"If you look long and hard enough for something, you will ultimately find it. Even if what you were looking for never really existed in the first place."
Those were the cryptic words Hunter Cullen White left me with earlier this evening at a Capitol Hill bar. It was a ruggedly cold afternoon, with a bitterly fierce wind slicing through DC, a perfect metaphor for the atmosphere here in Washington. The second week of Pres. Obama's impeachment had just come to a calamitous end--with several key Democrats storming out of the proceedings--and the architect behind said impeachment wanted to talk.
Many outside of Washington have never heard of Hunter White, but those inside the Beltway either exalt his prodigious mind or tremble in fear of his power.
This graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and University of Virginia's Law School first arrived in Washington in 1995 with the "Republican Revolution." He immediately landed a communications position with Tom DeLay's Congressional office. Some unofficially credit him for first finding Paula Jones and then Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky. Many think White the driving force behind Bill Clinton's own impeachment trial.
"We learned a lot of things with the Clinton debacle," White declared, behind a Grey Goose spritzer and piercing blue eyes. "We learned that we acted too late."
"What do you mean?" I asked, behind a Red Stripe.
"When we Republicans took control of the House, we started all these investigations into the Clinton White House," White answered. "Whitewater, Espy, Cisneros, Travelgate, Vince Foster's death. We didn't care if we found anything. We just wanted revenge--no, divine retribution--for all those investigations the Democrat Party inflicted on the Reagan White House."
"But those resulted in dozens of convictions," I started. "Yours didn't result in even one."
White shrugged.
"We felt that Clinton was a dangerous man who was ruining the country. He had no right to rule. We didn't understand why the American people didn't understand that. We had to do whatever was in our power to stop him."
"But the American people understand now?" I ventured.
White smiled. "Oh yes. They understand now." He hunched his shoulders forward and moved closer. "Look, Bill. Back in 2009--before all this Tea Party and Birther nonsense--before the man even got a chance to decide who would be the first high-priced donor to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, 35 percent of registered Republicans wanted BHO impeached. Thirty-five percent. After we swept the midterms, that percentage went up to 57 percent. This whole impeachment business isn't 'feeding red meat' to our base. We are fulfilling a fucking mandate here."
"And you did all this by being focused?" I asked.
"Well, you were there, Bill," White answered. He was right: I was. "See, we realized that people get comfortable pretty quickly. Sure, the voters were upset back in '10, but they'd mellow out come this year. Health care reform would stop looking like a Communist plot. Some people might actually start liking it. Jobs would continue to pick up. Housing prices would continue to slowly increase. In other words, '94 would become '96 again. So, when BHO would start saying, 'Is your life better than it was four years ago?' we all knew the answer would have to be a resounding, 'Yes.' Cause things couldn't get as bad as they were back in 2008.
"So, we had to start the investigations. Endless rounds of them. Investigation after investigation," White confessed.
"Right," I nodded. "So, that's why you started the Rezko probe, that stuff into Jeremiah Wright's church, Bill Clinton's travels and donors and links to the State Department."
"You got it," White smiled. He seemed to actually be beaming. "Campaign donors, Salazar's Interior Department, revisited Van Jones, ACORN and voter fraud, I could go on."
"I know," I said. "Please don't. I'm quite familiar. I'm also aware that you haven't gotten a single conviction."
White shrugged again. "You know, Michael Jackson was never convicted of a single count of pedophilia. Yet, half the people on the entire planet think the man molested children. Probably 80 percent of those people think he spent time in jail for it. And, out of the people who think the man was innocent of all charges, probably half of them would never have let the man around their children while he was still alive."
"Ah, I get it."
"Do you?"
White stared at me with his icy blue eyes. I didn't quite shiver, but I think my colon had an allergic reaction to the man's glare. It was my turn to shrug.
"We stopped the Obama Agenda cold in its tracks," White triumphed. "All those little policy initiatives nobody ever hears of--none of those were carried out. We had the administration so buried--scrambling out answering subpoenas and affidavits, even lowly secretaries forced to hire high-priced attorneys--they didn't know where we would come from next. They could get nothing done, and then we excoriated them for inaction."
"No, I definitely give yall props," I admitted. "Liberals who were complaining about the man before the midterms are now simply apoplectic. They haven't looked this desperate since Bush's re-election."
"It's a street fight," White chuckled.
"And a court room battle, apparently," I added. "So, you did all these investigations and panels and hearings and probes knowing you were going to impeach him going in?"
"Well, yeah," White confessed. "We were going to impeach the man. We knew that. We just didn't know what we were going to charge BHO with when we started."
"And that's when you found the Iraq thing?"
"And that's when we found the Iraq thing," White smiled, triumphantly. He rattled the ice around in his glass, took a cube in his mouth, and started chewing mercilessly. He suddenly got up and grabbed his coat. "Look, I gotta go."
"Wait a second, why are you telling me all this?" I asked.
"Oh, I just felt like talking to someone. I remembered your interview with Charlie Rangel a couple years back. I like your work."
"Thanks, Hunter," I said. "Hey, look. This has been bugging me for the past couple years."
White straightened his trench coat collar and looked intently at me. "What is that?" he asked, smirking as though he already knew the answer.
"Well, I've been watching all these proceedings for the last year or so. I've been reading up on all the analysis and punditry. And I still can't help wondering--because I don't see it," I said. "I've just got to know, is there actually anything to this Obama impeachment? I mean, do you guys really have something on him?"
And that was when Hunter Cullen White imparted the words that open this article, leaving me with a bundle of questions that were too hot to handle and too large to wrap my head around:
"If you look long and hard enough for something, you will ultimately find it. Even if what you were looking for never really existed in the first place."
He immediately left the bar and disappeared into the cold, Washington wind.
No comments:
Post a Comment