We Control the Horizontal ...

by J.D. Tuccille

The feds are now offering a handy new way for those of us with a bone to pick with the administration to sound-off directly to the powers-that-be. All we have to do is scrawl our missives in the margin of the 1040 form and it’ll make it’s way straight to the White House.

All right, all right — it’s a cheap shot. And we don’t yet know the full story on the IRS tax information that was supposedly found in some of the 340 ... 407 ... 700-plus FBI files that burdened White House shelves almost as weightily as the ... robust former White House Director of Personnel Security challenged the structural integrity of his government-issue chair.

But a nasty pattern is emerging here, one that is best summed up by the nickname given by White House aides to yet another database maintained by the White House on 200,000 Americans — they call it (and you can credit this to a generation steeped in Watergate and spy films): “Big Brother.”

Normally you can’t pay politicians to hand you material like that (well, you probably can, but nobody did), and this does raise a big old “What were they thinking” red flag, but we also owe these anonymous Clinton aides a vote of thanks for their honesty. What they’ve done is to succinctly tie together the unifying theme behind the accelerating pace of revelations oozing from the White House: Clinton and his cronies are control freaks.

Now, we’re all familiar with control freaks — many of us have lived with one at some time. They obsess the details, flip out at the unexpected, and at all times have to know exactly what we’re up to. When challenged they display a vast memory of slights real and imagined, and an uncanny knowledge of the contents of that drawer that you always kept locked. The Clinton White House is that neatness-obsessing foot-tapper, but with a vast police apparatus — sort of as if your ex had been made head of the CIA while you were breaking up.

Just think about the evidence: The 700-and-counting horded FBI files, the “Big Brother” database on 200,000 of the administration’s closest friends, enemies, and casual dinner guests, the pursuit of the ridiculously named “Communications Decency Act” — better known as the Internet censorship bill — up to the Supreme Court, the insistence on trapdoors into all private encrypted communication, Hazel O’Leary’s enemies list ...

Huh, that was the first time I ever put all this stuff into one place, and I don’t like it one bit.

That’s not to say that the Clintonistas are engaging in an overtly sinister play for police state power — it’s just that they can’t seem to tolerate the existence of any person, goal, thought, or activity beyond their line of sight. At some level I think they know that the rest of us don’t especially want political dirty-tricks boys pawing through our underwear, but the need to peek, peer, and pry is a nagging compulsion that they just can’t shake.

My Mom used to do that, too. I just don’t let her run the show anymore.

From the Notebook

You gotta love the latest last-ditch attempts at spin control on embarrasing White House revelations. Repeat after me: Hillary Clinton is not an old-fashioned spiritualist nut, she’s a modern New-Age wacko ... Hillary Clinton is not old-fashioned spiritualist nut, she’s a modern New-Age wacko ...

Next week: Absolutely nothing about the White House!

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Ah well, and so much for the power of argument. So back you go to Full Automatic or to my home page.