Here's a more recent one. He nukes Clinton's "defenders":
Making Liars of Us All
By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, February 11, 1998; Page A21
Assume for the sake of crazy, far-fetched argument that President Clinton
is lying about Monica Lewinsky. The line from the president's increasingly
cornered defenders is that this doesn't matter, that this is a lot of huff and
puff about nothing more than a married man's bit of on-the-side stuff. And,
anyway, Ken Starr has committed acts a lot worse than anything the
president did, not that he did anything.
No. The Lewinsky matter is not about the minor and personal question of
whatever an individual does in the pursuit of happiness behind closed
doors. And it is not about the diversionary question of prosecutorial
misconduct. It is about the largest, most central and most public of
questions: whether we demand that the president obey the law, whether
we accept that the president lies to us.
There are a great many laws on the books of this country, many of them
onerous and some of them odious. Nevertheless, we are all required to
obey them all. You have to tell the truth under oath, and so does the
president. You may not conspire to obstruct justice, and neither may the
president. You must not paw women who come to you seeking
employment, and so too must not the president. To excuse the head of
government from the laws that govern the rest of us is not to tolerate one
man's peccadilloes; it is to tolerate the corruption of democracy.
And it is this fomenting of corruption that is the great problem with Clinton.
The president has always had around him a constellation of defenders --
the planet Rodham, the moon Blumenthal, the satellites Carville and Begala
-- who are prepared to do whatever is necessary in defense of anything
Clinton does. These are people who believe in total-war politics, and they
accept, to borrow from what Churchill said about truth, that Clinton is so
precious that he should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
Fine, if that's as far as it goes. But year by year, scandal by scandal, the
defense of Clinton has made the rest of us accomplices to these lies. The
most serious consequence of this has been to devastate what is left of
liberalism's claim to be the philosophy of morality in politics.
In 1992 Clinton said that his enemies were targeting him for a woman he
didn't sleep with and a draft he didn't dodge. Liberals knew in their hearts
that both claims were lies, but they told themselves that this didn't matter.
In the Whitewater affair, liberals were presented with a case of political
corruption of a sort that they had classically fought, a conspiracy by a
circle of political insiders to loot a savings and loan and to defraud a
government loan program for women and minorities. Whitewater too,
liberals decided, didn't signify.
When Hillary Rodham Clinton was found out to have made $100,000 on a
no-risk $1,000 investment in commodities deals with a lawyer who
represented one of Arkansas' largest regulated businesses, liberals who
had taken to the streets against Reagan's Decade of Greed said -- oh,
never mind. When the Clinton 1996 campaign subverted the entire system
of campaign finance laws, liberals said, well, everybody does it. Lately,
with independent counsel Starr getting troublesome, liberals have been
saying it is time to scrap the liberal independent counsel act.
And now this. On "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Tim Russert asked Rep.
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) whether the allegations that the most powerful
boss in the world had sexually exploited a 21-year-old female intern raised
questions about Bill Clinton's treatment of women. No, no, said Pelosi,
they raised questions about Ken Starr's treatment of women.
"There's a point of sensitivity that women have about Kenneth Starr's
attitude toward women; how he's investigating, exploiting Monica
Lewinsky, how he used Linda Tripp to do that," said Pelosi, with a face so
rigidly straight it seemed it might crack. "The Susan McDougal case comes
back to mind, because here again is a humiliation of a woman because she
won't tell him what he wants to hear in that case. And now you see the
humiliation of Betty Currie." Yes, Susan McDougal was humiliated, and so
was Betty Currie. But the agent of their humiliation wasn't Ken Starr; it
was Bill Clinton. And he is the agent, too, of the humiliation of Nancy
Pelosi.
The problem with Clinton is not only that he lies; it is that he makes liars
out of everybody else. The problem is not only that his moral standards are
low; it is that he requires that everybody else lower theirs to meet his. By
the time he is finished, so too will be the quaint idea of a higher ground in
politics.
Michael Kelly is a senior writer for National Journal.
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