The Great Race Card Getaway

Via SF Medic

 

Greenfield, at his best.

In his second term, as scandals were exploding all around him, President William Jefferson Clinton boarded Air Force One along with a few close personal friends, like BET CEO and richest black man in America Robert Johnson, and a bunch of other businessmen and politicians, along with the ubiquitous Jesse Jackson, for a jaunt to Africa.

The trip cost a mere $42.8 million, which would have been enough to feed a sizable chunk of Africa, and featured an entourage that would have shamed Alexander the Great or Jay-Z. It took 1,300 people to make Clinton’s Great African Getaway possible including 205 personnel from the Office of the President, 60 from the State Department, 9 from the Department of Transportation and 1 from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Somehow Fish and Wildlife stayed at home.

The Department of Defense flew 98 airlift missions and 110 refueling missions. It might have been simpler to just invade and get it over with.

Despite the mass mobilization, Clinton wasn’t going to Africa so much as he was getting away from Washington, D.C. where every television news show was full of women accusing him of a One Man War on Women.

Two months earlier, Bill Clinton had wagged his finger at America and Hillary Clinton had blamed a vast right-wing conspiracy for her husband’s inability to keep his pants on.  Now as Lewinsky’s lawyers were immunity agreements, President Clinton invoked executive privilege, in more ways than one, and flew off to Africa.

It was the first black president’s first trip to Africa where he hoped to use the horrors of slavery to put his peccadilloes in perspective. Sure, the victim of the vast right-wing conspiracy might have actually had sexual relations with that woman and tried to force himself on countless other women, but who can attach any importance to that when contemplating the thousands chained up and dragged away to a life of slavery?

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