Slime of the Century

As Americans, we were all raised on a steady diet of white hat-black hat, good guy-bad guy stories. But in real life, of course, morals and motives are always far more mixed than in our preferred fictional templates.

The Clinton scandals are representative of this truth. Yet pro-Clinton and anti-Clinton partisans muddied the water by insisting on a black and white approach. Pro-Clinton people often implied that there was nothing wrong with the President's conduct because it was "personal".

Anti-Clinton people implied that anyone not demanding the President's resignation was endorsing his personal behavior and that all means were justified towards the end of discovering personal sins.

The truth, however, is that there was no shortage of "wrong" on both sides of this fiasco. But the amazing thing is that President Clinton did less "wrong" than his attackers. This messy truth calls into questions many of our perceptions of law, morality, and privacy.

We all know that what Clinton did was wrong. And since it's so short and sweet, we'll stipulate that point first. Clinton engaged in sexual acts with a woman who was 1) not his wife 2) his subordinate in the workplace, and 3) half his age.

That's what Clinton did. What is important to note is that 1) I don't defend any of his behavior, and 2) NONE of the above behavior is illegal.

The President was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors concerning an action that was not a crime. That should give us pause.

Here is what his enemies did wrong:

1) After investigating the Whitewater land investments that the Clintons made in Arkansas, no criminal conduct by the Clintons was ever found. When they realized they could not indict the Clintons in this matter, Clinton's enemies did not end their investigation; Instead, they expanded it into the President's sex life.

2) The excuse for the entree into Clinton's sex life was a sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones against the President. Since nobody ever alleged that the President's affair with Monica Lewinsky was not consensual, this conduct had no relation to the Jones suit other than that they both involved "sex" (even though there was no sexual conduct in the Jones case)

3) In investigating the President's affair with Lewinsky (remember, there was never any allegation that this affair was "illegal"), Clinton's enemies used illegally tape-recorded phone calls between Monica Lewinsky and her "friend", Linda Tripp.

4) In order to extract a confession from Ms. Lewinsky (a "confession" about something that was NOT a crime) the investigators detained her in a hotel room and refused to let her call her lawyers, instead threatening to send her to prison. When this did not sufficiently loosen Ms. Lewinsky's lips, the investigators then threatened to imprison her parents.

5) After determining, through illegal phone recordings and coerced statements from Ms. Lewinsky sans lawyer, that the President had an affair with Lewinsky, the investigators planned to ask the President if he had sexual contact with Lewinsky, hoping to trap him in a lie. They did so during the Paula Jones deposition.

6) While testifying in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, investigators asked Clinton about Lewinsky even though Lewinsky had never alleged sexual harassment, making that line of questioning entirely irrelevant. And when they asked the President about this non-relevant non-crime, he lied.

That is the "crime" that Bill Clinton was impeached for, after being investigated non-stop for 6 years. The issue is not whether we defend Clinton's conduct with Lewinsky, but rather how anyone could justify the conduct of his accusers.

Clinton's pursuers spent $80 million to prove that he committed adultery and setting up a situation in which Clinton would lie about this affair while being deposed about an entirely unrelated issue.

The budget for the 9/11 commission was $5 million.

The persecution of William Jefferson Clinton was not a good vs. evil morality play; it was bad vs. evil. And just how evil does one need to be to make Bill Clinton look like a victim?