Archive [May 2000]

This is the picture Bill Clinton doesn’t want you to see, the searing image of a government marshal snatching a child from an unarmed man at gunpoint. MP5 submachine gunpoint, I should say.

Attorney General Janet Reno says now she “allowed” the photographer to take this picture. She is happy the photographer took this picture.

Don’t believe it. They did everything possible to prevent revelation of this moment … up to and including beating the NBC cameraman so badly he was incapacitated during the raid. By chance, an AP photographer — with his camera — slipped through the cracks. The Clinton spin machine immediately went into overdrive.

“If you look at it carefully,” Reno said, “it shows that the gun was pointed to the side, and that the finger was not on the trigger.” Who are you going to believe, Janet Reno or your lying eyes?

In 1987, immediately after Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, Sen. Ted Kennedy went to the Senate floor and declared: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”

Well, Senator. You protected us from Robert Bork. And you protected Bill Clinton from the consequences of his own deeds. And now we do have rogue police breaking down citizens’ doors in the dead of night.

This is Bill Clinton’s America. Or should we now write it, “Amerika.”