I don't want, God knows, to add to President Clinton's shame. Not
since Jerry Falwell inflicted the president with his peculiar brand of
Christian ministry.
As bearer of The Good News, Mr. Falwell is selling $43 videotapes
passing along charges that President Clinton has engaged in just about
everything from sexual hanky-panky to complicity in the murder of
"countless people." Mr. Falwell says he doesn't know if the charges are
true, but he feels called upon by his ministry to disseminate them
because "the national media should have been doing it and has been
hypocritically quiet."
"We're simply saying these charges are being made, look at them and
determine what is true," he said on CNN's Crossfire show this month. "I
am making no charges whatsoever."
Imagine the trouble he could cause if he ever gets around to making
charges.
So I don't want to add to the President's heavy load. Still, the
national media have been hypocritically quiet about an even more
important issue than hanky-panky or murder, and I feel duty-bound to let
you all in on it.
Are you ready for this?
No you aren't, but I can't wait any longer for the miscreant media
to get on with their job.
Here it is: Without being at all judgmental, without making any
charges whatsoever, I have reason to believe President Clinton is
passing off an imposter in his current nomination to the Supreme
Court—a person who calls himself Stephen Breyer and says he is a
federal appeals judge in Boston and a one-time member of the Harvard law
faculty.
But the horrible truth just might be this: Breyer is an English
professor! Yes! The closest he may have ever been to the law was when
he paused ten seconds to watch "Night Court" while he was flipping
through the channels looking for "Masterpiece Theatre."
"Judge" Breyer has not, of course, admitted to any of this, but
what do you expect from an English teacher trying to pass himself off as
a judge?
The evidence is overwhelming to anyone with half a sense of just
how deceitful this administration is.
How else explain the AP photograph last week of this guy astride
his bicycle, wearing a short-sleeved, necktie-less unironed shirt and
baggy pants, supposedly on his way "to his office in the federal
courthouse"?
He's also wearing a goofy grin that suggests he's been caught in
the middle of some monstrous prank. The last person I saw grin that way
was an English professor who'd just been asked to justify the sabbatical
leave he was on.
And how are we supposed to react to the Knight-Ridder story telling
us that Breyer rides a three-speed bike and only one of the gears
works? Or that he once wore a suit for nearly six months "without
noticing, as nearly everybody else did," that an armpit was ripped out?
Or his wife's story about his coming up out of the basement for some
tools to fix a leaking water pipe?
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The Truth, Mainly
"Then he remembered something else he was supposed to be doing,"
she said. "He got in the car and drove away. He was gone for two
hours." When he came back, the basement was flooded.
That, I submit, is hardly the picture of a federal appeals judge
and one-time Harvard law professor. It is clearly a picture of the
kind of social misfit who hangs out in English departments throughout
the land, wondering if he's had lunch and when his next class is,
thinking long long thoughts about ironology, deconstruction, and
dangling modifiers.
Is that the kind of person we want interpreting the law of the
land? Somebody who talks about the disappearance of the author, about
the fallacy of trying to read the writer's intention, about double
negatives making a positive?
And the President's nominee doesn't help his credibility at all
when he pledges "to cut legal jargon and write clearly."
That's supposed to be a lawyer talking?
I'm not sure if Prof. Breyer—we'll pretend that's his real
name—has deceived the President or if the President is deceiving the
American people. We may or may not have in the White House a willing
dupe of the National Council of Teachers of English, a useful idiot
waiting to be exploited by the Modern Language Association.
I make no charges whatsoever. I simply bring the facts to light so
that others may decide guilt or innocence. When you've got a
hypocritical media refusing to say anything that might embarrass the
President, somebody—Jerry Falwell and I come to mind—has to do the
dirty work.
Satterfield is a college professor and writes as a means of discovery.
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