THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

...And these liberals drew back...

...So, apparently, does still another Post writer, Mary McGrory, who in one column spoke of Tripp’s “Serbian-strength malevolence”—this when reports of Nazi-like atrocities were coming in from Kosovo— and in another described Tripp as “malice personified...

...An “essential meanspiritedness” infects the GOP “like a virus,” and the case against Clinton “should not be made by a partisan mob...

...Perhaps the most storm-tossed pundit of them all is Lars-Erik Nelson, columnist for the New York Daily News...

...Clinton is a disaster, but Starr is “a nightmare out of Kafka” (leaving Orwell aside for a moment...

...Our president’s conduct need not be angelic: “Hitler was monogamous” (really...

...He put it succinctly in his October 12 column: While “Clinton’s offenses are despicable,” Starr’s “are a threat to fundamental liberties...

...Richard Cohen, on reflection, says that he considers the impeachment drama “a domestic version of the Iran-Iraq war: I find it hard to choose a side...

...The avenging, evangelical prosecutor,” Dowd wrote, “never seems to give a thought to how his relentless chase” rends the nation...

...and “he didn’t smoke, either...

...He put his dilemma neatly on September 24: “On the one hand, you have a president who is so reckless and untrustworthy he is not fit to hold the office...

...Lately, however, Nelson has returned to his natural home: the excoriation of Starr and the conservatives who back him...

...Dowd seems to have turned on a dime, as though her mind had been annexed by James Carville...

...Nothing was worth that...

...But there is also something broader, something cultural, something almost spiritual...

...No one—not even Carville—has been more vitriolic about Starr than another Post columnist, Richard Cohen...

...Because—and here again comes the darkness-at-noon theme—“this is still America...

...But—and this is the mammoth “but” of all such liberals—“I look at Kenneth Starr . . . and I say: No way do I want this man to win...

...Above all, Cohen, like his brethren, loathes Linda Tripp—“the odious Linda Tripp,” he has called her, “a suburban Judas...

...Even if Clinton’s actions were “reprehensible,” she wrote, he “doesn’t deserve to die for it” (death taking the form of impeachment...

...McGrory has been harshly critical of Clinton, but, like the others, she feels torn: With the release of the Starr documents, “the country slipped back to its original dilemma about the two compulsives—both obsessed by sex—who dominate our political life...

...The great question was, “Would the presidency survive his lust...

...Starr, she claimed, “is pressing the ominous Orwellian concept of sex crimes against the government...

...Sure, he wrote, Clinton had behaved abominably, and “I make no brief for him...

...Yet he leaves no doubt as to which house he wishes to afflict the most...

...Dowd attempted to explain herself in a mid-October column, arguing that she was not “being inconsistent”— rather, she was “trying to make distinctions in a complicated case...

...Starr, in Dowd’s fantasy, “couldn’t stop thinking about [Monica Lewinsky’s] thong underwear,” which “inflamed his imagination,” “quickened his pulse,” and “made him catch his breath...

...Nor did he hold that Clinton’s dalliance with Lewinsky was merely a private indiscretion: “Exploiting her sexually was an abuse of power, a violation of trust, a betrayal of office...

...In an interview last week, Herbert stated that his view is “a pox on all their houses...

...So too, he kept seeing Lewinsky in “that blue Gap dress”: It was “too tight, and he was glad...

...A few weeks later, Herbert was even more alarmed, having watched Gingrich preside “over the possible impeachment of a Democratic president,” a scene both “chilling” and “insane...

...And they asked, conservative- style, Where’s the outrage...

...Starr was determined “not only to overthrow the president, but to overthrow the ’60s, and restore the black-and-white moral code” that had vanished with the tail fin...

...Their barbs, coming from the left, had a special sting...

...Republicans have “lost all sense of proportion” and should be denied “the sadistic pleasure” of holding hearings...

...After all, “two wrongs don’t make a right...

...William Raspberry, like the other liberals in this group, is fully persuaded of Clinton’s guilt...

...They called him a liar, a felon, and a disgrace to the Democratic party...

...Neither, obviously, does Maureen Dowd, starlet of the New York Times op-ed page...

...Clinton, foolishly, had “given the right-wingers the opportunity to finish their business,” and they, not the president, must be stopped...

...Then a curious thing happened: Kenneth Starr submitted his report to Congress...

...She painted Starr as a sexcrazed maniac, “the helpless victim of his cravings for ecstasy...

...But on the other, “you have a Republican party dominated by a snarling, vicious pack of rightwingers that is willing to do almost anything to seize complete control of the government...

...It looked as though the Republican majority might actually impeach Clinton...

...It is Starr’s prosecutorial zeal that “I don’t want to prevail...

...There are legal objections to the independentcounsel investigation, certainly...

...Would his opinion be different if he opposed Clinton politically...

...I think...

...Yes, wrote Herbert, “the country would be better off if Clinton were not president,” but “voters, quite rightly, don’t want the likes of Kenneth Starr and Newt Gingrich” to settle the question...

...The Lewinsky affair “conceals” the Republicans’ “real agenda,” Herbert charged— the “subversion of the interests of ordinary working Americans and the poor...

...On September 23, Dowd published one of the strangest columns yet to appear about the scandal...

...Yet after Clinton’s semi-admissions in August, Nelson turned furiously against the president, declaring that “the lie to the American public” was “reason enough to hound him from office...

...Dowd’s Times-mate Bob Herbert also flinched at the specter of a post-Clinton world, one controlled not by a Gore administration but by a newly cocky Newt...

...Even so, “I do feel strongly that, sooner or later, you have to ask yourself, ‘Which side are you on?’ And I’m not on Ken Starr’s side, so I guess that puts me on Bill Clinton’s side,” given Starr’s “scary zealousness...

...But she was only warming up...

...They would ban abortion, allow diseased meat to be sold, deprive the elderly of their substance, and pollute the land...

...The shift from Clinton-scorning to full-time Starr-hating was jarring for some, seamless for others, and probably predictable for all...

...For most of 1998, she skewered Clinton as zestfully as any journalist in the country...

...Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THEWEEKLY STANDARD...

...For a certain strain of liberal—not prone to make excuses for Clinton’s many misdeeds— there is a fate worse than a lawbreaking president: the idea that, sometime, somewhere, Jerry Falwell may be smiling...

...Never before had Dowd given any indication that she regarded Starr’s aim as the killing of the sex drive...

...But “impeachment is where people sort of choke,” he told me...

...For months, Clinton was a blight on the presidency...

...Four days later, though, it was another official who was making the capital Orwellian: Ken Starr...

...I’ve asked myself that question a number of times,” Raspberry answers, “and if it were Newt Gingrich in this same set of circumstances, I’d like to believe . . . Well, put it this way: I’d be very disappointed in myself if I didn’t object in print in the same way...

...He has always despised Starr and his investigation...

...There is “no one to honestly root for,” he complained...

...They decided that, no matter what Clinton had done, Starr, Newt Gingrich, and conservatism generally could not be handed a victory...

...As late as September 16—after the release of the president’s grand-jury video—she was asserting that Clinton, with his manipulation of language, had made Washington “Orwellian...

...Cohen ended one October column by acknowledging that he had something in common with Lewinsky: “I hate Linda Tripp, too...

...Republicans, for their part, “have raised the prospect of bringing down a president on a technicality,” which is “as close as America has come to a Putsch” since the 1860s...

...Then, overnight, he was “just a sad philanderer...

...Try to imagine the implications of a bigger, more powerful, more aggressive, more right-wing regime of Republicans,” he wrote...

...To Cohen, Starr is “Keyhole Ken,” a “menace to us all,” a man who “in a different era” would have made “a splendid petit fascist...

...Clinton has already been embarrassed, and “you can’t punish someone twice...

...She then quoted Nineteen Eighty-four, in the manner of Clinton apologists everywhere: “The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it...

...Clinton may be to blame, but he is also the victim of an “Orwellian intrusion,” and though “only one of us is president,” we all “have bedrooms...

...This sentiment was expressed most explicitly by William Raspberry, columnist for the Washington Post...

...Nelson expounds at greater length in the November 5 New York Review of Books, where he asks, “Which is more outrageous to us—Clinton’s illicit relationship with a 21-year-old intern or Starr’s use of the law to hound an elected president from office...