Bill, Bill, Bill…

It’s an interesting moment in politics. On Wednesday, Fox News’ movie critic praised Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Yesterday, Jeff Jarvis waxed enthusiastically on Bill Clinton’s talk at the premier of The Hunting of the President, and last night Micah Sifry exposed the dark underbelly of the Clintons’ rise to power, the Whitewater scandal the Republicans never exposed because it was, well, so businesslike. (Thanks, Doc, for the pointer. Sorry we’ll miss each other.)

Micah quotes Roger Morris’ Partners in Power:

More than half those who bought Whitewater lots from the future president, his wife, and their extravagant partners would lose their land and all their equity payments. Partial records showed at least sixteen different buyers paying in more than $50,000 and never receiving property deeds. Meanwhile Whitewater carried on a flourishing traffic in repossessions and resales, selling some lots over and over when aged buyers faltered….Typically, Clyde Soapes’s planned fishing retreat was resold to a couple from Nevada for $16,500, then taken back again after only a few payments, and resold to yet other buyers–all for the same middling but pitiless profit wrung from the struggling and the old….’They screwed people left and right,’ said a local businessman who watched the sales. ‘Taking advantage of a bunch of poor old folks on a land deal….The future President and First Lady. That ought to be the real Whitewater scandal.’

Interesting. The right wing spent $80 million looking for something tawdry about the Clintons, and wouldn’t expose the real scandal because there’s nothing wrong with stealing money as long as you do it with a corporate charter and a lawyer. The well-documented conspiracy didn’t hound Bill Clinton for doing the hurtful things that they would have done, and probably had.

Instead, they hounded him for doing the things they dreamed of doing.

1:13:05 PM