CLINTON'S ADMISSION that he lied under oath about his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent publication of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's charges, has triggered a serious political crisis for the US president. The scandal further exposes the political corruption of the two parties of capitalism, strengthening the widely held idea that politicians and the mass media are all liars and hypocrites.
While the media have produced thousands of hours of footage and pages of titillating details of the affair, the real problems facing working people face in this country are pushed further and further into the background. Where is the outrage about the fact that tens of millions of people are without healthcare coverage, that almost a quarter of all children live in poverty, that the combined wealth of the richest 1% is greater than the wealth held by the bottom 90%, and that the average US worker now works three weeks longer than 30 years ago?
The reasons for the investigation and unprecedented grand jury dragnet of Kenneth Starr are to be found in the political war of the Republican party's Christian-right against the Democrats, and against Clinton in particular. This serves to disguise the absence of any serious policy differences between the two parties and to rally the Republican electoral troops for the mid-term elections for Congress being held this November. The Clinton scandal has now displaced the corruption scandals involving Newt Gingrich and other Republicans, who can now appear as 'respectable' politicians, defenders of 'family values', and so on.
Although Clinton has shown himself a completely reliable conservative capitalist politician (having abandoned nearly all of his promised reforms early in his first term), Christian-right Republicans continue to regard him as a draft-dodging left liberal, with friends in Hollywood. Incidentally, this shows their colossal capacity for hypocrisy since they have virtually deified Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood B-movie actor (and an FBI informer as well). Dan Quayle, Bush's vice-president, avoided the draft by getting a nominal position in the National Guard, while the Christian right also conveniently forget the sex scandals of right-wing preachers like Reverend Jimmy Swaggart and Jimmy Baker.
The Republicans are using the Lewinsky affair to exploit the conflicting cultural, generational and regional attitudes that exist among US voters (well under half the electorate actually vote). Moralistic scandal-mongering is an everyday weapon in the scramble for the trough of political office, and also feeds the media's depraved need for sensational 'news'.