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WHEN IT COMES TO THE BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS | the moral and political atmosphere of Bill Clinton's Washington becomes every day more like Teapot Dome. The president, like Warren Harding, may ultimately walk away unscathed; but the stench of common bribery, pungently reeking of crude oil, is there. "Oleaginous" indeed might be just the right word for the manner by which this administration has become degraded. Never was that more clear than when oilman Roger Tamraz appeared recently before Sen. Fred Thompson's campaign finance hearings, exuding the same kind of contempt for democratic norms as convicted hotel queen Leona Helmsley once expressed for taxes and pathetic "little people." Tamraz, an American citizen of Lebanese extraction, hasn't bothered registering to vote. As he told the Thompson hearings, elections are not decided by voters. This might have gone a little further than any member of that "bipartisan" circus wanted to hear, but there was no gainsaying the man's logic. You can, like Tamraz, be wanted by Lebanon and Interpol on an outstanding warrant for embezzlement, and you can be described by Vice President Al Gore's office as having "a shady and untrustworthy reputation," but William Jefferson Clinton will see you, or at least glimpse you, at various White House events, if you can cough up $300,000, more or less. Mr. Tamraz was also quite right when he offered the standard defense -- that all this is legal and that everybody does it. It is indeed legal. And everybody does indeed do it. As he put it, Democratic financier Felix Rohatyn and investment banker-turned-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin didn't get where they are today by being cheap. As Tamraz also put it, had he kept his checkbook in his pocket he would have been rewarded by watching his rivals in the oil business waltz through the doors of the Oval Office while he remained outside. No matter, in this case, that the flamboyant Mr. Tamraz's money wasn't nearly enough. NEXT PAGE | Some real influence peddling |
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