_______________RUFF GOING BY BRUCE SHAPIRO(12/10/98)
	The Judiciary Committee, acting under the leadership of a moral hypocrite, has sworn out four articles of impeachment on straight partisan votes against President Clinton for receiving a blow job from an adult woman not his wife. The ludicrousness of this action has been well documented, especially at Salon. However, there is a way out of this mess. It is a way that is about as likely to happen as Bob Barr becoming the NAACP's Man of the Year, but there is a way. Until Jan. 5 or thereabouts, the Speaker of the House remains the outgoing Rep. Newt Gingrich. All he has to do is offer a motion of censure in place of the articles of impeachment. You're laughing. Bear with me for a moment. Gingrich is leaving Washington with his tail between his legs. This is not how the former history professor with a taste for the dramatic envisioned things going. Nor did he ever think that he would never achieve approval ratings in the country at large above 30 percent -- a pathetic showing for an American politician, but a consistent one for Newt. Nevertheless, he is not allowing people to think that he believes he has been chastened. He is treating this as a momentary setback in the ebb and flow of his brilliant career. After all, even Nixon returned from exile to become America's most popular politician, if only for six months. But in today's culture, any comeback by Gingrich would be prefaced by two minutes of film clips of his most ridiculous statements, like laptops for the homeless and the return of orphanages, along with the famous GOPAC list of code words to use against "enemies." This would not facilitate any comeback he has in mind. Nor would his eventual comeback be a strictly behind-the-scenes role; like many other politicians, his ego is too large for that. But if Gingrich would take charge of the House this week for the last time, call for a vote of censure and declare the impeachment articles useless because of their strictly partisan nature (and also because of the complete lack of likelihood that 22 Democrats would vote to impeach Clinton -- the hearings have shown that there is no new information, after all), he would leave Washington on the most triumphant note any politician in the last 100 years could imagine. Sure, he would anger his core constituency for a while. But every American who has expressed an unfavorable opinion of Gingrich -- holding steady in polls at two out of three -- would be forced to reevaluate his or her opinion of the current speaker. The media glare would follow him to the ends of the earth daily for at least 90 days. MSNBC would stop being the Clinton scandal channel and become the Gingrich channel. And with that amount of publicity at his disposal, Gingrich could return to placing his ideas in the forefront of American consciousness, issues on which few Republicans could disagree. His fellow Republicans, except for the nut cases like Barr, Burton and DeLay, would be able to go before the American people and laud a great man who seized a moment in American history and made a bipartisan decision to put aside piddling things in favor of moving the country's business back into the spotlight. Even Democrats would have to speak well of him -- something that's never happened in the 20-year congressional career of the speaker. Naturally, this is as likely to happen as Henry Hyde admitting that the only difference between him and Clinton is that the government didn't spend eight figures to chase him and his girlfriend into a corner. But if Gingrich were to happen onto this idea on his own, it would be too irresistible to pass up. -- Francis Volpe Carlisle, Penn.
_______________RIGHT ON!: FASCISM BY ANY OTHER NAME BY DAVID HOROWITZ (12/07/98)
	David Horowitz's article lacks integrity because it misreports primary source material appearing in the Nov. 17 news release of Accuracy in Academia, the conservative group that sponsored the conference. Other source material that Horowitz may or may not have consulted includes the Nov. 20 issue of the Columbia University Record (a weekly) and a Nov. 17 editorial in the New York Post. These three accounts of the conference differ irreconcilably as to whether the conservative conference was "evicted," as Horowitz states, and the Post affirms. Or whether, as stated in the AIA press release, there was a Saturday morning administrative offer to let the conference meet on campus on the grounds that only students with valid Columbia IDs be allowed to attend. Because several verbatim sections of Horowitz's article are identical to the AIA news release -- the one and only news release on their Web site -- it appears almost incontrovertible that Horowitz read and quoted it. Having read their release, he knew that Columbia did not simply bar all conference attendees, as his article erroneously states, but tried to restrict enrollment because of the previous night's fracas. The AIA Web site indicates that it is planning a lawsuit on this matter. In any case, Horowitz's central declaration, on which he builds his entire argument of the university fascist left, still stands: "President George Rupp's solution to the problem created by the presence of the demonstrators was to ban those who had registered for the conference from attending the sessions the following day." Defending this statement as even remotely accurate journalism would involve the argument of "it all depends on what the meaning of 'those' is -- it means only the 'outside-of-Columbia those,' not 'all' of the conference attendees." Do we not sense here an appeal to the Clintonian rhetorical method? Horowitz's argument lacks power, not because his premise -- that leftists are capable of fascism -- is false, but because in his vehemence to demonize the left, he misrepresents the truth, thereby invoking in his own article that for which he broadsides leftist campuses: "In the last 30 years [they] have moved a long way toward endorsing the proposition that the ends justify the means." -- Kip Leitner N E X T+P A G E+| Get Lamott a therapist; culture lessons for Wanderlust writer