Social criticism with a hammer

EJ Dionne, a Washington Post columnist I am quickly coming to dislike intsensely, weighs in today with a column entitled "Where's the Outrage Now?". His thesis is that all conservatives everywhere have been exposed as hypocrites by Arnie's eletion in California; he equates Arnie's alleged groping of women (which he says conservatives ignored) to the entire Clinton imbroglio, in which all conservatives (as he sees it) denounced Ol' Bill solely for sexual pecadillos:

In the California recall, the right wing's moralistic masters of attack choked on their own partisanship. These are the people who praised the "courage" of anyone who reported anything embarrassing about the sex life of a certain former president. Then they painted all who did not respond with indignation as "apologists" complicit in America's moral decline and the "death of outrage."

Dionne misses a few points here. His argument rests on two assumptions: (1) the Arnie and Clinton issues are the same and (2) all and only conservatives voted for Arnie. But neither of these is accurate.

To take the second point first, it is not at all axiomatic that all and only conservatives voted for Arnie. McClintock got 1 million votes to Arnie's 3.7, and those voters were, I assure you, not generally more liberal than those who plumped for Arnie. Second, as even Dionne admits, Arnie won over a lot of traditional democratic voters: According to Dionne's figures, he got "37 percent from union members, 31 percent from Hispanics, 20 percent from self-described liberals and 18 percent from Democrats." And Arnie's first act has been to appoint a transition team full of liberals and others who are not traditional conservatives. So making him into the prototypical conservative poster boy is foolish and wrong.

Second, Dionne misses the point that thoughtful conservatives made about Clinton. I don't want to rehash this argument over and over, but Dionne just ignores that fact that Clinton lied under oath, which is a federal crime. I am not discounting the unpleasant moralistic tone with which the Starr report was written, and I recognize that many Republicans took a perverse glee in the sexual details it contained. I also concede that many (me included), did not think the impeachment was right or wise. But to reduce the entire Clinton affair to sex and nothing more is intentionally to close your eyes. But it gets the results Dionne wants, and it enables him to lambast conservatives, which is what he's invariably looking to do.
- posted by Anonymous @ 8:30 AM