The President and the Prosecutor

Editors Letter

'The typical lawmaker of today," H. L. Mencken once wrote, "is a man wholly devoid of principle—a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game." The men and the game, as Mencken described them, have clearly reached bottom in the petty, schoolyard grudge match between Bill Clinton and Ken Starr. In one corner, you have a silver-tongued scalawag (who, it is said, reads the Bible looking for loopholes). And in the other, you have a pointy-headed, finger-waving obsessive who is determined to bag his quarry at all costs. It's your basic Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd situation.

The assembled dress extras of this sorry drama—the pols, pundits, and professional mouthpieces who have all but destroyed television newshave earned no distinction for themselves this past year, either. Even the used and discarded heroine gets little support from the gallery.

Clearheaded discourse on the subject is difficult. Speak out on Clinton's behalf and you are effectively saying that you will put up with almost any level of personal depravity in the highest office of the land because you think the president is doing a fine job. (This is a vote for a two-tier system of justice: one for competents and another for boneheads.) Profess support for Starr's inquisition and you side with an unpleasant lynch mob of pious, self-righteous busybodies.

The moral and intellectual conflicts inherent in taking either side are apparent in two stories in this issue, one by a lifelong Republican who finds herself at odds with the independent prosecutor, and the other by a leftist radical who has never much fancied the president.

The first comes from Renata Adler, a legendary journalist who has spent more than three decades as a staff writer at The New Yorker. In "Decoding the Starr Report," on page 116, she concludes that the report is a form of congressionally approved pornography, fairly bursting with biases, omissions, and base details. The findings are repulsive, but, according to Adler, they are in no way grounds for impeachment.

A sharply different perspective comes from contributing editor Christopher Hitchens, who attended Oxford with Bill Clinton in the 1960s. The two were never friends, and they won't be anytime soon. (In 1993, Hitchens accused Clinton of cheap sloganeering and spiritual emptiness; a year later, he attacked the president's veracity about Whitewater.) In "It's Not the Sin. It's the Cynicism," on page 138, Hitchens argues that the only person we should blame for the Starr report is ... Bill Clinton, whose outrageous behavior and serial mendacities caused this mess in the first place. This, if polls are to be believed, is an opinion not widely shared by a majority of the public. For, as Mencken also wrote, "the men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars."