Thursday, May 15, 2008
Janet Reno blew it; Al Gore's a shaved terrier; Ricky Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow are tedious; Harper's Bazaar kicks Vogue's ass; and a few words on opera.
Sep 8, 1999 | Greetings, Salon readers! My column returns after summer hiatus with a new format, which will allow greater flexibility as we move into the 2000 political season. I will continue to respond to questions, however, and the column will as usual cover the full range of contemporary issues, from culture to politics.
My summer report begins with my enormous sense of satisfaction and relief over the renewal of public attention to the Waco disaster, which was so foul an affront to American civil liberties. The abortive investigation into the 1993 incident, in which more than 80 members of cult leader David Koresh's Branch Davidian religious sect died in a fire at their Texas compound, is currently being blamed on the FBI's withholding of crucial information from Attorney General Janet Reno, who had just assumed office.
But the major media, with their strongly liberal bias, are equally guilty, for in trying to protect the new Democratic president, Bill Clinton, they let Reno get away scot-free with her blatant mismanagement of the Waco standoff. At the quickly convened congressional hearing into Waco in 1993, Reno's self-righteous invocation of the child-abuse card deserved to be derided and rejected by the media, who were already in a state of collective amnesia over the appalling spectacle of government tanks knocking down the buildings of a private citizen.
Where were America's leftists after Waco? Diddling their thumbs in their urban and campus coteries, as usual. The shocking absence of protest about this incident drove the issue underground. It reemerged two years later on the lunatic far right, in Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City on the anniversary of Waco, at the cost of 168 lives.
This is a good example of what I have described as the principle of rightward drift in populist thought (a phenomenon also germane to the endless blunders of insular gay activism). When authentic critique is silenced or censored by the left, issues drift subliminally to the right, where they burst out again full-formed as fascist violence.
Government authority was illegitimately used at Waco -- and one fascism begot another. A side effect has been the destruction of yet another female professional reputation: Janet Reno's mishandling of Waco, like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's folly in leading us into a senseless, hideously expensive war over Kosovo, shows that women, when placed in high office, can be just as incompetent as men.
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