David Corn is Washington editor of The Nation magazine, the oldest political weekly in America. He writes on a host of subjects, including politics, the White House, Congress, and national security.

He has broken stories on Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Oliver North, Colin Powell, Richard Gephardt, Hillary Clinton, Rush Limbaugh, Clarence Thomas, Senator Paul Laxalt, Senator Robert Bennett, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and other Washington players.

Corn has contributed articles, including political satire and book reviews, to The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, Newsday, Harper’s, The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Washington Monthly, The Village Voice, The New York Press -- which features his weekly column "Loyal Opposition" -- and many other publications. He also writes for several on-line magazines, including Slate, HotWired, and Salon.

He is the author of Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades (Simon and Schuster, 1994). The Washington Monthly called Blond Ghost "an amazing compendium of CIA fact and lore." The Washington Post noted that Blond Ghost "deserves a space on that small shelf of worthwhile books about the agency." The New York Times termed it "a scorchingly critical account of an enigmatic figure who for two decades ran some of the agency's most important, and most controversial, covert operations."

Corn was a contributor to Unusual Suspects, an anthology of mystery and crime fiction (Vintage/Black Lizard, 1996). His contribution to the book -- a short story entitled “My Murder” -- was nominated for a 1997 Edgar Allan Poe Award by Mystery Writers of America. The story was republished in The Year's 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories (Carroll & Graf, 1997).

Corn frequently is a guest on television and radio talk shows. He has been a panelist on CNN's Capital Gang, and he is a regular on C-SPAN. He has appeared on ABC News, CBS Morning News, Fox Television News, Fox New Cable, Crossfire (CNN), Washington Week in Review (PBS), Equal Time (CNBC), Tim Russert (CNBC), Tribune Television, MSNBC, and other shows and networks.

He was a co-host (with Pat Buchanan) of the nationally-syndicated radio show Buchanan and Company. He has appeared often on the syndicated Diane Rehm radio show, and provided commentary to National Public Radio. He is a featured guest on RadioNation, a nationally-syndicated show. He has contributed political commentary to BBC Radio, CBC Radio, Pacifica Radio, Australian National Radio, and has been a guest on scores of call-in radio programs.

Corn, thirty-nine years old, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University. Before joining The Nation, he worked for Ralph Nader's Center for Study of Responsive Law and Harper’s magazine.

Click here to read more of David Corn's Loyal Opposition.

The Thrill Is Gone

With the mysteries of Monicagate now resolved -- they did it; he lied -- the saga is threatening to become bogged down in the muck of Capital Hill, where the characters are too-familiar and their motives too transparent. As Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Henry Hyde squabble with Richard Gephardt, Barney Frank and John Conyers over what material to release and how to proceed, the script appears clear. The Republicans are happily on the impeachment track from now until Election Day. They care not about the don't-impeach polls. But not for the reasons you want politicians to eschew polls. Between now and November 3, the GOPsters are not playing to the masses. They merely want to gear up their voters -- put the taste of blood in their mouths -- so the faithful flock to the polls. Impeachment is the GOP election strategy. They don't want a deal. Most of the political community expects the coming congressional contests to set record lows for voter turn-out. In such a situation, a small number of highly motivated balloteers can dramatically sway races. For six weeks, then, the Republicans will say they don't care that polls show the American public is opposed to impeachment. They will don their somber statesman masks and prattle on about their solemn duty to proceed carefully, deliberately (and slowly!) down this path, knowing that by pursuing impeachment they are shooting anabolic steroids into Republican-leaning voters.

Once the election results are in, the Repubs can reevaluate and decide if impeachment remains in their political advantage. They may then find it hard to back away from the process, and in the short run they might piss off large chunks of the public with the drip-drip-drip. But the GOP doesn't give a darn about any of this. The party leaders are betting that there will be no profound backlash -- that is, not one with electoral consequences. That's probably a smart wager. But with these guys, you can never tell. In the throes of orgasmic joy, they could go overboard enough to prompt the only anger that counts: voter anger. Witness their gleeful release of the videotape of the President's grand jury appearance -- the biggest flop since The Avengers. It did not change pubic sentiment, as many Republicans believed would happen. Bill Clinton's approval ratings got a boost after the much-hyped broadcast.

As for Bill Clinton... who cares? Yes, Kenneth Starr is a zealot who should never have been independent counsel in the first place and, considering his political baggage, should never have sought authority to probe the delicate topic of the President's private life. But once the battle was engaged, Clinton had two options: to fight the probe's legitimacy or to deal with it (and deal with his aides, his supporters, and the public) honorably. Instead, he tried to Slick Willie his way through a dilemma born of his own recklessness and selfishness. With his well-honed survival skills, he may well skate through this scandal. But in keeping with Clintonian tradition, it probably will be his allies who bear the cost. After leading his party to an embarrassing and historic defeat in 1994, Clinton, in 1996, saddled it with his own campaign finance scandals and undermined the Democrats' attempt to win back the House. This year, because Clinton stuck to his lie for seven months, the Democrats are forced to confront his dishonesty as the campaign season kicks off. What's he going to do to his party in 2000? Grab an AK-47 and fire on kids in a schoolyard a week before the elections?

Since Clinton waited so long to come clean, his party-mates are screwed. They cannot dump him so close to the election, for that would cause an internal dust-up not likely to inspire Democratic base voters. They cannot defend him without looking foolish. And they fear that following him into the elections is akin to trooping behind George Armstrong Custer on the way to Little Big Horn.

What's surprising is the support Clinton has garnered from the most liberal quarters, namely the Congressional Black Caucus. Representative Maxine Waters seems his most vociferous defender. She maintains she is only advocating a fair process. Yet when Clinton appeared at a CBC dinner, with Waters at his side, he was greeted with thunderous applause. Has Waters and her supporters forgotten about welfare reform, the crime bill, the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, NAFTA, and Lani Guinier? In each of these episodes, Clinton told the CBC to take a hike. Where is the inner-city policy? Clinton deserves a slice of praise for backing the earned income tax credit, which assists low- income workers, many African-Americans among them. But what of concrete use has emerged from his race initiative? He has not been a loyal ally of this community.

It's obvious that the CBCers are freaked by the prospect that the Gingrichian, anti-affirmative action right might attain even more power in Congress. No doubt, they sincerely believe, as Waters said, that "as African- Americans, as people who have a history of having to fight to make sure there's justice and equality in the criminal justice system, we can't allow anybody to be railroaded." With polls showing Clinton's support highest among African-Americans, it's good local politics for Waters and Company to be in his corner. Nevertheless, it's painful to watch Clinton exploit good will he has done little to earn. Clinton's standing among African-Americans also protects him from any dump-him sentiment that might be floating within his own party. (Not that there's much of that.) The Democratic Party is nowhere without black voters.

"It's ironic that the people he has helped the least are supporting him the most," says one liberal House Democrat, who is white. "I can't get over that." The aide to another House Democrat asks, "What has he done for the African- American community? It's weird. What's the positive? If there is an after to all this and Clinton survives, what do they think he's going to do for them."

Speaking as a white progressive -- perspective declared! -- it was also sad to see President Nelson Mandela, a class act, be drawn into this Clinton support club. In the East Room of the White House last week, this man of courage called Clinton a "friend of South Africa and Africa and... the friend of the great mass of black people, and the minorities, and the disabled of the United States." Mandela may not be fully briefed on welfare legislation in the United States. But Clinton was AWOL when Rwanda went through a horrendous genocide and he subsequently lied about his state of knowledge at the time of the disaster. Sure, Mandela stands by his supporters (Qaddafi and Castro included). But Clinton does not deserve to bask in his glow. He is owed all the loyalty that he gave Lani Guinier.

Pat's War

"Monicagate is a battlefield in the war for the soul of America, a war that is religious and cultural in character, as well as political."

So spewed pugilist-pundit Pat Buchanan in his syndicated column last week. Seems as if a sex-and-lies presidential crisis that raises the specter of impeachment ain't a big enough deal for Buchanan. It has to mean more. Just as did Watergate. That scandal, he insists, was not about President Nixon's rampant abuses of power; rather, it was "a political execution" conducted by "an establishment" that detested Nixon. For Buchanan, Monicagate is the front-line in a "cultural war" that pits "believers in an older moral order against the Woodstock generation." In this configuration, Clinton is the prince of the 1960s, who has led the crusade to push the values and practices of that decade--the joy of sex, acceptance of homosexuality, abortion rights--into America's mainstream.

Buchanan is still settling scores from decades ago. He swipes at the brave civil rights activists, sneering that "in the name of civil rights," activists believed they "were entitled to engage in civil disobedience." He blames all the nation's ill on those years.

Thanks to the 1960s, he adds, "Hollywood today celebrates values that are the antithesis of the patriotism, courage, fidelity and honor it celebrated only 40 years ago." Pat, get out more. Or rent some videos. Suggested viewing: Saving Private Ryan, Independence Day, Apollo 13, Jerry Maguire.

The nut of Buchanan's jeremiad is that because the attack on Clinton is an attack on the cultural elite, watch out for the counter-attack. "That elite, which believes itself almost god-like because of the causes for which it fights -- AIDS research, anti-apartheid" (hmmm, are these illegitimate causes?) "-- is not going to humbly accept such a verdict upon itself."

Wait a minute. I'm confused. The media, we've been told repeatedly, is more angry with and disgusted by the President than Joe and Josephine Citizen. The dismay runs from spindits like George Stephanopoulos and Dee Dee Myers to The New York Times editorial page to assorted political jabbering heads. Is this bunch not part of the "social and media elite" Buchanan so regularly decries? (Isn't The New York Times party central for the "social and media elite"?) Fellow boomers are some of the President's most vocal critics and dogged pursuers. Boomer-envy may well be fueling the media assault against Clinton.

There's another problem with Buchanan's analysis. As we are presently learning, membership in the Woodstock generation was not so cut and dry. While teenagers openly frolicked in Max Yasgur's mud, Henry Hyde, the pro-family values advocate who now chairs the House Judiciary Committee, was freewheeling in Chicago, stepping out on the missus to romp with another. A few years later, Representative Dan Burton, who has led the Republican jihad against Clinton, fathered an out-of-wedlock child. Bob Dole, Mr. Republican, left Wife Number One and started an affair while he remained married. Newt Gingrich--well, the list can go on.

Sorry, Pat, adultery is nothing new. (Check your Bible.) It was not invented in the 1960s. The "social and media elite" is not rallying for Clinton and is not engaged in warfare to preserve the right to fuck (or receive incomplete blow jobs) outside of marriage. (I know, for a fact, the "social and media elite" does not even hold meetings.) Try as he might, Buchanan cannot hijack the spectacle of Monicagate for his own fundamentalist purposes. What does it mean that the public is less outraged by Clinton than Buchanan and others in the media? Perhaps there's no real battle to be had. Maybe the Woodstock generation long ago won the hearts and minds of America--without ever having to fight Buchanan's war. How sixties.

Past Is Not Prologue

So far it does not seem that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has unleashed the hounds in response to the GOP request that it investigate whether the White House leaked word of Henry Hyde's affair of 30 years ago. There's also no sign that Hyde will try to enforce a troubling memo he issued days before Salon, an Internet magazine, broke the story. In that memorandum, Hyde declared that if "supporters of the president" disseminate "derogatory personal information about members of Congress," they could be prosecuted for obstruction of justice.

I haven't noticed much complaining among right-wing pundits and other conservatives about this burgeoning Republican Party effort to revive the Sedition Act of 1798. Back then, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed a bill, signed into law by President John Adams, that made it illegal to utter or publish "any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or the President, with the intent to defame...or to bring them...into contempt or disrepute." This was one of the most repressive pieces of legislation enacted in U.S. history. The point was to gag Republican criticism of the Adams Administration. Hyde and the House Republican leadership are imitating the old Federalists. All lovers of liberty and a free press should hope that the FBI disregards the GOP's call and that Hyde's memo has been relegated to a circular file.

Let's have one more relevant flashback: It's 1989, somebody on Capitol Hill is peddling the allegation that House Speaker Tom Foley is gay. This whisper campaign becomes public, backlash ensues, and the story of the moment is, who's behind this? Eventually, the sleaze-attack is traced back to the office of Newt Gingrich, and an aide named Karen Van Bocklin. These days, Republicans are screaming for the head of Sidney Blumenthal, a White House aide, who has been accused of conducting a let's-smear-Republicans operation out of the White House. (See my column from last week for proof that Blumenthal was not behind the Hyde story. On other fronts, I have no firsthand information about his activity.) So, continuing our stroll through history, what happened to Van Bocklin? Did the Republican leadership banish her from its ranks? Gingrich said she would be suspended without pay--not fired--if she again talked to the press. In other words, the Republicans let her get away with it.

Real Screwing

Can you stand a little policy, instead of sex-and-lies-and-hypocrisy politics? No? Too bad, here it comes. As Monica matters monopolize attention, House Ways and Means Committee chairman Bill Archer of Houston, who represents one of the richest congressional districts in the nation, has been pushing an $80 billion tax cut. Sound like a good idea? Over one-third of it goes to folks making above $100,000 a year; only one fifth benefits households making less than $50,000 (a group that comprises 64 percent of the United States). More importantly, it's a blatant raid on Social Security. Archer claims that he is only grabbing 10 percent of the estimated budget surplus over the next five years for this tax give-back. But, according to the Congressional Budget Office, all of the surplus for this period will come from Social Security. (For now, the Social Security program is taking in more than it is paying out.) In fact, remove Social Security from the budget numbers, and the rest of the federal government is estimated to rack up a $137 billion deficit in the coming five years. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, "There is no surplus except for the reserve building in the Social Security system."

Consider what is under way: Archer is tapping that reserve, which could be more appropriately set aside to cover the boomers' retirement, for a tax cut with a big payoff to the rich. Keep in mind that the tax that produces this reserve is a regressive one. For Social Security, the government taxes income only up to about $65,000. Bill Gates pays as much Social Security taxes as a college professor. So Archer wants to raid a pot of money which comes mostly from the pockets of middle-income Americans and hand a chunk of that booty to the well-to-do.

There's a lot else wrong with his scheme. In an attempt to end the so-called marriage penalty tax, his plan supplies a tax break to couples unaffected by the penalty. (The cost: $15 billion.) Under his proposal, a single person, instead of paying 42 percent more income tax than a married person, would pay 49 percent more. (Listen up, you uncoupled Manhattanites!) And Archer would rush to implement the scheduled boost in the amount of an estate that is exempted from inheritance tax. The 1997 tax bill raised the exemption from $600,000 to $1 million, but the change was not to kick in until 2006. Archer would start it up in 1999. This accelerated tax relief, he claims, is necessary "to allow parents and grandparents the right to pass their life savings onto their children without the government confiscating it." That's misleading. The provision affects less than 2 percent of the population. Most of us can leave our estates to heirs free of any taxes.

All in all, the most egregious aspect of Archer's plan is his snatching of Social Security funds. In search of political cover, on Friday, the House Republican majority, over the objections of Democrats, approved a bill declaring that 90 percent of the surplus will be protected for Social Security. What a thin ruse. Archer's measure remains, in part, a transfer of wealth from middle- and low-income taxpayers to high-income citizens. Fortunately, it faces tough going in the Senate, where the rules require this sort of bill to obtain a super-majority of 60 votes in order to pass. While the political media class is obsessed with you-know-what, Archer is trying to do to millions of Americans what Monica Lewinsky wished the President had done to her.

David Corn's Loyal Opposition is published weekly in New York Press.