Gay Today: World

Hillary: Attacked by
Andrew Sullivan & Kenneth Starr

By Jack Nichols

London/ Atlanta—Strange bedfellows gay editor and author Andrew Sullivan and zealot Christian conservative, Kenneth Starr, have launched frontal attacks on First Lady Hillary Clinton in a nearly simultaneous attempt to derail her bid for a Senate seat in the year 2000.

First Lady Hillary Clinton

A practicing Roman Catholic, Sullivan is also an openly gay editor at the conservative New Republic magazine. In an article replete with moral judgments and published as an opinion in London's Sunday Times (August 8), Sullivan paints Mrs. Clinton as a person with values that on the surface at least--would seem to recall San Francisco's famed Perpetual Indulgence trooper, Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch.

In a fit of partisanship, Sullivan references the "tell all" memoirs of TV pundit George Stephanopoulos, who jumped from his perch at the center of White House power to a somewhat lackluster career as a Sam Donaldson-style news commentator.

"Read George Stephanopoulos's memoir of the inner workings of the Clinton team," Sullivan begs, "and the answer is obvious. Come off it. Hillary Clinton was - and is - at the centre of all the action."

Sullivan therefore blames Mrs. Clinton—not Kenneth Starr-- for prolonging a year of national agony over her husband's indiscretions when, he insists, she could have come forward and told what she supposedly knew about her husband's (to Sullivan) unsavory sex habits.

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"Hillary, in other words," writes Sullivan,, "has never been a simple victim. She has also been a co-conspirator. Knowing what she did, she could have stopped the year-long impeachment nightmare in its tracks."

An unabashed GOP sympathizer, Sullivan rescues Kenneth Starr and the Republican Congress in his article, saying that Mrs. Clinton "almost certainly knew that the Lewinsky affair was more than a plot concocted by her enemies."

The New Republic editor dismisses Mrs. Clinton's assertions about a Right Wing conspiracy against her husband as "at best a reckless assertion made in the face of everything she already knew about her husband's long history of lies."

Hillary Clinton, claims Andrew Sullivan, is presently "cleaning up the mess now for the next power bid." He expresses hopes that New Yorkers will not vote for her.

Andrew Sullivan

The next day, in Washington, D.C., Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, announced that he would issue a report on both of the Clintons during 2000's autumn election campaign. His timing, strange for a judge who claims to be free of political bias, is already causing waves.

"We are trying to move forward very, very rapidly in that respect," Starr told lawyers gathered in Atlanta, Georgia for a meeting of the American Bar Association.

Starr is promising that his report on the First Lady and the President, would not engage in characterizations. Starr claims he was "horrified" when the Republican Congress released his report last year about the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.