Saturday, June 1, 2013

Hillary Clinton: return to Whitewater mode.ON LANGUAGE; Shoulda-Coulda-Woulda



Whitewater

Whitewater, popular name for a failed 1970s Arkansas real estate venture by the Whitewater Development Corp., in which Governor (later President) Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, were partners; the name is also used for the political ramifications of this scheme. 

Whitewater was backed by the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, which went bankrupt in 1989. The controlling partners in both the land deal and the bank were friends of the Clintons, James and Susan McDougal. Vincent Foster, a Little Rock law partner of Mrs. Clinton, represented the Clintons in the buyout of their Whitewater shares. Accusations of impropriety against the Clintons and others soon surfaced, regarding improper campaign contributions, political and financial favors, and tax benefits. Claiming that relevant files had disappeared (they were found at the White House in 1996) and that they had in any case lost money on the Whitewater venture, the Clintons denied any wrongdoing.

When Foster, now White House counsel, committed suicide (1993), however, more questions arose. Strongly pursued in Washington, mainly by Republicans, but largely ignored by the general public,

Whitewater was investigated by a special prosecutor beginning in 1994 and by congressional committees in 1995–96. Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's investigation included testimony from Mrs. Clinton (which was the first time a first lady was subpoenaed by a grand jury) and videotaped testimony from the president.
In a 1996 trial, the McDougals and Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton's successor as governor of Arkansas, were found guilty of fraud in the case, and in another decision the former municipal judge David Hale, who had pled guilty to fraud and had been a witness in the McDougal trial, received a jail sentence. In yet another trial the same year two Arkansas bankers were acquitted of some charges, and the jury deadlocked on others. Although nothing conclusive concerning the Clintons' involvement in the Whitewater deal was proved in the congressional or special prosecutor's inquiries,

Republicans charged Hillary Clinton with having sought to suppress politically damaging information and accused Clinton administration officials of lying under oath.

In early 1998, Starr won authorization to expand his investigation to include the Lewinsky scandal, and questions about Monica Lewinsky's relationship with Clinton quickly overshadowed Whitewater matters. However, in late 1998, when Starr presented his case for impeachment of the president for his attempts to conceal the Lewinsky affair, he indicated that his office had no impeachable evidence in the Whitewater matters. Starr resigned in Oct., 1999, and was succeeded by Robert W. Ray, the senior litigation counsel in Starr's office. In Sept., 2000, Ray ended the Whitewater inquiry, stating there was insufficient evidence to prove that President Clinton or his wife had committed any crime in connection with the failed real estate venture or the independent counsel's investigation into it; the final report was issued 18 months later. Susan McDougal was pardoned by President Clinton in Jan., 2001, shortly before he left office.








A hard-edged question was posed to Hillary Rodham Clinton at her Whitewater news conference: what about "the suggestion in the R.T.C. memorandum . . . you and your husband knew or should have known that Whitewater was not cash-flowing and that notes or debts should have been paid"?
"Shoulda, coulda, woulda," the First Lady replied. "We didn't."

Some journalists narrowed their eyes at this airy dismissal of financial responsibility in land speculation at the place Mrs. Clinton prefers to refer to as "northern Arkansas." My own investigative lust was instantly replaced, however, by linguistic curiosity: Whence the reduplication shoulda, coulda, woulda?

The order of words in this delicious morsel of dialect varies with the user. On the sports pages of The Washington Post of Dec. 7, 1978, Gerald Strine wrote about the New England Patriots football team: "The Pats coulda, shoulda and woulda been ahead of the Cowboys by at least 16-3 at halftime . . . but three field goals were blown."

Eleven years later, in a United Press International account of another football game, the phrase again led with coulda, as a shamefaced kicker was quoted: "I should have kicked the extra point, but coulda, shoulda, woulda doesn't do it."

By the 90's, football players were fumbling the order. Said a Notre Dame tackle, Aaron Taylor, offside on his subject-verb agreement: "There's no excuses. Woulda, shoulda, coulda is not going to cut it."
During the last two decades, an author told Vernon Scott of The Hollywood Reporter he planned a "Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda book"; a retailer opined to Investor's Business Daily about the decline of Carter Hawley stores: "There are shoulda-beens, coulda-beens, woulda-beens, but the fact is they didn't meet the retail revolution that happened in the past five years." And the funk-and-roll singer Anthony Kiedis (misidentified as a "rap singer" by the incognoscenti) wrote and sang in 1991, "Shoulda been, coulda been, woulda been dead if I didn't get the message going to my head."

We have here an elision field. Elide, rooted in the Latin for "to strike out," means "to omit"; in speech, an elision is the omission of letters and sounds to produce compressions like don't and couldn't, or as the would-be boxer played by Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront" said, "I coulda been a contender."
In this rhyming compound, a triple elision does the hat trick: although each elision expresses something different, when taken together, the trio conveys a unified meaning. Shoulda, short for should have (and not should of, which lexies call a variant but I call a mistake), carries a sense of correctness or obligation; coulda implies a possibility, and woulda denotes conditional certainty, an oxymoron: the stated intent to have taken an action if only something had not intervened.

These meanings were explored separately in a 1977 song by the country singer Tammy Wynette, whose earlier song "Stand By Your Man" was unintentionally derogated by Mrs. Clinton during the 1992 campaign. In "That's the Way It Could Have Been," Ms. Wynette's chorus goes: "That's the way it could have been [ possibility ] ./Oh, that's the way it should have been [ correctness ] ./If I had met you way back then,/That's the way it would have been [ conditional certainty ] ."

Lexicographers have been tracking the individual elisions for decades. First came woulda, translated into Standard English in Dialect Notes in 1913: "Would a went, would have gone." Theodore Dreiser introduced coulda and the solid woulda in his 1925 novel, "An American Tragedy": "I coulda chucked my job, and I woulda." A 1933 book on crime used the third elision: "You shouldda seen him."

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/15/magazine/on-language-shoulda-coulda-woulda.html

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