I'VE never been a fan of bodice-ripper novels so I didn't get very far into Kenneth Starr's steamy bestseller, "Bill and Monica do D.C.," before I had read enough about our president's disgusting behavior. Lewinsky scandal was
a private affairBeyond the revulsion, the Starr report left me feeling like an uneasy voyeur peeping at the most private moments of two lives in a way I had no right to do. While it may come in handy someday to know to think twice before accepting a cigar from Bill Clinton, basically I didn't need or want to see this stuff.
My discomfort was capped by sorrow that this is what our once-proud tradition of political fair play has come to. History will record this sorry episode more as a bloodless coup than a triumph of justice.
This was not presidential abuse of power. It was a consensual affair between two sexual predators and Starr had to bully Lewinsky for months with threats of prosecution before she agreed to testify against the president.
We need to ask: Would we as Americans be better off or worse off if we had never heard the saga of Bill and Monica? Would any serious injustice be left standing if their affair had been kept in the family where it belongs?
Was it worth $40 million to dig for dirt on a duly-elected president until the lowest kind of political garbage was unearthed? Was it worth the lost energy that could have been devoted to making our country a better place to live?
Mostly, was it worth the degradation of our political process? We now have one lawmaker after another confessing to past illicit affairs while demanding that the FBI investigate the White House for "smearing" them.
Huh? It's OK for Congress to spam the Internet with the most humiliating details of the president's sexcapades, but a few tales of their own indiscretions come out and they want to make a federal case of it? All together now: Poooor babies! Sorry kids, but you unleashed this capricious genie and we wish you luck in trying to stuff it back into the bottle.
Locally, we've seen an unprecedented front-page story in another newspaper exploring the question of whether Linda Lingle, the Republican candidate for governor, is a lesbian.
This is nobody's business but her own and absolutely irrelevant to her ability to do the job, the gay-marriage issue notwithstanding.
Lingle denies that she's gay and we have no reason to disbelieve her. But the fact that she was even asked the question put her in an unfair, no-win situation. There's no answer she could have given that would have curbed the sexist and distracting speculation about her private life that has no place in a political campaign. If this matter has any bearing on the outcome of the election, shame on us all.
Republicans who like Lingle and hate Clinton will argue that the two issues are different, but I disagree.
ONCE we allow a public official's consensual love life to become fair game for political scrutiny, the lines of what's proper and what's not get real fuzzy real fast. The unfair and inappropriate question posed to Linda Lingle -- and its unfortunate migration into the news -- sprang directly from the climate created by the Starr investigation.
The irony is that Clinton surely would have gotten his comeuppance even without Starr and the Republican faithful on his tail. There's a joke (Repeat: This story is apocryphal) circulating on the Internet that Hillary Clinton went to a fortune teller and was warned that her husband would die a violent and painful death. Hillary's only question: "Will I be acquitted?"
Why couldn't we have just left it in the family?
David Shapiro is managing editor of the Star-Bulletin.
He can be reached by e-mail at editor@starbulletin.com.
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