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Male troubles: Bill Clinton, Matt Drudge and Mark McGwire I serviced the president and all I got was this lousy Martha's Vineyard souvenir
Swinging with the sodomites
Why American athletes don't kiss and hug like soccer stars
Linda Tripp, the White House's ghoulish bad conscience
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A L S O
About Camille Paglia
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Dear Camille:
Now that Ken Starr has finally dumped his report on Congress, what's your verdict? Should Clinton be impeached over consensual, if not terribly wise, sexual behavior? Are you as outraged as I am that the report has nothing about Whitewater in it -- did taxpayers spend $40 million to find out their president got a blow job? Starr has turned this into the most expensive act of fellatio in history! And we didn't even get to watch!
-- Frustrated
Dear Frustrated:
While I have had ample doubt about independent counsel Ken Starr's
organizational skills over the past four years of interminable investigations,
I was reserving judgment on his alleged partisanship -- since I have learned
never to trust the claims of spokesmen of my own Democratic Party.
However, the voluminous "referral" to the U.S. House of Representatives that
Starr suddenly released last week is almost as damning to him as to President
Clinton. I was appalled at the grotesque disproportion in the report -- the
total absence of review or summary of the prior investigations, beginning with
the Clintons' failed Whitewater land deal; the ostentatious foregrounding of
the more recent stop-and-go affair involving Monica Lewinsky; and the lurid
specificity of sexual detail that unnecessarily compromises the dignity of a
sitting president, whose global authority must be maintained in our national
interest.
The Republican House leadership was irresponsible in ordering the instant
publication on the Internet of that mass of material, with its unchallenged
assertions and prosecutorial conclusions. A digest could and should have been
expeditiously prepared for public consumption, with Judiciary Committee
members having full access to the archive and buttressing evidence of the
report.
Opinions obviously differ about Clinton's scarlet past and dull-gray
future. My partner, Alison, for example, a Washington-born, dyed-in-the-wool
Democratic loyalist, declared about Starr's report last weekend, "It's
totally a shoddy case! They have nothing!" After perusing Clinton's oral-sex
chronicle in the Washington Post, her mother, Diane Maddex, quipped, "He never
inhaled and never impaled!"
I am furious at both Clintons for their political stupidity, as well as for
their unconvincing religious sanctimony, which turns my stomach. Their
campaign of shameless deceit and arrogant manipulation of popular opinion will
apparently go on to the contemptible end. Nevertheless, I see no substantial
basis yet for impeachment or even resignation. I have been calling for
Congressional censure from the start. If Democratic leaders had not been so
craven, they would have launched a genuine ethical critique of Clinton in
January and spared the nation this agonizingly protracted travail, which
distracts attention from vital issues of public welfare and national security.
And let's not forget the ultimate source of Starr's partisan orgy: liberal
Democratic feminists who hung Clarence Thomas out to dry in the trumped-up
Anita Hill controversy in 1991. In their ruthless pro-choice zeal, they were
the ones who dragged porn films and pubic hairs into the political discourse.
They were the poisonous mothers of today's sexual witch-hunts. It's X-rated
poetic justice: The Starr report is rampant Republican revenge for
Thomas' outrageous "high-tech lynching."
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