Is Clinton a Bastard?

Murray N. Rothbard’s “Is Clinton a Bastard?” is a very short single-author political squib. Its scope is deliberately narrow: it turns a reported irregularity in Bill Clinton’s parentage into a satirical attack on Clinton’s legitimacy, family background, and fitness for office. The piece is less an argument in constitutional law than a specimen of abrasive 1990s anti-Clinton polemic, using genealogy, scandal, and mock-populist outrage as instruments of political delegitimation.

We instinctively knew it all along, but now it looks like it’s confirmed: our beloved president, William Jefferson Blythe IV Clinton, is indeed a bastard.

The central move is to treat a possible biographical fact—Clinton’s father allegedly being married to another woman when he married Virginia Cassidy—as politically meaningful in itself. Rothbard’s language is intentionally derisive: Clinton is not simply President Clinton but “that Creep in the White House,” and the alleged bigamy becomes a way to recast the presidency as contaminated by illegitimacy.

But if Bill Jeff III was married when he hitched up with Ginny, this makes him a bigamist, and it makes that Man in the White House a bastard.

The piece proceeds by compressed escalation. First comes the announcement of “confirmation,” then the legal-social inference from bigamy to bastardy, then a comic expansion into speculation about unknown siblings and sexual promiscuity. Rothbard’s conceptual move is not to prove misconduct by Clinton himself, but to ridicule the symbolic aura of the presidency by collapsing public office into scandalous family narrative.

Here’s some grist for the office betting pool: when will the next half-brother/half-sister of Bill Jeff IV turn up?

Its final relevance lies in its style: the essay exemplifies a strain of polemical writing that seeks political force through insult, taboo-breaking, and anti-reverence toward high office. The closing line turns the genealogical joke into an impeachment slogan, revealing the piece’s real structure: anecdote becomes stigma, stigma becomes political demand.

Do we want a bastard in the White House? Impeach Clinton!