Following the Money

Testimony by Janet Reno and Louis Freeh reminded me of what so occupied them, and all of us, during the latter years of the second Clinton Administration. It was like an 800 pound invisible elephant in the Commission room while they testified, namely, the yeoman efforts of Ken Starr.

According to the GAO, and they say it’s pretty hard to figure, in their “Combating Terrorism: Spending on Governmentwide Programs Requires Better Management and Coordination” (Letter Report, 12/01/97, GAO/NSIAD-98-39), the FBI spent $79.3 million on unclassified counterterrorism efforts in 1994. It ramped up steadily to $393 million by 1997. But that $79 million stuck in my mind.

We spent $70 million on Ken Starr and countless amounts of public and governmental time on this investigation of Presidential moral turpitude. So maybe, as we reflect on how we got to 9/11, we should also reflect on this focus of resources and attention on the personal mistakes of a handful of people, too.

Clinton was a pretty slimy guy in a lot of ways. In his personal life, he’s what I call a user. Of course, all politicians are users…but he had a way of hanging his good buddies out to dry. Not a trait I consider admirable, but that’s just my opinion.

From the standpoint of what’s good for the country, my take on the 9/11 rehash is that we all made a mistake…Last time I checked, L’Affaire cost us no State secrets, nor lost any American lives. At least, not directly because the President cheated on his wife.

And while we wasted money and time on the fascination with prurience that enveloped the soul of the neocon movement, our real enemies pursued plots against us. Real plots with real dangers.

Maybe you think pornography and weak morals will bring down this country. I do not. Frankly, and I know this is harsh, we would all be safer if Americans took care of their own morality and let the government take care of (and limited itself to) defending us against threats like terrorism and acts of war.

History has not spoken its final word on the matter, just yet. Perhaps it’s worth having the government involved in fighting gay marriage and messing with people’s sex lives and defending prayer in the school and fighting a war on pornography. But the evidence so far shows that the terrorists that have attacked this country are pretty uninterested in those issues.

Of course, those are terrible things to them, but we are not earning our infidel stripes because we let gays live, but not marry, or women get abortions or adults buy pornography.

And they like prayer in the school just fine. In fact, at their schools all they do is pray, they don’t even learn anything that might put a meal in front of the many hungry people in their antidemocratic and destitute dictatorships and theocracies.

But I digress. Nothing Clinton did in his private life, which we wasted so much time and money on, not even the lies he blatantly told the Feds when they caught him at adultery, had one damned thing to do with the threats to this country then, or the ones that we face now.

The only thing our relentless pursuit of moral turpitude did during the Clinton years, and is doing now, is to distract us from the real threats and the real war between our culture of freedom (including the freedom to be a damned and immoral fool, in my opinion) and the cultures of enslavement practiced by those who wish us harm and call us “infidels” for not seeing things their way—and ultimately submitting to their rule. ¶ 10:09 AM