Don’t ask me why but lately my mind has been deeply preoccupied with fellatio. I mean much more than it normally is.
That in turn has led to thoughts of Matt Fong, the Chinese American California Treasurer who’s now in a dead heat for Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat. In turn, that took me all the way back to World War II.
No doubt part of it has to do with the fact that Clinton wasn’t sticking to the missionary position but was getting a blowjob while on the phone — a threatening image of alpha-male sexual dominance.
What’s the connection?
I would love to see an Asian American occupy one of the Senate seats from the nation’s biggest state. It’s high time, especially as Asian Americans would practically own the state’s choicest real estate today but for several tidal waves of institutionalized racism that have swept the state since the early days of the gold rush. It looks like Fong has an even chance of taking the seat come November. That excites me.
On the other hand, I’ve been growing increasingly outraged at Republican bosses for trying to strangle a presidency with a sexual witchhunt — despite the fact that I’ve always been a staunch Republican, even during the late 70s and early 80s when Ronald Reagan was a big joke to all those fashionable liberals. I always thought Democrats were plain out of it — mindless sheep who believed the world owed them a living.
Now I’ve begun to think the Republican party is about to suffer early extinction after it burns itself out trying to hound Clinton out of office — and falls flat and hard on its collective face. It’s hard to believe there are people left on earth today, even Bible Belt Americans, who really believe leaders should be burned at the stake for enjoying a little recreational sex on the side.
No doubt part of it has to do with the fact that Clinton wasn’t sticking to the missionary position but was getting a blowjob while on the phone — a threatening image of alpha-male sexual dominance that no doubt enrages people I call sexual communists. That’s a whole ‘nother subject I’ll address on another occasion in connection with a more appropriate topic.
The point here is, this fiasco is revealing the core Republican leadership as being grossly out of touch with ordinary Americans. They actually spout on about how we expect our presidents to be moral leaders. Bullshit. I’ve stopped thinking of our presidents as moral leaders at the age of 11. I don’t even think the Republican leaders themselves believe that nonsense. I think they think there are a lot of backwoods Americans who believe it, and are simply trying to exploit that sentiment to harass and distract Clinton enough to weaken his image, and that of the Democratic party, long enough to pick up a few extra congressional seats.
That’s bad enough, but what really angers me is that the Republican leadership is resorting to precisely the kind of tactics used by racists and demagogues to harass and intimidate Japanese Americans long enough to rob them of their property rights during during World War II.
They claim they aren’t talking about sex, but about perjury. Funny — that’s exactly what they told Japanese Americans in 1942— we aren’t talking about race but about loyalty and national security! After forcing 100,000 West Coast Japanese Americans to sell their farms, nurseries, stores and houses for a few pennies on the dollar on 3-days’ notice, the Federal government then shipped them off to remote camps surrounded by barbed wire. Then, just to make sure the Japanese Americans wouldn’t be able to work up the nerve to insist on their rights when the war ended, they forced them to answer the infamous Questions 27 and 28.
Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?
He could choose to answer the obnoxious questions truthfully and give tacit acquiescence to that unprecedented invasion of his privacy, an invasion to which no citizen need ever subject himself under the Constitution.
Imagine that! Asking young men who’d been stripped of every vestige of their constitutional rights — the kind of rights even normally enjoyed by foreign nationals under the Constitution — to pledge to go and fight for Uncle Sam! The fact that tens of thousands of them did, and with unmatched heroism, made the question even more of an outrage.
Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power or organization
It’s like asking you to swear that you have stopped beating your wife. If they answered no, they would be branded traitors. If they answered yes, innocent men and women whose only crime was being born Japanese American would be branded former traitors — in other words, without the ability to seek redress for the government’s atrocity. There was no way for a Japanese American to answer the questions and retain a shred of self-respect.
That’s precisely the kind of Catch-22 with which Kenneth Starr confronted President Clinton. He could choose to answer the obnoxious questions truthfully and give tacit acquiescence to that unprecedented invasion of his privacy, an invasion to which no citizen need ever subject himself under the Constitution — at least theoretically. Or he could refuse to answer it and, given the then prevailing climate on Capitol Hill, be legally ordered to answer it or face a trumped-up obstruction of justice charge.
The course President Clinton ended up taking won’t qualify him for sainthood, but it wasn’t unreasonable, or even particularly dishonest, especially for a sitting president in retention of his sanity. He answered the question in the strictest legal sense into which its meaning had been narrowed during his deposition in the Paula Jones case. I’ve read the definition of “sexual relations” in the Paula Jones case and agree with Clinton that it would not cover a situation in which he only received oral sex.
The truth is that the judge in the Jones case simply screwed up by approving a leaky definition, but under the circumstances — a gross, politically-inspired effort to destroy his privacy, family life and the dignity of his office — the President wasn’t under even a moral duty to take it upon himself to broaden the definition.
And now the Republican leadership hangs on for dear life in the way a pitbull has to hang on or risk getting trampled to death.
And Matt Fong is thought to be a beneficiary of the resulting fallout to the extent it will energize a higher percentage of core Republicans to turn out to vote out of office an incumbent democrat perceived to have been a laggard on distancing herself from Bill Clinton.
It’s a shame. Matt Fong’s victory, if victory it will be, will in the long run be tarnished by its association with this whole Clinton sexual witchhunt. Given our history in this country, I can’t imagine that any Asian American would want to be associated with any witchhunt of any kind — racial or sexual.
