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EDITOR'S NOTE: Greta
Van Susteren defected yesterday to the Fox News Channel. Van Susteren
marks Fox's second recent high-profile liberal addition, the first
being Geraldo Rivera. In the October 26, 1998, issue of National
Review, Jonah Goldberg wrote "Regrettable Van Susteren"
about Miss Van Susteren and her ardent Clinton defending.
 he
smoke has not yet cleared enough to determine exactly which part
of the civic culture has been damaged the most by the Clinton presidency.
But surely one noxious outcome of Bill Clinton's effrontery has
been to advance the "legal analyst" to the highest niche
in television's pundit taxonomy.
Increasingly,
the pundit class is dominated by people trained primarily in how
to keep guilty people out of jail. Thus these new pundits are especially
gifted in the techniques of equivocation, confusion, distraction,
and blame shifting. So, largely thanks to the lawyers in this Administration
of lawyers, and to their colleagues on TV, we have a scandal that
is called complex ("What are High Crimes and Misdemeanors really?")
when it is actually quite simple ("He's a pig").
The dogs of
law were first unleashed on the viewing public by the decision to
allow cameras in the courtroom, together with the boom in all-news
networks. They found their supply of raw meat in the televised trials
of William Kennedy Smith, the Menendez brothers, and, of course,
O. J. Simpson. Their influence was as deeply pernicious as it was
straightforward: "Put the system on trial." They made
Davids out of alleged rapists, Goliaths out of venerable institutions,
and jokes out of deadly serious moral points. Jill Abramson claimed
that her clients, the Menendez brothers, did not blow their parents'
heads off. Instead the boys merely unloaded a shotgun in their direction.
But the Clinton
scandal is something new. Using the independent counsel as their
entree, the lawyers have replaced the philosophers, journalists,
and politicians as the priestly class charged with reading the entrails
of the Clinton presidency. En masse they have slithered from the
shadow of O. J. to become the Greek chorus of the Clinton scandal.
It should not be surprising, then, that the high priestess of Clinton
apologists is the first among equals from the O. J. punditocracy:
Greta Van Susteren, co-host of CNN's Burden of Proof and
ubiquitous CNN legal analyst. She is, thanks to CNN's global presence,
the international poster girl for all that is wrong with American
political commentary.
Miss Van Susteren
distinguished herself during the O. J. Simpson trial by muddying
the waters of Simpson's crystal-clear guilt by picking at procedural
nits. This was a clever marketing tactic — if every intelligent
person in the world thinks X, television producers will seek out
and exalt someone who argues for Y, all in an effort to provide
"balance." Miss Van Susteren became a passionate advocate
for Simpson — although she often denied it. She was masterly
at importing a courtroom technique into the television studio: the
moral equivalence of facts. According to this credo, an almost comical
abundance of DNA evidence carries no more weight than one detective's
racist comments ten years before the murder in question. As Felix
Frankfurter once observed, "To some lawyers, all facts are
created equal."
While this
kind of argumentation is despicable, we make allowances for it in
the courtroom because of our admirable devotion to due process,
especially in capital cases. But Greta Van Susteren and her colleagues
have carried this mode of analysis into the political arena. It
has had a lobotomizing effect on civic discourse. For example, on
September 21 on Larry King Live Judge Robert Bork asserted
that a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would be, and should be,
impeached if he was sexually serviced by an intern in his chambers-even
if he never lied about it. That someone should be punished for something
that is not a crime flummoxed Miss Van Susteren to the point of
incoherence, "Maybe if he's a bachelor, may-have-what if he's
a . . . bachelor? . . . as consenting adults?"
There was a
time when poor manners and dishonorable behavior were judged as
reprehensible as committing a crime. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
Claude Rains tries to commit suicide on the Senate floor because
he has disgraced himself, not because he's going to jail. Today
if one has violated every tenet of decency but stopped short of
violating criminal law — a constantly moving goalpost —
then one is merely expressing oneself (like Larry Flint) or minding
one's own business (like David Cash, the vile Berkeley student who
stood aside as his friend raped and murdered a young girl). We are
greeted constantly with the images of scoundrels triumphantly leaving
courthouses celebrating the fact that their repugnant behavior was
found not to have technically violated the law.
Now the president
of the United States benefits from this new standard. During the
seven long months when Bill Clinton interrupted the business of
government far more severely than any "government shutdown,"
and allowed the entire Executive Branch to lie for him, Greta Van
Susteren was his chief cheerleader. The president was just another
perp, with no obligation other than staying out of the orange jumpsuit
of the federal penitentiary. She argued time and again that the
president should be praised for "standing on his rights"
and that he has no obligation to clear the air about whether or
not he's a scoundrel. "Had I been the president's lawyer,"
she said, "I would have urged him to fight this all the way
to the United States Supreme Court."
In the end,
all the legalese may simply be a con. Miss Van Susteren is pathological
in her insistence that she is not a journalist. She asserts that
she is a lawyer first and foremost and just concerned with "arguing
the evidence." This is plain dishonesty. Say what you will
about the serpentine James Carville or even Geraldo "I want
to hug the President" Rivera, at least their biases are open
for inspection. The legal pundits claim in an aw-shucks style that
they are simply stating "the law." This infuriates lawyers
who actually care about the validity of the law. Miss Van Susteren
often suggested that there was no precedent for a president to testify.
But there are numerous recent examples of presidents offering testimony,
including Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Miss Van Susteren suggests
that everyone ranking higher than the White House janitor has executive
privilege, although the judges before whom the question has been
brought scoff at the notion and hand Kenneth Starr courtroom victories.
Miss Van Susteren
recently observed of Clinton's testimony, "There was no perjury.
. . . I mean is the president obligated to make out the case for
Paula Jones's lawyers?" According to Stuart Taylor, writing
in National Journal, "The most charitable interpretation
of such stuff is that Van Susteren had read neither the Jan. 17
deposition transcript replete with unambiguous perjuries —
nor the Starr Report, which provides so-far-unrebutted proof of
those perjuries and powerful evidence that Clinton resumed perjuring
on Aug. 17." We can forgive Paul Begala's distortions of the
truth on behalf of Bill Clinton, but should CNN's leading legal
analyst fall in the same category?
Greta Van Susteren
elicits strong feelings, which usually translate into high ratings.
She is a ubiquitous presence on CNN, constantly on the air even
when Burden of Proof isn't. She co-hosts the show with Roger
Cossack, who is at best like the silent partner from Penn and Teller:
a silent straight man whose interruptions are only permitted to
allow Van Susteren to take a breath or for comic relief. To explain
Miss Van Susteren's perspective, many critics point to
her real partner. John Coale*, her husband as well as her law partner,
is a self-described "ambulance chaser" and has enthusiastically
earned himself one of the most nefarious reputations in the country.
In 1984 he acquired the nickname "Bhopal Coale" by being
the first lawyer to hop on a plane to India to sign up gas-leak
victims who couldn't even read their retainer documents.
American
Lawyer magazine called him "a symbol for everything wrong
with the plaintiff's bar." In 1987 the same magazine awarded
Coale its Most Frivolous Suit Award: He had sued his tailor, on
the grounds that the sub-par work on his shirts had subjected him
to "public humiliation . . . severe emotional distress, and
embarrassment." The West Virginia Bar tried to disbar both
John Coale and Greta Van Susteren for their allegedly unethical
behavior in soliciting the families of coal-mine accident victims,
among others. Coale's repeated unapologetic defenses of his professional
practices are true to form: "Everything I've done is permissible
under the First Amendment."
This attitude
highlights the deeper sympathy between Greta Van Susteren and Bill
Clinton. Trial lawyers are the president's most loyal constituency
— and not just because he employs so many of them. They contribute
vast amounts of money to his campaigns and to the Democratic party
generally. Indeed, when one looks at the lawyers who are his most
ardent defenders they are trial lawyers, starting with the wildly
biased Larry Pozner, president of the National Association of Criminal
Defense Lawyers. Those lawyers who are more critical of Clinton's
behavior — Robert Bork, Jonathan Turley, James Stewart —
tend to be academics or self-described journalists. If Miss Van
Susteren and all those lesser lights who imitate her on the various
television shows claim that their first allegiance is to the legal
profession rather than to journalism, is it any wonder they are
wild defenders of the president?
When Bill Clinton
announced that he would have a Cabinet that "looks like America,"
he must have thought that 90 percent of Americans had passed the
bar exam. For quite some time he relied on Jeremy Bentham's adage:
"Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law
is not punished." Had Bentham lived two centuries later he
might have said, "Television lawyers."
*Note: When this article originally appeared,
John Coale was erroneously identified as "James Coale."
We regret the error and it has been corrected here.
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