WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

...I infer, for example, from talking to even reasonably well-informed for- eigners that practically the whole world believes the following inversions of the truth: 1) That the independent-counsel statute was invented by conservatives to avenge themselves on the '60s by destroying Bill Clinton...

...it also results from the fact that conservatives, never mind Republican politicians, have done next to nothing to straighten out such confusions...

...Yet the rancor and the bitterness that would have been caused by throwing out so popular a president as Clinton (whatever the sources of that popularity) would have injected even more poison into our political system than is already so abundantly there...

...WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN NORMAN PODHORETZ THE MOST DISHEARTENING LESSON of the entire farce through which we have lived for what feels like an eternity is how easy it has become to turn everything upside down...

...The other detail is that on the basis of this theory countless corporate executives have been fired and millions upon millions of dollars have been shelled out by their terrorized companies...

...What should conservatives do now...

...When I point out that more than a hundred Americans are at this moment sitting in prison for doing just that, my foreign interlocutors murmur, "Really...

...The stare gets even blanker when I further explain that this is precisely how and why Monica Lewinsky's name came into the Paula Jones case...

...Finally, it turns altogether glassy-eyed when I add two more details...

...Both alternatives entailed serious evils, but my reluctant assessment is that those brought by acquittal are on the whole the lesser of the two...

...2) That Ken Starr and other "religious fanatics" were the ones who arrogated unto themselves the right to investigate Clinton's private sexual life...

...who persuaded the courts to allow investigations to establish a pattern of such behavior when a woman brings suit—a procedure that in other areas of law would be deemed "prejudicial" and therefore inadmissible—I am hit with a blank stare...

...When I explain that it was not conservatives, or the Christian Right, but rather the feminists and their supporters on the Left who invented the idea of "sexual harassment," I am rewarded with a skeptically knowing smile...

...I think that even though Clinton richly deserved to be convicted, and though Henry Hyde and his colleagues were honorable and courageous in pressing their prosecutorial case, it would have been worse if they had succeeded...

...Now, however, I have to throw in what will no doubt seem a perverse conclusion...

...Nor have conservatives retained the zeal with which they opposed the institution of the independent counsel when it was being used against the Reagan administration...

...On the contrary, just as the feminists were deserting their own cause in order to defend Clinton against the jackboots they imagine waiting in the wings, conservatives rushed to fill the vacuum by turning themselves into champions of the concept of sexual harassment and its abominable legal offspring...

...And then when I go on to inform my interlocutors that it was also the feminists Conservatives should regain their zeal against the independent counsel law...

...Well, we might start by returning to where we were on these issues before and fight the fight we should have been fighting all along...

...This is not just a tribute to Democratic spin...

...3) That no one in America is punished for lying under oath...

...When I explain that this institution was created by liberals, that conservatives have in the past consistently called for its abolition, and that Clinton himself strongly supported renewing it early in his term, my foreign interlocutors look at me as though I were trying to put something over on them...

...Little if any damage was done to the country when a highly unpopular president like Richard Nixon— whose crimes, by the way, were no better understood by foreigners than Clinton's, and appear, I confess, no more reprehensible to me—was forced out of office...

...in a tone suggesting that surely I exaggerate...

...Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author of Ex-Friends (Free Press...

...one is that the same feminists who have defended Clinton— on the ground that his sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky were "consensual"—have previously insisted with fury in their voices that there could be no such thing as consensual sex between a male boss and his female subordinate...

...My guess is that at least half of the American people believe these same inversions of the truth...