Senior Gore supporters and strategists have been pounding away at the same message ever since Florida's secretary of state pronounced Gov. George W. Bush the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes. They have "no choice" but to contest the certification because, says running mate Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the count is still "incomplete and inaccurate."

"An election's not over until the votes have been counted," said Gore's chief attorney, David Boies, as he prepared to launch a fresh blitz of lawsuits to overturn the certification. "And you have nine or 10 thousand votes that have never been counted once."

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That should certainly last longer than Tuesday, the deadline imposed by Florida's Republican secretary of state. But not much longer. If by Friday, when Florida's absentee ballots are supposed to be counted, Gore still remains behind there, then he should gracefully step aside. His only legitimate chance rests with Florida's absentee Jewish voters in Israel. If they are not enough to put him over the top, then it should be over.

Why? Because after that, Republican arguments, cynically motivated as they may be, take on increasing merit. Taking Gore's statement to its logical conclusion -- the presidency, he said, should not be determined by "a few votes cast in error or not counted or misinterpreted" -- the recount would indeed never end, as James Baker has suggested. It's a shame that the bubbes in Palm Beach County punched the wrong hole, or didn't punch it firmly enough. But the Republicans are again right: It happens all the time. And if, because of such errors, there is to be a wholesale recount in Florida, then why not, as the Republicans argue, in New Mexico, Wisconsin, Iowa and other states where the vote was close? For that matter, why not the country as a whole? There must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of similar "errors" out there.

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As the New York Times gently pointed out, the memorial actually commemorates the 3,400 Tennesseans who died in World War I; and it was the Russians, not the Americans, who liberated Auschwitz. Even more enraging to Finkelstein, no doubt, was this comment from Hadassah Lieberman's friend, Mindy Weisel, who told the Times: "I think her background as a [Holocaust] survivor's daughter has given her a humanity that a lot of people don't have."

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It was a noble thought, and if achieved, it would be a wondrous legacy of his presidency. At this point, it is hard to see how the threshing cycle of political murder and revenge eating away at the vitals of American democracy will be slowed. The grotesque impeachment proceedings, the cynical Republican rhetoric about "the rule of law," the rank abuses of prosecutorial power exercised by the independent counsel, the vindictiveness, the trampling of rights, the blatant coup in broad daylight -- these will long be angrily remembered.

Testifying on behalf of the coup's opponents, historian Sean Wilentz told the House Judiciary Committee that history would "hunt down" those who voted for impeachment. In faint echoes of the civil rights and anti-war days, celebrity teach-ins are springing up and protesters are taking to the streets. A veritable crusade is shaping up on behalf of a president whom writer Mary Gordon, in the pages of Salon, likened to the martyred Billy Budd.

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-- a Salon reader

What I wrote almost seven months ago was that if President Clinton had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, lied about it and led others, inadvertently, to lie on his behalf, then he should resign. Now that we know he is guilty on all three counts, I believe he must go.

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I write to you as a concerned citizen and reader. I have included an article you wrote on Jan. 27, 1998. I am wondering what your position is now as it pertains to our president.

-- a Salon reader

What I wrote almost seven months ago was that if President Clinton had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, lied about it and led others, inadvertently, to lie on his behalf, then he should resign. Now that we know he is guilty on all three counts, I believe he must go.

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Unfortunately for Mandanici, who has been waging a lonely legal battle to have the independent counsel removed for conflict of interest, Starr may very well get away with it -- unless we wake up to the Alice-in-Wonderland world into which Starr has now taken us.

For Starr, what was not a problem 14 months ago, when he accepted the Pepperdine chair funded by arch Clinton-hater Richard Mellon Scaife, has suddenly become one. Why? Not because he suddenly realized that accepting the post was a clear conflict of interest, but because the end of his investigation -- presumably in sight in February 1997 when he accepted the Pepperdine job -- is now, in April 1998, "not yet in sight." This despite the imminent demise of the Whitewater grand jury, his avowed "satisfaction" with the Monica Lewinsky investigation and the leaks to the Washington Post that his report to Congress is already being written.

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It took a female Republican judge, a Bush appointee, to cut through the pollution that the media not only did nothing to fight, but actually helped spread. Judge Wright's decision will likely be appealed, and it is quite possible Jones' case will be reinstated. But a historic moment has been reached. If, as James Carville has said, the effort to bring down Clinton is a "war," then Wright's ruling is its Normandy. From now on, the American public will be treated to the spectacle of a highly disorderly retreat, with the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife, Susan Carpenter-McMillan, the Landmark Legal Foundation, R. Emmett Tyrrell and various Wall Street Journal editorial writers crawling back into the holes from which they oozed.

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It took a female Republican judge, a Bush appointee, to cut through the pollution that the media not only did nothing to fight, but actually helped spread. Judge Wright's decision will likely be appealed, and it is quite possible Jones' case will be reinstated. But a historic moment has been reached. If, as James Carville has said, the effort to bring down Clinton is a "war," then Wright's ruling is its Normandy. From now on, the American public will be treated to the spectacle of a highly disorderly retreat, with the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife, Susan Carpenter-McMillan, the Landmark Legal Foundation, R. Emmett Tyrrell and various Wall Street Journal editorial writers crawling back into the holes from which they oozed.

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Unfortunately for Mandanici, who has been waging a lonely legal battle to have the independent counsel removed for conflict of interest, Starr may very well get away with it -- unless we wake up to the Alice-in-Wonderland world into which Starr has now taken us.

For Starr, what was not a problem 14 months ago, when he accepted the Pepperdine chair funded by arch Clinton-hater Richard Mellon Scaife, has suddenly become one. Why? Not because he suddenly realized that accepting the post was a clear conflict of interest, but because the end of his investigation -- presumably in sight in February 1997 when he accepted the Pepperdine job -- is now, in April 1998, "not yet in sight." This despite the imminent demise of the Whitewater grand jury, his avowed "satisfaction" with the Monica Lewinsky investigation and the leaks to the Washington Post that his report to Congress is already being written.

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The fruit of their labors was evident in Saturday's New York Times, which devoted a three-column all-caps headline and five full pages inside to the groundless lawsuit filed by one of the Clinton haters' chief puppets, Paula Corbin Jones. There, and all over the mainstream media, popped up the same discredited figures -- from Gennifer Flowers to Dolly Kyle Browning (many of whom the coup plotters have been promoting for years) -- all dressed up in the formal clothing of legal depositions. More ammunition for independent counsel Kenneth Starr, the pundits sagely agreed.

The plotters ought to be equally pleased with Starr, their front man, whose chair at Pepperdine University, funded by arch-conspirator Richard Mellon Scaife, still awaits the independent counsel's comfortable posterior once the coup is complete. What other truly "independent" prosecutor would still be pursuing, at taxpayers' expense, a 20-year-old land deal that investigation after investigation has conclusively shown involved no criminal misconduct, or even impropriety, by the president or his wife? Who else but Ken Starr would be relying on a convicted scam artist, David Hale, whom the late James McDougal once laughingly described as a "recreational liar," and who, too, has been a beneficiary of the plotters' financial largess?

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Unfortunately, not all Time cover boys and girls were able to attend. Among those who sent their regrets:

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The Soviet Union in the time of Beria? No, it's the United States in the age of Kenneth Starr, the apparently unstoppable "independent counsel" who has now decided to drive a tank through the Constitution if that's what it takes to get President Clinton.

But as most of the nation's elected representatives stand mute in the face of such grotesque assaults on basic rights, and the vast legal machinery that is supposed to ward off such threats remains frozen in uselessness, there are signs that the press may, at long last, be rethinking its Pravda-like role as the unquestioning mouthpiece of the Inquisitor-General.

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It is one of the ironies that while Clinton has benefited handsomely from the economy, some of his closest political friends have been putting considerable distance between themselves and their former boss in the wake of the Lewinsky affair. George Stephanopoulos has as good as called for the president's impeachment; former Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers has grumbled darkly about Lewinsky's alleged 37 visits to the Oval Office; former Chief of Staff Leon Panetta openly wondered whether it might not be a good idea for the president to step down and give Al Gore a chance.

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Gene Lyons Gene Lyons is a political columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and the author of "Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater" (Franklin Square).

Even people here who have been on Clinton's side through all the so-called scandals are pretty shaken up by this. If he did do this, he's got to resign and I'll be bitter at him for a long time, because he will have betrayed his country, and his party and his family.

But at this moment, I'm still agnostic. I have tapes in my office -- which I got while researching right-wing "dirty tricks" against Clinton -- of women talking about having sex with Clinton and it's all demonstrable fantasy. What we may have here is a David Letterman situation, where you have a young woman who gets infatuated with the president, keeps following him around and fantasizes that she's having a relationship with him.

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Remind you of anything? To go along with the Christmas good cheer, auld lang syne and resolutions to be better in 1998, Salon's Newsreal herewith presents its first annual Fin de Sihcle Awards to all those who have helped make the world a worse place in the past year. However, this jeremiad is not ranted without hope. We believe that it is true that you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't -- well, you know the rest. So we make these awards hoping and trusting that the recipients will, one day, get their comeuppance.

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According to reports, the militant group known as Gama'a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) claimed responsibility. The radical Muslim organization has killed more than 1,000 people since 1992 and has specifically targeted foreign tourists. According to government figures, released coincidentally on Monday, the country is expected to earn $3.7 billion this year from the more than 3.5 million people visiting the country.

Are we about to see more and even more violent terrorist attacks in Egypt, which has been a relative model of political stability in the Arab world? Salon spoke with Judith Miller, former Cairo bureau chief for the New York Times, and author of "God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a Militant Middle East" (Touchstone, 1997).

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For much of the past 24 hours, Paglia has been glued to the television
screen again, switching between channels, watching the bulletins and the specials
and the endless replays of a crushed Mercedes being hauled away from a
tunnel by the River Seine. Salon talked with Paglia about the wretched
death of a young, once-glorious icon.

At its core, what was Diana's appeal?

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Ha, ha, very funny, responded the kinder readers. Other responses from Mac zealots ran along more murderous lines. Well -- ta da, not to mention the gasps and boos of the Apple faithful at Macworld Expo in Boston -- Microsoft and Apple went quite far in that direction with the shock announcement Wednesday that Microsoft was investing $150 million in the ailing computer company. Microsoft also promised to continue producing software for the Macintosh operating system for the next several years.

What did Perlman know that the rest of the world didn't even suspect? Salon spoke to Perlman on his car phone soon after the announcement was made.

How serious were you when you suggested Microsoft buy into Apple?

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