The topic, of course, was the unfolding Florida recount of presidential ballots. The average American, Republican or Democrat, may have thought what was happening in Florida was a predictable, if highly contentious, legal battle to decide one of the closest elections in American history. But Will saw much more. He detected the remnants of Monica Lewinsky's "stained blue dress." He saw Gore's "serial mendacity." He spied a "corrupting hunger for power," a selfish attempt to create "postelection chaos" and "delegitimize the election."

That was just the beginning. In weeks to come, as the recount battle was played out in Florida's courts, Will, coming across less as the Montesquieu-quoting sage he fancies himself and more a foaming GOP attack dog, spouted on about "Gore's attempted coup," "slow motion larceny," "manufactured votes" and a "stolen" election.

The rest of the respectable conservative press brayed just as loudly. Michael Kelly, whose animus against President Clinton (forged in the Lewinsky scandal) cost him his editor's job at the New Republic, insisted in his Washington Post column that Gore's "revolting" campaign was littered with "hacks and political thugs."

At the Weekly Standard, a magazine that referred to the vice president of the United States as "the jerk" during the campaign, editors could barely contain their spleen. According to their current cover story, Gore is "self-obsessed, conniving and dangerous." He's "certainly divisive and ruthless, and wholly obsessed with achieving his ends," a man "seen as compulsively mendacious. Politicians lie, but few do so as audaciously and with such self-satisfaction as Gore."

The more rabid right-wingers, of course, were positively apoplectic with rage. To Ann Coulter, who has made a career out of loudly hating Clinton since the Lewinsky sex scandal first broke, the confused voters in Florida were "stupid," "feeble-minded" "jackasses," while the Florida Supreme Court represented "a kangaroo court."

Just what was Gore's unspeakable sin? What did he do that caused the entire conservative press to lose its moorings at once? The winner of the nation's popular vote, he aggressively, but lawfully, contested a crucial state race so close -- the difference in Florida represents just .01 percent of the statewide vote -- that if the election were a 100-meter dash at the Olympics, both Gore and Bush would have been declared winners in a dead heat.

Even Bush supporters find it hard to argue with a straight face that the Texas governor wouldn't have done pretty much the same thing if their situations were reversed.

Of course, you expect partisans to be partisans. Republicans have enough bottled-up impeachment frustration to power a locomotive, and conservatives haven't been locked out of the White House for this long since the Beatles invaded America. No one thought that the vein-bulging right-wingers were suddenly going to call for national patience with their horse in the lead, even if only by a ten-thousandth of an inch.

Still, their all-out, no-holds-barred assault on Gore is so wildly disproportionate to its putative cause as to be almost surreal. And what's even more remarkable is that their lock-step rantings don't even raise eyebrows anymore. It's as if the impeachment debacle created a minimum standard for conservative bile, and now everyone simply takes it for granted that the right-wing press will serve up bitter, resentful, ad hominem attacks on the flimsiest of pretexts. For the more thoughtful of conservative critics, this can scarcely be cause for rejoicing.

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