Creep of the Week - May 9, 1998
The man who put scumbag into the public discourse is Congressman Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, who is chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, charged with looking into allegations of financial illegalities during the 1996 presidential campaign. Dan called Bill Clinton a scumbag a few weeks ago saying, "that's why I am after him." Dan's fellow congressmen mulled over whether the guy who's in charge of investigating the president should have already made up his mind about Bill's character, while the rest of us realized that even though Bill's been accused of countless sexual transgressions, no one's ever mentioned him wearing a rubber before.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Scumbag Story is how certain elements in the media are dancing around using the word itself in their reporting. Many copped out with a bland "derogatory term" description. The always intellectual New York Times was a bit more precise: "A vulgarity for a condom." The tabloid Daily News, normally blatantly in-your-face about everything, printed a headline containing a "S___bag." Shocking! Journalistic devices like that are an open invitation for people with overactive imaginations like mine to fill in the blanks. What was Dan calling Bill? A Shitbag? Snotbag? Slutbag? Sickbag, smutbag, spazbag, spitbag, suckbag, studbag? Or was he using one of my all-time favorites, slagbag?
In any event, if Dan's use of an invective was evidence that he was close to the edge, he flew off it at top speed this week when he released portions of taped conversations Webster Hubbell had with his wife and others while Webb was in jail. Webb, a former Justice Department official and Clinton bud, was in the pokey for double-billing his clients and stealing from his law firm back in Arkansas when he was one of Hillary's law partners. Ken Starr has been trying to squeeze Webb for years to spill what he knows about Whitewater, but Webb claims ignorance and faulty memory, saying he was too busy bilking people to pay much attention to that swamp land banking stuff.
Although it seems that Dan has the legal right to release the tapes, his political instincts and intelligence have to be questioned when you try to figure out why he did it. The first problem is that Dan edited the conversations before he released them and the Democrats jumped on that, claiming that segments favorable to Webb and the Clintons were omitted. When asked about this, Dan replied that Webb knew his phone calls were being taped and he might have been making favorable comments for that reason. Uh, Dan, if you can't believe what is being said on the tapes, THEN WHY THE HELL DID YOU RELEASE THEM?
Some Republicans in Congress are wondering the same thing. Speaker Newt Gingrich, who's gotten a much better feel for public perception in recent months, tried to talk Dan out of making the tapes public before the fact but failed. Things got so tense on that side of the aisle that Dan wrote a letter to his colleagues apologizing for "any embarrassment", admitting that "mistakes and omissions were made" in tape transcripts, and concluding, "I take responsibility for those mistakes." Good words, but in action, Dan subscribes to the "buck stops with the next guy" theory. Dan fired one of his top committee investigators, David Bossie, for giving him bad advice in this manner.
What should one conclude after watching these escapades? Is it any wonder Bill Clinton constantly looks better than the guys accusing him of high crimes and misdemeanors? Dan's only succeeded in making himself the issue here rather than what he's supposed to be investigating. He's also succeeded in convincing me that he's an odious and obtuse snake of a man with a cheap toupee whose right-wing partisanship makes Ken Starr look like an ACLU-card-carrying, American-flag-burning, nose-ring-wearing, Jesse-Jackson-voting liberal.
What kind of sexually transmitted disease protection and/or birth control device would you use to describe a man like that?
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