Your article: “Sidney Blumenthal: First Amendment Warrior” (Paper Trail, 2/27) makes me wish my bladder were full so that I could say that I laughed so hard that I wet my pants. I think I’ll run through a Bud or six with that end in mind.

Here’s something I want you to consider: My bet is that Bill and Hillary have told Chelsea exactly the details of his relationship with Lewinsky and answered, in whatever detail Chelsea required, her questions. From the get go. That’s Part 1. Part 2 is that I don’t think Chelsea is protected from a prosecutor the same way a husband and wife are. I mean, if Starr can compel testimony from a mother about a daughter, I don’t see how a daughter can escape testifying about a father. Plus, she just turned 18, which means she is legally an adult.

And if Ken Starr is serious about putting Monica Lewinsky in jail, he cannot not call Chelsea in front of the grand jury. And if he doesn’t at least explore the possibility pretty aggressively, then he is a fucking liar. If the Truth Starr so sanctimoniously clings to doesn’t compel him to explore every possible resource, even if it requires something as distasteful as forcing a child to testify against a parent, then Starr is an absolute fraud and his so-called investigation merely a cover for an ideologically driven witch hunt…

Which is the case.

Now, I am the same age as Clinton and Starr, more or less, but my way took me to Vietnam at the time they were avoiding it, and, when I came back, they had a two-year jump on their careers, while I was trying to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up. My life’s experience is not particularly unusual, and I expect if you talk to other Viet vets and Peace Corps volunteers, you’ll find that these two distinct population pools, the Clinton liberals and the Starr conservatives, have been conducting this generational food fight since Janis Joplin was still with Big Brother, and before them it was the McNamara Whiz Kid Democrats and the Nixon/McCarthy Republicans, and before them the FDR college kids and the Robert Moses Republicans, ad nauseam. They were a reality when we got home, and they continue to be a reality, and they are an enormous pain in the ass, and I, for one, am sick to death of this intermural political bullshit. I voted for Clinton not necessarily because he was the lesser of two evils, but if that was the case, I would have voted for him on that basis anyway. The people around Reagan and Bush are just exactly like Starr, and if I got to choose between an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution based on the moral vision of Bubba or Adolf Eichmann, there ain’t no choice.

Here’s something else you might consider: If you need an example of sexual politics in the work place and the distortion of an editorial position to accommodate an inappropriate relationship in the work place, Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn would be the classic study. You’ve observed the casual arrogance of Quinn for yourself. Imagine this magnified by actually having to work in a newsroom where she was fucking the guy writing your paycheck. You’ll end up sounding like Tony Kornheiser or not being heard like Phil McCombs. And Quinn, like most of the women at the Post and ABC, considers Lewinsky to be a whore and cannot see the irony of their judgment. Jennings is in the middle of a series on sexual harassment, which strikes me as high comedy in this context.

Starr is like the Kamikazi pilot with 148 missions. He shouldn’t be able to happen in a rational universe.

Adams Morgan

via the Internet