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	In some ways, Gary Kamiya gives today's virulent strain of Republican reactionaries too much credit. They don't really hold to the high moral standards they profess. Those only apply to other people. Rep. Barr's rhetoric about "real Americans," Rep. DeLay's contemptuous characterization of the president as a "gray-haired middle-aged hippie" and all the sanctimonious grandstanding we're seeing now are really about exclusion and scapegoating. The message is, "It's us good people against those bad people." More fascist than conservative, their fake morality serves to generate self-righteousness, bigotry and hatred, which they encourage in their constituency. Hyde, DeLay, Barr and their ilk are politicians who, at bottom, don't give a damn what happens to their country as long as they get to head the parade and walk away with a pocket full of loot. They should be differentiated by name from Republicans who are true conservatives and loyal citizens. I suggest they be called "Republikanners." -- Walter Risley Columbus, Ohio Thanks for Gary Kamiya's article, which expressed observations about the impeachment process that seem to be virtually absent in most of the media. I would only add that it is precisely the '60s that Republicans are desperate to formally and finally annihilate through the Clintons, whom many of the congressmen's older generation seem all too eager to forget, like the memory of a "bad trip." -- R.D. Hall Gary Kamiya seems to be everything he rails against in his article. The bulk of this article speaks of how the author used to call the Republicans names back in his radical acid-dropping days at Berkeley; apparently nothing has changed. Kamiya's rant is long on invective and short on facts. Rather than calling the GOP names, why doesn't he lay out the case of how the "partisan hacks" (ever notice how no one refers to the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee as partisan even though not one voted for an article of impeachment) of the Republican Party are trampling on the Constitution? The author arrogantly questions the fitness of the Republicans to hold office, when it's his own president who has exhibited the lack of character, judgment and respect for the law that renders him unfit to hold office. In short, Kamiya needs to come out of his long hazy acid days. Obviously, his brain has been fried beyond the point of reason and all that is left(ist) are the catch phrases, talking points and name calling. If this is journalism, I could do better. -- Jeffrey R. Cobb Gary Kamiya is right. The Republicans are breathtaking in their arrogance. Their claims to be protecting the values and the "letter of the law" are spurious and infuriating. I cannot believe this insanity has come so far. I live in Utah -- Republican country -- but I will never again support, believe, trust or respect a member of the Republican Party who has been a participant in this madness. -- Margaret Sowerby Ogden, Utah Gary Kamiya writes, "We must again, we hear over and over, become a country of laws, not of men." As a matter of fact, I heard Republican John Danforth say on the McNeil "NewsHour" just last night that we "are not a country of individuals, we are a country of law." Nobody batted an eye. Good lord. Thanks for a great article. -- Carol Garner I have been waiting for a long time for the media to portray some hostile reality about the impeachment proceedings. Gary Kamiya's article did just that. Why is everyone else in the media taking sides with Satan's war pigs? Are they afraid to stand up to the GOP? Or do they sell more newspapers by appeasing the Republicans and making the American public's blood boil? -- Joel Elrod I just read your excellent article by Gary Kamiya. It seems that Kamiya doesn't know that the word "Pharisee" is identical to the word "Rabbi," just like the word "data" is identical to the word "information." Most Jews today are "Pharisees," or at least their spiritual descendants. Pharisaical Judaism became Rabbinical Judaism after the Second Temple was destroyed. The contempt that the authors of the so-called New Testament showed the Pharisees was part of the original blood-libel that led to all these years of Christian antisemitism. The use of the word "Pharisaical" to mean "hypocrite" is a legacy of the hate. This is not a call for censorship (i.e., don't use the P-word). If you feel it is appropriate, use it. Just know the background of the image that you or your authors are conveying. -- Steve Hirsch
_______________BILL GATES AND BILL CLINTON -- PRISONERS OF LAWYER WORLD BY SCOTT ROSENBERG (12/15/98)
	Kudos to Scott Rosenberg for putting his finger on one of the least appreciated aspects of the Clinton fiasco. Clinton the lawyer-turned-defendant was simply acting the way thousands of civil and criminal defendants do. It's not right, and lawyers are justly criticized for taking such drastic departures from common sense. But it's hardly surprising or necessarily illegal. What it comes down to is this: Litigants don't make good presidents, and we should have avoided turning the latter into the former while he remained in office. Once the Supreme Court ruled that the Jones litigation could proceed while Clinton was in office, the course of later events was set. -- Jeff Schwarz I enjoyed Scott Rosenberg's very sensible essay about the differences between Lawyer World and Common Sense World. I hope that editorial writers all over the country read it. The whole argument against Clinton is a purely legalistic one -- a lawyer's case, of course. Who else but lawyers would intone as though they believe it, "We have a government of laws and not of men." But it is a very particular kind of lawyer, too. A prosecutor. I cannot understand why liberal editorial writers, at my paper, at the New York Times and elsewhere, think we should have a country governed by prosecuting attorneys. -- David Reilly Thanks to Scott Rosenberg for pointing out something that has been driving me crazy about this impeachment thing for months. This bouncing back and forth between Lawyer World (LW) and Common Sense World (CSW). It is inherently unfair to use the "rule of law" against the president, and then require him to defend himself in political terms. Evidently, he is not to be allowed the defenses any of us would have in LW, because these are considered "evasive" in CSW. This latest nonsense about admitting he "lied under oath" is a perfect example. If he does that in CSW, he will be castigated in LW -- and LW is where the charges against him lie, as you rightly pointed out. He will suddenly become "an admitted perjurer." If he doesn't make this admission, then CSW condemns him as not facing up to his responsibility. Have we really come to this? -- Heather Parton Scott Rosenberg 's article is right on point. I have seen very little analysis so accurate. But I happen to disagree with him about impeachment, because I'm much more pissed off at having a president who lives in Lawyer World, who can't speak a straight sentence, who has the unmitigated hubris to think he could lie and then out-slick everybody, than I am about whether what he did amounts to "perjury." But if meeting the definition of perjury is important: A friend of a friend of mine was sent to prison for saying, "I don't remember" when she probably did. What the Big Creep did is much worse than that. -- Mitchell R. Miller SALON | Dec. 18, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| UNDER THE COVERS: BRILLIAN MISTAKE BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK

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