Going, going - gone

National Review, Oct 12, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The day after the Starr report was filed Clinton loyalists had a very hard time. As anticipated, they settled on the line: "Wait until you hear the other side of the story." The line was repeated in several forms by several apologists, notably Sen. Tom Daschle and Reps. Barney Frank and Charles Rangel. The focus of their complaints rested finally on two decisions: Mr. Starr's not to turn the material over to the White House before sending it to the House; and the Judiciary Committee's not to send it to the White House before releasing it to the public. Insufficient thought was given to the nature of the objection. Think of it as: The prosecution says Martin killed the girl-but you have not heard from Martin's defense team.

The problem of the Clinton people in this situation is that the defendant has already pleaded guilty. Nothing in those 18 boxes of documents is going to contradict what Mr. Clinton spent all week doing: apologizing to everyone except his dog. If he were Defendant Martin, accused of murder, the defense would go the route of extenuating circumstances. . . . Granted, Your Honor, that Martin fired the mortal bullet, but a) Rosie had raised a knife and aimed it at his throat, b) he was aiming not at Rosie but at the armed burglar behind her and unfortunately missed, and c) he didn't know the gun was loaded.

But even Johnnie Cochran couldn't come up with a reason to mitigate, let alone excuse, what Clinton admittedly did. If Monica Lewsinky had arrived in the Oval Office with a spray can that shot out an irresistible hypnotic-aphrodisiac that overwhelmed the senses of the target male, that defense would surely have been raised. What else might account for 10 sexual contacts in the Oval Office?

The defense takes one step back and says: "Okay, he did it. But what he did is not an impeachable offense."

The public did not know, on Starr-Day Plus One, what else was documented in the testimony. But what evidence is there to suggest that the Judiciary Committee will fail to ponder a line of defense conspicuously absent from the Starr case? We did not know, on Thursday, whether President Clinton had sought to obstruct justice. Let us suppose that the deposition of Vernon Jordan suggested to Starr that indeed he had been prodded by Clinton to find refuge for Miss Lewinsky. Hypothetical conflict: a) Starr interprets the relevant testimony as an attempt, under the direction of Clinton, to Take Good Care of Monica in order to get her out of the way of people taking depositions; b) the Clinton people maintain that Jordan acted entirely spontaneously, just one more example of a lifelong solicitude for forlorn young ladies.

Well, nothing is going to happen to Mr. Clinton based on a cranky reading of the Jordan record. Question: Was the Secret Service man-on-the-spot urged to be vague about what he saw all those times that Monica came into the office? Why is it necessary to turn over to the White House, ahead of the public and Congress, the testimony of the Secret Service agents? What would Mr. Clinton's lawyers do with it?

We are dealing, bear in mind, with someone who lied publicly, adjuring all the American people to trust his word about Monica Lewinsky. How has the gravity of his offense been lessened by a showing by his lawyers that what was said to the Secret Service was ambiguous?

Reps. Barney Frank and Charles Rangel are wonders in the non-judgment of members of their ideological fraternity. Writing a generation ago in his novel (Pictures from an Institution) about the adamantly fair-minded liberal faculty wife, Randall Jarrell said, "If [Flo] had been told that Benton College, and [her husband] Jerrold, and [her son] John, and [her daughter] Fern, and their furniture had been burned to ashes by the head of the American Federation of Labor, who had then sown salt over the ashes, she would have sobbed and said, at last-she could do no other-'I think that we ought to hear his side of the case before we make up our minds.'"

Loose words are all that is left to Mr. Clinton. Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman said that what Mr. Clinton did was "wrong, and unacceptable." Unacceptable? If the President's conduct was unacceptable, that means we refuse to accept it, right? How do you do this?