I won't defend President Clinton's apparent inability to control his libido. If the latest accusations against him are true, he lacks loyalty, judgment and class. Clinton’s faults
not worth impeachmentBut even if it's true that Clinton had an affair with a White House intern and lied about it, is it an impeachable offense worth flinging the country into a political and constitutional crisis? Let's get a grip.
If we're going to start prosecuting people for having consensual affairs and lying about it, Gov. Ben Cayetano had better increase the number of beds in his new Kau prison about tenfold. If only the sexually faithful need apply for public office, we'll need to fill a lot of empty seats on both sides of the aisle.
This isn't about sex or even truthfulness. It's about the mullahs of the right refusing to accept that Clinton was elected president -- twice. They see him as a philandering, draft-dodging hippie and feel justified in bringing him down any way they can.
After they couldn't nail him with Whitewater, Vince Foster or fund raising, they turned to his sex life -- first helping Paula Jones in her sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton and now fanning the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Not that Clinton didn't bring it on himself with his sleazy behavior. But the sleaze on the other side is just as troubling.
When Paula Jones' conservative friends are finished using her, they'll go back to their traditional opposition to sexual harassment laws as an unwarranted government intrusion into the workplace.
The special prosecutor is a political enemy of Clinton's who is trying to make his case by bullying a young woman secretly taped by another Clinton political foe who won Lewinsky's confidence by posing as her friend.
It's madness when a president can't have privileged conversations with White House attorneys, when his private secretary is dragged before a grand jury to be questioned about his sex life, when investigators threaten to subpoena the Secret Service agents he must allow to live virtually inside his skin.
It's insanity when a president may be run out of office over consensual sex when 60 percent of voters approve of how he's doing his job and don't think the affair is any of their business.
Voters didn't expect a monk. They had ample evidence of Clinton's loose zipper before they twice elected him president. As is their right, a majority thought other things were more important that his sex life -- like the economy.
We've been here before. Ronald Reagan was as repulsive to liberals as Clinton is to conservatives. Liberals in Congress tried to occupy Reagan and later George Bush with lengthy investigations of the Iran-Contra affair and other matters. While the investigations at least related to conduct on the job, they went on for too long and produced too little result.
CREDIBLE allegations of presidential wrongdoing involving official conduct must be fully investigated. But enough of the losing side's recent tactic of trying to nullify election results by burying the president under endless investigations into matters voters knew about before the election. We'll regret making the president's private life fair game for political scrutiny. Our lost tradition of civility, fair play and a loyal opposition worked.
After Reagan was elected, I expected an old liberal friend to be upset. He just shrugged, "This, too, shall pass."
Conservatives can say the same of Clinton. He's out of there in a couple of years no matter what. Let's let nature take its course and not bring the country to its knees in a spiteful attempt to speed things along.