Gary Farber reiterates * his annoyance with Ann Coulter, pointing specifically to this comment that she made:

I think it?s wonderful that these people are being taken away in cuffs and that people are angry about it. But to say that Bill Clinton had nothing to do with that, when half the people on TV saying it?s fine to lie, cheat, steal, it?s just about sex. Well, apparently a lot of people who run corporations think it?s OK to lie if it?s just about money.

I think it was incredibly corrupting for America.

To which Farber comments:
It's all Bill Clinton's fault. Any fault of a human, due to Bill Clinton's parsing, is his fault. No one before him sinned or erred or is to be blamed. All after him him can blame their faults on Bill Clinton. After all, if you pile your errs on Jesus, you can be forgiven, but if you put them on Clinton, you're blameless, since he is, basically, apparently, the anti-Christ.

Just so we don't go overboard. It's all on demon Clinton!

I have the peculiar animus towards Clinton of a former believer. I defended him for two years against the mean Republicans before becoming disillusioned with the fallacy that he had even a modicum of personal dignity and honor. That being said, Coulter is obviously wrong here. The link between sexual and political misconduct with the fiscal and accounting ethical lapses of late are tenuous at best. So why is it so appetizing for conservative eyes to glaze over and soothingly say "yeeaaaahhh" when their ears hear such rhetoric?

It's because Clinton has come to represent our own version of the Original Sin. For the near future, everything that goes wrong in this country that has an ethical basis will emanate from the Clinton years and his presidency. We will look to the pre-Clinton years as a Garden of Eden in which personal accountability was the rule of the day. Then came Clinton. Clinton will have invented ethical lapses and immorality in a way that it never existed before. He took the fruit from the tree of knowledge and learned, and showed us, just what it is people without shame can get away with. Every sin will link right back to Clinton and Clintonism and the moral decadence of those years where not only he did these disgusting things and got away with it. He did them and he got away with it, but most importantly the people defended him! Our innocence has been torn away from us and paradise has been lost!

Non-Clinton-haters will remember it differently. In his book about President Clinton and the entire impeachment proceedings, Joe Eszterhas comes to the strangest conclusion as to who was behind it all: Richard Nixon. He talks eloquently of how Nixon stole the nation's innocence and faith in government and how he jaded and embittered us all, creating the force behind Clinton's corruption and the Republican's vitriol. To Eszterhas, and indeed many liberals, Nixon's were the original sins on which all sins will be based.

Of course, Nixon and Clinton invented government and personal corruption any more than Reagan invented poverty. These beliefs are generally tools that we use to explain the world as we see it through our biased lenses. Alluring as the thought is, Clinton is no more responsible for the personal corruption of corporate leaders than Bush is. The idea that Clinton created an "atmosphere" of personal degradation is pure bunk. So too is the idea that Bush is responsible because he created a pro-corporate atmosphere that emboldened these criminals that had started long before Bush took office.

In Clinton's case, he was the symptom rather than the harbinger of our scandalous culture. With a less sensational culture, his personal misconduct never would have recieved the attention that it did or the investigation. At the same time, a society that was less star-struck and superficial would likely have never elected him in the first place. For all Clinton's moral posturing, the public never really bought it. He wagged his finger and nodded and winked, and we winked back. As long as times were good and he was considered a moderate, we were willing to put up with a lot. Even if he had been elected in a more serious culture, he would have had to react differently to cling to power. He would not have been able to move from "I did wrong" to "none of this is my fault" nearly as quickly as he did. There would have been some personable accountability that he would have at least had to fake. The flagrancy of Clinton's immorality (which in many ways the right's biggest problem with it) would not have existed and there wouldn't even be the temptation to view him as the epitome of everything wrong with our shallow culture. He would have instead merely been the flawed human that made some mistakes and owned up to them. If he hadn't owned up to them with shame, he would have with punishment. If the public had been nearly as morality-minded as the right likes to think it would have been without Clinton, they would have demanded his resignation. In the face of dwindling poll numbers, don't doubt for a minute that Gephardt and Daschle would have made a magnanimous trip to the White House to tell Clinton "It's time" (to resign), much as Howard Baker did with Nixon years before.

But we didn't care. The personal corruption that we lament as being invented by Clinton actually propelled him to power. We didn't care what he did, who he was, or what he stood for a long as we thought he was doing a good job. Our tolerance for personal excess was high and that cleared the path for his ascent to power. We may not have known that Clinton was as outrageous as he was, but in the end we forgave him and put it behind us as quickly as we possibly could, tut-tutting him when it's easy and he is of no use to us anymore.

So Coulter and Eszterhas are, in the end, both wrong. The sins of Enron were not borne of Clinton or Bush, but rather of greedy minds and a culture that tolerates personal fallability and admires corporate shrewdness, allowing both to be taken to their most ludicrous extreme. There is the solid chance that Bush is as hung over as the rest of us are from its excesses, or perhaps he, too, will become the left's new Original Sinner of Greed, gleefully overlooking all that we overlooked in Clinton because he kept the money rolling in.

*- Blogspot being blogspot, you can try going here and doing a search for "Ann Coulter is insane"

UPDATE: Gary was nice enough to write me, expressing some confusion with what I meant by connecting star-power with someone who was, in 1992, a governor of a small, unglamorous southern state. Regardless of his political status, Clinton has always had star power. He played the saxiphone. He told MTV that he wore boxers and not briefs (or vice-versa). The first time many people heard of him was in connection to a sexual scandal that would have killed any lesser candidate. Unlike with Gary Hart, by the time Clinton came along the public was willing to put up with personal indescretions in return for someone as articulate and cool as Clinton always was. I wish I could properly attribute this (if anyone can, please email me), but in 1996 someone commented that Bob Dole had all the characteristics of a strong leading man, but Clinton had the marks of a star. I believe that was true since the begining.