A L S O__T O D A Y Grace under pressure By Charles Taylor With his back to the wall, President Clinton finds his voice and passes the character test THE HENRY HYDE AFFAIR Hyde lied, says former lover By David Talbot "Long-term relationship" ended at least two and a half years after Hyde claimed it did, charges Cherie Soskin Editorial Salon's declaration of independence Political firestorm erupts against Salon By Harry Jaffe Republicans charge that White House was behind story and call for FBI investigation "This hypocrite broke up my family" By David Talbot The secret affair of Henry Hyde, the man who will sit in judgment on President Clinton Editorial Why we ran the Henry Hyde story - - - - - - - The full text of The Starr Report and The White House Rebuttal T A B L E+T A L K Does anybody really want to see the president impeached? Join the debate in the Politics area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y A man for all seasons By Jeff Stein Russia's former KGB chief dishes the truth about new Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov (09/21/98) Loyal to the end By Jessica Seigel Susan McDougal, on trial in California on non-Whitewater offenses, feels vindicated (09/18/98) Lives of the Republicans, Part Two By David Neiwert The strange case of Helen Chenoweth shows that playing the sex card against the Democrats as a political strategy can be, in Idaho parlance, as "dumb as a mud fence" (09/16/98) White House adjusts its game plan By Jonathan Broder White House switches tactics (09/14/98) Where's Whitewater? By Jonathan Broder The independent counsel seems to have forgotten something on his way to the impeachment party (09/11/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		A _N _A _L _Y _S _I _S The politics of paranoia The sexually insecure voices of moral absolutism are criminalizing some of our most cherished constitutional protections. BY BRUCE SHAPIRO | "How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting? ... This must be the product of a great conspiracy." Those words might have been spoken on the Capitol lawn by one of those camera-hungry Republican members of Congress after the broadcast of President Clinton's grand jury testimony; or by House Whip Tom DeLay last week when he called on the FBI to investigative Salon's exposé of Henry Hyde's extramarital affair. The same words also might have been uttered at some recent staff meeting of the Office of Independent Counsel, with the frustrated prosecutors trying to parse the president's presumed perfidies. But those sentences were actually declaimed in 1951 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who claimed (falsely, as it turned out) to possess proof of widespread Communist subversion in the State Department. McCarthy's Cold War "great conspiracy" speech stands as the high-water mark of an outburst of national insanity that scarred the political landscape for years. President Clinton, heaven knows, is no Red Scare blacklist victim; but the unremitting moral zeal on display in the president's broadcast grand jury interrogation, the preposterous logic of Kenneth Starr's "Referral to the United States House of Representatives" and the stampeding, irrational emotions that now grip Washington bear alarming comparison to the nation's cyclical witch hunts and outbreaks of paranoid persecution. It's no exaggeration to say that normal, rational political calculus and process of law has utterly broken down. Consider: The Gingrich majority in Congress, which stands to gain nothing from disposing of a weakened President Clinton, seems nonetheless hell-bent on impeachment hearings, ignoring pleas for sanity from distinguished Republican lawyers like Iran-contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh and former Nixon Attorney General Elliot Richardson. Monday, in defiance of the most minimal standards of responsible inquiry and due process, the House Judiciary Committee published reams of raw, uncorroborated grand jury records and investigative files. (Everyone in Washington seems to have forgotten that in 1991, when a single raw FBI report on Clarence Thomas bearing the name of Anita Hill found its way to the press, those same congressional Republicans went on an enraged leak-hunt.) House Judiciary Chairman Hyde, who a few weeks ago was still discussing the very high standard of wrongdoing needed for impeachment, now leads the impeachment-hearing juggernaut; Gingrich and DeLay threaten Salon and other publications; while honorable Republican moderates like campaign finance reformer Christopher Shays stand silent. At the root of all this is the Starr team's unshakable conviction -- evident both in the impeachment report and the interrogation of President Clinton -- that while conventional evidence for obstruction of justice by President Clinton doesn't actually exist, it must be so, for only a deliberate, organized effort by the president could explain how Clinton and Monica Lewinsky both decided to lie in their Paula Jones depositions last year. As a matter of law, this argument doesn't make much sense. Banished for all time is Starr's image as a scholarly, careful, precedent-honoring conservative jurist, respected even by his philosophical adversaries. The Judge Starr of the impeachment report embraces unprecedented legal arguments in unashamed advocacy of presidential impeachment, supported by a wealth of sexual detail and balletic leaps in logic. Media coverage has focused on Lewinsky's explicit descriptions of her sexual encounters with the president, and on Clinton's resistance to taking his testimony down that road. But it is the 11 "possible grounds for impeachment" with which Starr closes his brief that most reveal the independent counsel's mind-set. Starr claims that Clinton perjured himself in that grand jury testimony, which Republican leaders have seized on as a far more serious criminal charge than misleading or evasive testimony in the dismissed Jones civil suit. Yet the only "evidence" of grand jury perjury offered by Starr is the contradiction between two lovers' descriptions of their encounters: Clinton, in the testimony broadcast Monday, maintains he didn't touch Lewinsky's breasts "with an intent to arouse," while she says he did. Starr's report says it "strains credulity" to think that the president would have settled for simply being serviced by his lover -- but somehow the strained Victorian credulity of Judge Starr hardly seems secure evidence of perjury. Starr's report calls it "obstruction of justice" when the president challenged his grand jury subpoenas in court, and when secret service agents (backed up by former President George Bush, among others) sought exemption from testifying. And in the interrogation of Clinton, Starr prosecutor Robert Bittman suggested it amounted to obstruction of justice when the president answered only the questions put to him by Jones' lawyers rather than offering his antagonists additional information. By making impeachable offenses out of legal appeals or careful responses to a lawyer's queries, Starr proposes nothing less than criminalizing the most ordinary legal protections. That prolix and dangerous interpretation of the law links Starr directly to the anti-Communist witch hunters of the McCarthy era, who in similar fashion criminalized the Fifth Amendment by turning witnesses' invocation of the constitutional right to silence into admission of subversion. Indeed, the wild events of the past week only make sense if you consider the Starr report not as law but as part of the particular American tradition of conspiracy-obsessed literature devoted to threats to the political and moral order, from the great crisis of 1798 -- when Federalists, convinced that opposition Jeffersonians were conspiring with French and Irish revolutionaries to undermine the new republic, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts and arrested dissenting newspaper editors -- through the McCarthy era. To Starr's cultlike legal team and Jones' religious-right lawyers at the Rutherford Institute, Clinton epitomizes a 1960s-bred moral relativism that is the real "impeachable offense," a sort of moral subversion that fits within the Constitution's "high crimes and misdemeanors" clause. (Starr obliquely addressed this theme even while conducting his investigation, in one speech bemoaning the decline of "civility" and morals, in another in May defining "the good lawyer, the moral lawyer" -- with the clear implication that a certain law-professor-turned-president is neither.) N E X T+P A G E+| The far right's obsession