Friday, September 25, 1998

Where's Bennett's outrage about B-2, buying of Congress?

By Donald Kaul

William Bennett, the Virtue Police Chief, has written a book entitled The Death of Outrage. It's subtitled "Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals," which pretty much tells you what it's about.

He argues that the continued high job approval rating of the president, even by those who dislike him personally, is an emblem of our "moral and intellectual disarmament."

Were we really a moral society, he argues (presumably as we were when we had racial segregation, child labor and no Social Security), we'd be so outraged at the president's actions that we would demand him gone, no matter what the economy was doing.

Just like a conservative; money means nothing to him. Being celibate, monogamous or chaste, those are the important things.

Predictably enough, I disagree with Mr. Bennett, a pompous blowhard who is easily our single most overrated intellect.

The reluctance of the American people to form a lynch mob against the president is a matter of good, common sense, rather than moral flaccidity. Their responses to polls show they don't approve of Clinton's private life and think he's a pretty poor excuse for a family man, but that he's doing a good job as president and they don't want to throw him out just yet. What's wrong with that?

Most Americans, I think, are reluctant to make hasty judgments on a public figure's private life, largely because many of us have things in our own private lives we wouldn't like to see up on a billboard in Times Square. Bennett apparently suffers no such compunction.

It must be swell to be that much better than other people.

I, too, however, must confess to wishing the public had a keener sense of moral outrage. I wish, for example, that people were more outraged at the waste symbolized by the B-2 bomber, a $2-billion-per-copy plane that doesn't work terribly well and, in any case, is so expensive we're afraid to use it anywhere.

They might also be outraged at President Reagan's absurd Star Wars program, on which we have spent billions with nothing to show for it. Even now industry shills like former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld beat the drums for an antimissile defense system to guard against missile threats from rogue nations like Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya.

They neglect to tell us that, even after all these years and all that money, the antimissile missile idea is a colossal failure, flunking test after test.

And, in any case, if a rogue nation wanted to hit an American city with an atom bomb, it would be more likely to smuggle one into the country in a suitcase. Who needs missiles, which announce where they're coming from?

It is a gigantic scam whose purpose is to rid us of our tax dollars and hardly anyone is outraged about it, including Bill Bennett.

You want to get outraged about a report? How about this one: Last week the Center for Public Integrity issued a report called "The Buying of Congress," in which it documented the way big money interests - tobacco, drugs, health care, air lines, banks, telecommunications firms, the lot - bribe Congress into passing legislation that favors them and not passing laws that cost them money.

The report tells you how much money the industry gave ($30 million from tobacco in 1987-96) and what it got for it (no antitobacco legislation).

The report came out almost simultaneously with the Senate's action in filibustering campaign finance reform to death.

And Bennett wants us to be outraged at Clinton's moronic behavior?

That's way down on the list, and it should be.

Actually, a George Washington University professor has written a paper suggesting unfaithful husbands tend to make better presidents than faithful ones, with Warren Harding being the great exception. The author admits the paper was not a totally serious enterprise, but there's a grain of truth there.

If I had any outrage left over, I might spend it on the specter of President Clinton's videotaped testimony before Starr's grand jury being made public. I didn't expect the testimony to remain secret, but I didn't think we'd be watching it on Entertainment Tonight, either.

The president's critics are constantly reminding us that no man is above the law. Surely not, but no one is below it either, not even the president.

When you come down to it, outrage is a lot like sex: different strokes for different folks.

E-mail Donald Kaul at otcoffee@aol.com or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services. Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.