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This Just In: Media

The conservatives give it their worst

By Dan Kennedy

Those wacky conservative ideologues -- the ones who actually believe in their hearts that Bill Clinton's low crimes and misdemeanors equal Richard Nixon's war on the Constitution -- just don't have a clue when it comes to leading with their best shot.

Consider the Weekly Standard, the conservative counterpart to the New Republic and the Nation, started three years ago by media baron Rupert Murdoch. Its editor, Republican strategist Bill Kristol, is one of the right's most visible talking heads and is a regular on ABC's influential This Week. The Standard's opinion editor, David Tell, labors in almost total obscurity. So naturally, when Newsweek came looking for someone to make the case for impeachment, Kristol got the nod.

Trouble is, Kristol -- despite his intellectual genetic inheritance (his parents are neoconservative icons Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb) -- makes a laughable case. Kristol quickly passes over Clinton's lies under oath to get to his grand argument: that Clinton should be impeached as a way of standing up to his defenders' "barely disguised threat" to turn an impeachment trial into a "horror" in which Monica Lewinsky, and perhaps members of the Senate, will be grilled in excruciating detail about their sex lives. "To protect his indecent behavior, he has sought to exploit our decency," writes Kristol, substituting resonant cliché for rigorous logic. "The only response to this particularly insidious abuse of the public trust is impeachment."

By contrast, Tell, in this week's Standard, offers a linear argument aimed at showing -- in case anyone still has any doubts -- that Clinton committed perjury in his deposition in the Paula Jones case, and that he obstructed justice by attempting to silence Lewinsky and Betty Currie. "Which means he committed a felony," Tell points out.

Perhaps that's not enough to convince Clinton defenders that he should be removed from office -- after all, there are serious questions as to whether "high crimes and misdemeanors" include acts that don't involve the president's public duties. But Tell has offered up the sort of well-reasoned case that Newsweek's three-million-plus mainstream readers should be forced to think about. Unfortunately, the masses get Kristol's easily dismissed polemic, while Tell will be read only by the true believers.