When Hillary Rodham Clinton blamed a "vast right-wing conspiracy" for the brouhaha over her husband's occasional use of Monica Lewinsky, she seemed to have reached the apex of silliness. But when she added last Monday, to an interviewer from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, that "a lot of this is prejudice against our state; they wouldn't do this if we were from some other state," she managed to overreach even herself -- blaming bias against hillbillies for the pursuit of her Rhodes Scholar husband.
Alas, records exist to be broken, and just two days later, in a column in the Los Angeles Times, the novelist Gore Vidal proved once again why he is the silliest person in America still allowed access to pencil and paper. "What is behind this vendetta against Clinton?" Vidal demands -- and plumps for the two most obvious answers: "the rage of lumpen white Americans against blacks" and "the wealth of corporate America." It is the racist world of American business -- typified, Vidal believes, by Richard Mellon Scaife -- that "declared war on the Clintons in 1993 when the innocent couple tried to give the American people a national health service." And it is bigoted corporate America that has unleashed Kenneth Starr, "a one-time judge of meager intellectual capacity but deep faith in all the superstitions [i.e., God] that ruling classes encourage the lower orders to believe so that they will not question authority."
Vidal has always been more than a little bit nutty and more than a little bit slutty. Until you've read the scene in Myra Breckinridge in which a half-transgendered woman takes a boy up to her room for an afternoon romp, you have no idea of just how polymorphous a perversity can be. In his defense of the president, though, Vidal proves more narrow-minded: "Does a frictive act performed on a passive president, idly daydreaming of the budget, count as intercourse?" Absolutely not, he decides, unless the "sturdy Secret Service lads join in."
However much she tries, Hillary doesn't have what it takes to play in this league. When he concludes, "I should not in the least be surprised" if Starr "were to be put promptly on trial for treason against the United States and its people," Vidal shows the gulf that exists between the professional crank and even the most talented amateur.