherwise), the president was older, should have been wiser and was in an employer role. Women owe a lot to Bill Clinton. I thought about him this week when his Supreme Court appointee Ruth Bader Ginsburg correctly wrote a scathing dissenting opinion about the Hobby Lobby contraceptive issue. We wanted to forgive him. Averting our eyes was the party line. Maybe we should have felt compassion, too, for the young woman who made a horrible mistake and still is paying for it. The one thrown off the bus and under the wheels. CORRECTION: In the June 23 column “Her Writing Rocks,” I wrote that singersongwriter Pamela Jackson had been widowed. She has not. Her husband died after their divorce. (To find out more about Daily Corinthian columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com.)
Prayer for today Lord God, I come to thee for help, that I may make more of my life. Steady me, that I may know its value without wavering, and the loss it sustains from wasted days. I pray that I may live more in thy commandments, and with my work accept the joy of thy love. Amen.
A verse to share “And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel, For which I am an ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.” -- Ephesians 6:19-20
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Impeachment, a bridge too far Increasingly, across this city, the “I” word is being heard. Impeachment is being brought up by Republicans outraged over Barack Obama’s usurpations of power and unilateral rewriting of laws. And Obama is taunting John Boehner and the GOP: “So sue me.” Democrats are talking impeachment to rally a lethargic base to come out and vote this fall to prevent Republicans from taking control of the Senate, and with it the power to convict an impeached president. Still, Republicans should drop the talk of impeachment. For the GOP would gain nothing and risk everything if the people began to take seriously their threats to do to Barack Obama what Newt Gingrich’s House did to Bill Clinton. The charges for which a president can be impeached and removed from office, are “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” With Bill Clinton, the impeachers had a solid case of perjury. With Richard Nixon, they had a preponderance of evidence that, at least for a time, he had sought to obstruct justice in the investigation of the Watergate break-in.
Article II of the impeachment of Richard Nixon was for misuse of the IRS in Pat what turned Buchanan out to be futile and failed Columnist attempts to have the agency harass political enemies by having them audited. As yet there is no evidence Obama knew of the IRS plot to delay and deny tax exemptions to Tea Party groups, which would be an abuse of power and a trampling upon the constitutional rights of Tea Partiers, who were denied the equal protection of the laws. The GOP response to the lost emails of Lois Lerner and crashed computers that went missing should be a drumbeat of demands for the appointment of an independent counsel, not an impeachment committee. Obama claims he did not learn of the IRS abuse until years after it began, and weeks after his White House staff learned of it. In the absence of those emails, the claim cannot be refuted. In the Benghazi scandal, the president’s defense is the same. He had no idea what was
going on. And cluelessness appears here to be a credible defense. Two weeks after the Benghazi atrocity, Obama was at the U.N. still parroting the Susan Rice line about an anti-Muslim video having been the cause of it all. Has the president unilaterally rewritten the Obamacare law, while ignoring the Congress that wrote it? Indeed, he has. But would a Republican Party that failed and folded when it tried to use its legitimate power of the purse to defund Obamacare really stand firm in an Antietam battle to impeach a president of the United States? Or is this just “beer talk”? Impeachment is in the last analysis a political act. The impeachment of Nixon was a coup d’etat by liberal enemies who, though repudiated and routed by the electorate in 1972, still retained the institutional power to break him and destroy his presidency. All three power centers -the bureaucracy, Congress, the Big Media -- worked in harness to bring Nixon down. No such powerful and hostile coalition exits today with Obama. In 2008, Obama carried D.C. 24-to-1 over John McCain. The While House Correspondents Association has at times behaved like an
Obama super PAC. Liberal Democrats dominate the bureaucracy and control the Senate. Any Republican attempt at impeachment would go up against a stacked deck. And the GOP would be throwing away a winning hand for a losing one. The effect would be to enrage and energize the Democratic base, bring out the African-American vote in force and cause the major media to charge the GOP with a racist scheme to discredit and destroy our first black president. Does the GOP really want a fight on that turf, when they currently hold the high ground? If you are winning an argument, why change the subject? If the nation is led to believe Republicans seek to gain the Senate so they can remove Barack Obama from office after a GOP-led impeachment, then Republicans are not likely to win the Senate. Maybe that is why the Democrats are wailing about impeachment. Republicans should take away the football. (Daily Corinthian columnist Pat J. Buchanan is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster.)
Racial differences are real but no cause for discrimination “New analyses of the human genome establish that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional,” writes Nicholas Wade in his recently published book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.” That sounds reasonable, and Wade, a science reporter and editor for many years at Nature and the New York Times, seems an unimpeachable source. But many well-meaning people will regard his words as provocative and even dangerous. For they fatally undermine the idea, widely shared by so-called progressives, that any apparent differences between groups of people are the product of nurture rather than nature, of social conditioning rather than natural selection. This has become dogma among certain social scientists. The American Anthropological Association states that race “is a recent human invention” and “is about culture, not biology.” The American Sociological Association calls race “a social construct” and decries “the danger of contributing to the popular conception
Reece Terry
Mark Boehler
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of race as biological.” Unfortunately for these folks, the decoding of the human Michael genome in Barone 2003 has led research Columnist to showing significant genetic differences among people descended from Africans, East Asians and Caucasians. Those differences include not only skin pigment and facial physiognomy but many other physical characteristics, including genes that resist endemic diseases and the ability to live at very high altitudes. Many of the progressives who reject the notion that races differ in significant respects are the same people who accuse those skeptical of global warming of ignoring science, even though the alarmists’ warming models don’t match the recent past or the present. These genomic-science skeptics fear that acknowledging differences between races will encourage people to engage in racial discrimi-
nation. That fear has some basis in history, as Wade concedes. But, as he argues, it has no relevance to life in America today. Americans today are entirely capable of understanding that there is more difference within racial groups than between racial groups. This is a lesson they pick up from their families, at school, at work and in everyday life. They know that some members of a racially or ethnically defined group that on average scores low on IQ tests will score far above average. They know that some members of a group that scores high on such tests will score far below average. From that observation, ordinary Americans readily conclude that it is irrational to discriminate according to race or ethnicity or religion and that it is rational to judge individuals on their own merits. So the fact that there are differences in average IQ scores, or in some other testable characteristic, between races does not undercut the case against group
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discrimination, at least for the large majority of Americans. But it does undercut the case for racial quotas and preferences. It undercuts the case for the “disparate impact” legal doctrine that the Supreme Court concocted in a 1971 case on hiring discrimination. “Disparate impact” doctrine assumes that in a fair society we would find the same racial or ethnic or religious mix in every school, every occupation and every neighborhood. But that’s nonsense, as anyone acquainted with American life knows. Americans are quite capable of treating individuals fairly even while acknowledging group differences that, as science shows, are the result of recent, copious and regional natural evolution. (Daily Corinthian columnist Michael Barone is senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.)
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