Clintonite Savagery, Politicians' Hypocrisy
Still, Clintonite violence is nothing surprising, as Janet Reno's victims in Waco could have told you had they lived, and as inhabitants of such unlucky places as Sudan and Iraq will testify. What's more notable at this point is the orgy of shamelessness and dishonesty that the administration's actions?true to the Clintonites' seemingly conscious mission to debase the American public discourse to unplumbed depths?have generated among politicians.
Rudolph Giuliani, for example, who on Saturday compared the federal agents involved in the raid to "storm troopers," opined that the government should have stayed its hand and exhausted all legal options before launching a raid. Here, then, is a mayor whose police force has been authorized to search and harass citizens at will?a mayor who's reflexively hostile to civil liberties and almost neurotically enamored of state power?criticizing Federal agents whom, had they been New York City cops acting against some kid holed up in his mother's apartment in Bed Stuy after jumping a turnstile, he would have been defending.
Similar dishonesty was betrayed by some of the louts who represent the GOP in Congress and the Senate. It's interesting to learn that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Rep. Tom DeLay were offended by the raid. The former is threatening hearings and the latter has called the action "unconstitutional." True enough?but one doesn't imagine that Lott's and DeLay's solicitude will extend to the harmless marijuana farmer who finds his door smashed in by armed Federal thugs acting without a warrant.
The so-called left, meanwhile, has been just as mendacious. Jesse Jackson and, locally, Rep. Charles Rangel and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, all three of whom can be expected to scream bloody murder every time a New York police officer so much as looks crosseyed at a thug of color, expose themselves now as supporters of law enforcement and?as Nadler revealed when he claimed the action was necessary to "reunite [a son] with his father"?militant defenders of family values.
What this bipartisan mendacity reminds us is that there exists no mainstream American political faction that can be relied on to contest government violence and overweening state power in a principled way. That's disheartening: it testifies to a soullessness at the heart of American politics, to a bipartisan authoritarian viciousness that unites Republicans and Democrats, Rudy Giuliani and the Clintons. For the "left," violence isn't violence when it fulfills the agenda of its yuppie-authoritarian friends in power. And for the right, government savagery's to be denounced for gain in the short-term, even as conservatives' punitive law-and-order agenda foments that violence the rest of the year. Maybe, under the circumstances, Elian?who by the time he reaches manhood will have seen Castro buried anyway, and who can be expected, as a child, not to experience the full implications of Castro's brutality?would be better off in Cuba after all.