The President of the United States Stands Naked
The impeachment of
President Clinton dominated front pages around the world this weekend.
Britain's Sunday
Times called for Clinton's resignation, saying that the spectacle of a
trial in the Senate would subvert "America's responsibilities as the world's
only superpower." Meanwhile, the right-wing Spanish newspaper ABC applauded impeachment because it illustrated "the fact that even
[the president] is subject to political machinery of rare democratic
perfection."
Where the Sunday
Times suggested that Rep. Bob Livingston's resignation "shows Mr Clinton
the way," an editorial in the Age of Melbourne, Australia, called it "a bizarre
political gift" to the president. Livingston's act "instantly blurred the
Republican argument that the President's impeachment is based on the issue of
lies and the law rather than sex. ... Mr Livingston's resignation unleashes the
spectre of a political system convulsed by regular revelations of sexual
affairs and demands from the Republican's [sic] religious right for
sexual purity."
Australia's Sydney Morning Herald presented the weekend's events as "the logical conclusion to the
late-20 th century drama which has been quietly corroding the old
certainties of political power throughout the world's mature democracies. ...
That is, when the personal really is political, not merely a feminist
catchcry, and when new technologies and competition are driving the media to
deliver unparalleled, all-news-all-the-time access to the lives of those in
power, we should not be too surprised to see a US President on the brink of
losing his job for having an affair."
In Britain, the
Independent on Sunday , which called Clinton "a shallow, fawning mountebank, and a man whose
serial adultery might be overlooked more easily but for his serial mendacity,"
was just as hard on his Republican foes. It said, "The party of Lincoln and
Eisenhower seems to have been possessed by a zeal which is less 'republican' or
'conservative' than Maoist. These people will not be happy until they have
inflicted ritual humiliation on Clinton in the spirit of the Cultural
Revolution." An editorial in Sunday's Jerusalem Post concurred, describing the impeachment
debate as "a disgraceful partisan spectacle, an act of vengeance rather than
justice, a triumph for the fundamentalist Christian Right that will haunt
Republicans for a long time."
Clinton's comment last week that attacking Iraq during the
Muslim holy month of Ramadan would be "offensive" drew several responses. In
Britain, the Times said that the "considerate gesture ... is like any
hiatus in hostilities, a backhanded concession to the victim: a hearty
breakfast for a condemned man." In Lebanon, an editorial in Saturday's Daily Star suggested that the strikes would have been
more effective if they had been made after Ramadan ended and predicted that "it
now seems likely that the strikes will have to be suspended for about a month
while devout Muslims take leave of food and drink during daylight hours and Mr.
Clinton continues to take leave of his senses at all hours. Having been
supplied with so much notice, Saddam will then be able to make good use of that
month to conceal or destroy whatever the U.S. and Britain failed to eliminate."
(For more on the etiquette of fighting during Ramadan, see
Slate
's"Explainer.")
Britain's involvement in the Iraqi airstrikes
earned it little more than condemnation and condescension. A Sunday op-ed
column in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz
said that the "British mobilization ... helps London more than it helps
Washington. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who contributed a symbolic squadron of
Tornado bombers to Clinton, is only signaling that the Americans are not
alone." Writing in Canada's new national newspaper the National Post Saturday,
Mark Steyn observed that the U.S. media coverage of the strikes barely
mentioned Britain's participation: "This is the thanks a chap gets for
providing the most naked of presidents with his only international fig
leaf."
An editorial
in Sunday's International
Herald Tribune , headlined "Britain's Slavish Devotion to America,"
claims that Britain's tendency to ally itself so closely with the United States
reflects the country's inability to reconcile itself with Europe. Instead the
British have attempted "to stay on the world stage by associating themselves
with U.S. global supremacy. The United States finds them useful and is too
polite to tell London how little weight it carries in the world. The Germans,
French, even Italians and Spaniards, may say so. But they do not say it in
English. So Britain does not hear."
