I stared her in the face as she continued to speak and I knew she was a famous person I'd seen many times before, but couldn't quite place. Then it hit me: It was Kathleen Willey.

Becoming Kathleen Willey's hero was a thought that had never crossed my mind. I let the surreal moment wash over me; and let me say, Willey and her new husband Bill Schwicker couldn't have been more gracious. But Willey's instant identification with Chandra Levy is just but one example of the odd mix of nostalgia and vindication with which the far-flung crowd of Clinton-bashing chatterers have greeted the swirling mystery surrounding Rep. Condit and missing intern Chandra Levy.

Tune into any cable TV chat show these days and you will see a gaggle of faces from the bygone days of impeachment: the same familiar peroxide blonds jabbering not only about Gary Condit, but retrospectively re-fighting impeachment with endless analogies between Condit's shenanigans and those long ascribed to Clinton.

Take former federal prosecutor and one-time Dan Burton aide Barbara Olson. In her now-regular slot on "Larry King Live," Olson (who is married to former Clinton scourge, now Solicitor General Ted Olson) can scarcely find a thread of the Condit saga that doesn't remind her of similar misdeeds practiced by the odious former president. The Condit team's character assassination of Chandra Levy? Just like Bill Clinton. "We have seen this before, the character assassination. We went through this with Bill Clinton." Condit's creepy pasted-on smile? "The television cameras really do show you something about people. You can see into hypocrisy. You can see a lot through a television camera -- we saw that with Bill Clinton." Condit aide Mike Dayton helping arrange trysts for his boss? Been there, done that. "This is a very sad déjà vu," Olson told Larry King Thursday night, "to what we had with Clinton and the troopers." (Of course, Olson recently attacked the author of the infamous "Troopergate" story, turncoat Republican poison-pen David Brock, for "reinvent[ing] history and reinvent[ing] his own past." But that's another story.)

Other familiar faces are returning all along the chat show terrain from "Geraldo" to "The O'Reilly Factor" (where has Laura Ingraham been?). On another CNN chat show, New York Post columnist Robert George recently darkly joked, "Do you think Monica Lewinsky thanks her lucky stars that Linda Tripp saved that dress? You never know what could have happened if there hadn't been some evidence there, too."

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