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Clinton as Jesus

Newsday
December 21, 1998 Diane McWhorter

Clinton as Jesus, Republicans as Sadducees

Bill Clinton, obviously, is no Jesus Christ. . . . But indulge me in a political parable. A besieged conservative establishment that claims absolute custodianship; of a nation's laws furiously defends its dwindling power base against a charismatic upstart from the sticks. Showing a certain blithe contempt for those laws, the new guy challenges the whole concept of what that nation is.

Where his opponents have thrived on division and exclusion, he lays hands on just about everyone, rich and poor, sinners and saints, hipsters and squares, red and yellow, black and white, even women. In return, the reward him with a mysteriously enduring faith. . . .

These right-wing Republicans are like the Sadducees of the Jewish nation, the reactionary vested interests who carried out their narrow agenda through a strict interpretation of Jewish law--a code in which God's law was inseparable from the nation's law. The Republican's impeachment mantra--"the rule of law "--ostensibly referred to the Constitution.

But their conflation of American law and the absolutist word of a fundamentalist's God was made sensationally clear on Saturday, when Speaker-elect Robert Livingston stood in the well of the House and declared himself a sinner, urging his fellow adulterer in the White House to follow his example in abdicating his post. . . . Clinton's arch-enemies, meanwhile, flog the pieties of their "born again" doctrine, even as their most obvious secular icon is the country's corporate grim reaper, the tobacco industry. Theirs is a static vision of humankind as debased and shameful, condemned before a punitive God.

. . . That is Clinton's other blasphemy in the eyes of his enemies. By disgracing the sacrosanct office of the presidency, he also demystified the patriarchy that has run the country for its share of the closing millennium.

I wish Fryor Tuck would call on her to explain that analogy.