“How good of God,” said Samuel Butler, “to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable instead of four.” Pity is not the first emotion that springs to heart when contemplating the spectacle of President and Mrs. Clinton parading their latest acting triumphs on American television. Incredulity came first. But then, for me at least, came pity. Watching Mrs. Clinton come down the White House staircase accompanied by Barbara Walters was more revealing than the interview itself. The stiffness of the buttoned-up jacket, the regulation brooch, the smile that never reached her eyes, was the stiffness of a well-rehearsed but second-class actress about to give a performance on which more than her own career hung. All spontaneity was banished and all that mattered was remembering her lines. The only stumbling was clearly rehearsed. How else does one explain that this Yale-educated lawyer forgot for a moment the name of the organization that has been investigating her for four years.

It is harder to feel pity for the president. His smile does reach his eyes, and if his successive performances have put a strain on him, it’s hard to detect except in those rare moments when he laughs way too long or, if reports are to be believed, takes it all out on poor George Stephanopoulos, who is definitely showing the wear and tear.

Whether the Clintons are held together by the threat of mutual assured destruction or by undying love is beyond the ken of mere mortals to decide. But it must be very hard to be married to someone who knows the way to the Promised Land and who is sure about everything when you are sure about nothing except your desire to stay in the White House. If the definition of a martyr is one who lives with a saint, then perhaps we should feel a little sorry for the president.

The reign of the sinners was bad, but, as Cromwell discovered, the reign of the saints was quite impossible. And as for the reign of the ideologues, our century is littered with the tragic results of disregard for individual lives in the name of abstract humanity. Mrs. Clinton is out to save the nation, so how can we reproach her for trampling on seven solitary lives? Billy Dale and his six colleagues in the White House travel office were just in the way. So what if the effects of a 30-month investigation were devastating to Dale’s family, eating up all his savings and leaving him still at the mercy of continuing smears by the Clinton defense team?


In the memorable words of Arthur Koestler, “It would have taken a great deal of corpses to keep Gandhi in nonviolence.” And it has taken a lot of messed-up lives to keep Mrs. Clinton pursuing her mission of providing Americans with security from the cradle to the grave, lives of people perjuring themselves or suffering advanced stages of amnesia, or people who became targets just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Clinton scandals were never as significant as the Clintons’ political salvationism, their self-confessed “burning desire” to transform society through politics--that is, through big government programs. But where their ideology meets their scandals is in the persons of Dale and his crew. “We are human like they are,” Barney Brasseux, one of the seven fired travel office employees, said on Larry King’s show.

Our century is studded with leaders who forgot that simple fact. And it is political ideology, whether Marxism or Nazism, that has provided the justification for the chilling indifference to individual human lives in the interest of humanity at large. Dale didn’t matter. What mattered were Mrs. Clinton’s unimpeachable intentions to provide health care for all, child care for all and jobs for members of her inner circle. It is the same stunning dismissal of the personal that made it possible for Mrs. Clinton to write acknowledgments for her book that did not name a single human being.

To understand Mrs. Clinton’s arrogance and inability to admit even the slightest mistake, we need to see her as she sees herself: a disinterested force for good seeking to correct, through government, what all sensible citizens should recognize as evil. How many hells on earth have been unwittingly created by impatient ideologues, their gaze stubbornly fixed on their ultimate objective? How many innocent bystanders have been trampled because they stood in the way?


How many real live human beings with names and personal histories have been lumped together as faceless drones?

Ask those anonymous people who toiled hard to produce Mrs. Clinton’s latest variation on the same old theme: It takes big government to save us and our children. Calling big government a village is only going to fool those still willing to believe that giving cuddly pseudonyms to bankrupt solutions somehow makes them respectable again--and effective.