THE AMERICAN LEFT GOES NUTS

Mark Steyn says it is no longer extreme

Republicans who are guilty of foaming at the mouth

New Hampshire I THINK I speak for most right-wing bas- tards when I say that we take a quiet pride in being reviled as patently insane. In recent years, Bill Clinton has blamed con- gressional Republicans for the Oklahoma bombing and Jesse Jackson has fingered Newt as the root cause of a wave of black church burnings (a completely fictional wave, as it turned out). When a young gay man was beaten up and hung out to die on a fence in Wyoming, this crime was laid at the feet of the Republican Senate leader Trent Lott, even though the two bar-room bozos who did it have never heard of Sena- tor Lott. (I wish I could say the same.) When an abortionist in Buffalo was mur- dered by a sniper, the religious Right were responsible because of their campaign of `hate' — i.e., a quaint attachment to what every major religion on the planet regards as the sanctity of human life.

You could make a more compelling case that Al Gore inspired the Unabomber's murder campaign given that, to judge from the extensively annotated copy of Al's book on environmentalism found in the eco-ter- rorist's Montana cabin, he's the only guy who's managed to get past page seven with- out falling asleep. But no one would dream of accusing Al of fomenting hate because he's so obviously reasonable and Republi- cans, with their vast army of gun kooks and religious wackoes, are so obviously nuts.

But, sad to say, the strains of defending Bill Clinton are taking their toll of Ameri- ca's Left. In the Nineties, Democrat suc- cess has been predicated on a winning formula of sounding conservative but house-trained, Republican but sedated. But, having stolen the Right's policies, Democrats are now stealing the Right's eye-rolling, foaming-at-the-mouth, flipped- their-lid, out-of-their-tree, loonier-than- thou demeanour. There are still odd pockets of calm among Clinton defenders; for example, Time's Margaret Carlson sym- pathetically suggested the other day that `we all have a little Clinton in us'. Er, that sounds like wishful thinking on your part, Margaret. But these days the tone is more typically set by the likes of Hollywood hunk Alec Baldwin appearing on NBC television. Invited to share his thoughts on the impeachment debate, the great thinker and rumoured Democratic congressional candi- date unburdened himself: 'If we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us together, go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde to death.' Warming to his theme, he continued, 'And we would go to their homes and we'd kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families.'

The Capitol Police in Washington have launched an inquiry to see whether Bald- win's remarks constitute a death threat. I have some sympathy for the excitable fel- low. I was gratuitously abusive of him and his wife, Kim Basinger, in The Wall Street Journal last year and he responded rather drolly. It seems barely credible that a chap should let himself get so worked up over Bill Clinton. But, like the President, Democrats now wander about permanently aroused. John Conyers, the senior Demo- crat on the House Judiciary Committee, regularly denounces the impeachment pro- cess as 'a right-wing coup d'6tat'. When he's really working the crowd, he adds that it's also 'a crime against the United States and the people' perpetrated by 'clinical psychopathic' Republicans.

Russell Baker, gentleman columnist of the New York Times, despises the GOP as desperate 'to cleanse the Republic of a President they portray as abominable and loathsome, and quite possibly Satanic'. But just where, as a matter of interest, are they doing all this 'portraying'? During the House 'debate', the clinical psychopaths mostly contented themselves with more-in- sorrow-than-in-anger recitations of their constitutional duty, dressed up with the odd quotation from the Federalist Papers. In between, the Democrats rose again and again to reiterate and amplify the Conyers line: it was a 'coup d'etat' by `right-wing Christian Coalition extremists', said one Congresswoman; 'constitutional assassina- tion' by 'provocateurs', said another, who would, added a colleague, have 'blood on their hands'. Eventually, California Demo- crat Tom Lantos stepped forward and began, 'I rise as the only member in the history of the Congress who has lived under and fought against both fascism and communism.' At last, I thought, someone with a sense of proportion. But no: from this congressman's unique experience, the House of Representatives was distinguish- able from fascist and communist legisla- tures only insofar as it was managing to be both simultaneously. By indulging in this debate, said Lantos, the House had become no different from 'Stalin's parlia ment' or 'the Reichstag'.

Away from the chamber, Democrats are, happily, less constrained. Stomping out of an unsatisfactory meeting with Republican big shots, veteran feminist Betty Friedan dismissed them as 'a bunch of dirty old white men'. Run that by me again, will you? It's the Republicans who are the dirty old men, not the guy with his penis in the subordinate's mouth? The one who never took it out long enough to exchange even the most perfunctory social pleas- antrie,s with her until their fourth 'date'? Sounds like the feminists have a bad case of what psychologists call `displacement'. And what's with this 'dirty old white men'? Toni Morrison's claim that Mr Clinton is `our first black President' seems to have leapt from metaphor to fact: from slavery to desegregation to the next great African- American civil rights issue, the right of horny Democrats to get blown without being set up by whitey's racist justice sys- tem.

`We are looking at theocrats,' bellowed feminist intellectual Blanche Wiesen Cook at a Clinton rally in New York. `We have to mobilise like we.mobilised against the war in Vietnam, like we mobilised against slav- ery. This is about race,' she roared. 'This is about crack cocaine in the neighbourhood.' By the time Baldwin (again), Miss Morri- son (ditto) and novelist E.L. Doctorow had had their say, apocalyptic prophecies were a dime a dozen and Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Jnr had his work cut out. But he rose magnificently to the occasion: 'I think of the millions and millions of people who will suffer and die because the Republicans want to get President Clinton for a person- al sin.'

Driving south the other day, in search of suffering, corpses, mass graves, etc., I switched on the radio and caught WABC's Sean Hannity in conversation with Profes- sor Alan Dershowitz, former O.J. lawyer and friend of the First Family. The profes- sor opined that Republican congressman Bob Barr of the House Judiciary Commit- tee was a white supremacist. Hannity begged to differ. 'You're a horse's ass, a wimp and a liar,' yelled Dershowitz. 'You'll be working at McDonald's next year because you're playing ball with racists.'

`Shut your jackass professor mouth,' said Hannity. 'You're a failed talk-show host who has the nerve to call people racist after you sat silent while the race card was played in the Simpson trial.'

I was on a radio show with Dershowtiz during the O.J. unpleasantness and he didn't call me a horse's ass. He was a Kennedy liberal and genially full of shit, as is their wont, but he didn't seem to be the sort of person who'd suddenly go berserk and consign you to the ranks of burger-flip- pers for disagreeing with him. Yet almost every day now, in one public forum or another, prominent liberals are saying things that are, by any reasonable standard, completely bananas. According to the Democrats' own censure proposal, Bill Clinton has 'violated the trust of the American people' and 'dishonoured the office which they entrusted to him'. If that's the way his own party feels, it's sure- ly unobjectionable for the Republicans at least to consider the question of his fitness for office. But every time they do Democrats scream that it's playing 'parti- san politics' in an effort to stop the Presi- dent's 'agenda' and 'disenfranchise every man and woman who went to vote in 1996'.

But what 'agenda'? His proposals for teenage curfews and school uniforms? Bill Clinton's about the best Democratic presi- dent a right-wing crazy could dream of: when he's not getting oral sex from interns, he's playing golf with Vernon Jordan or going to fundraisers with Steven Spielberg. I'll bet, if the First Lady's 'vast right-wing conspiracy' is ever uncovered, it turns out to be a Republican plan hatched in the Six- ties to plant a draft-dodging pothead dou- ble-agent in the White House. Al Gore, Dick Gephardt or almost any other Demo- crat would be far more dangerous from an `agenda' point of view. And 'disenfranchis- ing'? Every elector who voted for Bill Clin- ton also voted for Al Gore. And what idiots would organise a 'coup d'etat' that winds up installing their political rival and enables him to run in 2000 as the incum- bent president? As for playing 'politics', with every single move against Mr Clinton his numbers climb further into the strato- sphere and theirs go down the toilet. Either Republicans are so dumb they're holding the graph upside down or — per- ish the thought — they're acting out of principle.

After his impeachment, the President intoned solemnly, 'I have accepted respon- sibility for what I did wrong in my personal life.' Read those last four words: in the long year since he first committed perjury in his Paula Jones deposition, Mr Clinton's position has shifted not an inch. Month by month, his hapless pals have had to con- cede the factual evidence, the law and the sleaziness of their man's behaviour. That doesn't leave much else to talk about except white supremacists, crack cocaine, the Reichstag and stoning Henry Hyde. Still, the President's doing his best to give them a new tack: 'We must stop the poli- tics of personal destruction.'

Yes, but who's behind 'the politics of per- sonal destruction'? Who sent out presiden- tial aides James Carville and Sid Blumenthal to smear Paula Jones as trailer- park trash and Monica as a stalker? The Christian Coalition isn't leaking revelations about gay Democrats. Instead, Larry Flynt, distinguished pornographer and loyal Democrat, is turning Hustler — once a widely admired periodical for aficionados of sadism and bestiality — into the house organ of the Clinton administration: having lowered the boom on Bob Livingston, Larry now says he's got the goods on another 11 congressmen — ten Republicans and one Democrat — but he's only going to out the Republicans.

If you'll forgive a touch of humbug, there's something almost tragic about the corruption of liberal idealism. Bill Clin- ton's tainted seed has seeped into the party's core and infected its soul. As in the final stage of syphilis, an appalling pustular madness has set in, as gibbering feminists, blacks, artists and intellectuals froth ever more wildly in defence of their leader. Mr Clinton's assault on language has corrupt- ed the culture, so that words no longer have any reliable meaning. Even when the President says he has 'accepted responsi- bility', it's only up to a point. According to the New York Times, he's told aides that Ken Starr is 'partly to blame' for his affair with Monica. If Judge Starr hadn't pursued him with such excessive zeal over White- water, Mr Clinton wouldn't have been so angry and stressed out that he wound up seeking solace from Miss Lewinsky.

No wonder Clinton defenders have a hard time coming up with rational argu- ments. Sometime in the next two years he'll be gone, but it will take his diseased party far longer to purge the last residues of his toxic stewardship from their system.

Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now, by Mark Steyn, is available for £20 post-free from the Spectator Book- shop. To order please ring 0541 557 288, quoting ref SP030.