Smoke Him Out
It's time to amend Freud: Sometimes a cigar is *not* just a cigar. Just when you think that the news can't get any more sordid, President Clinton delivers. Further revelations of this nature, if true, might very well bring the President's all-important job approval numbers down; the "everybody does it" defense is starting to wear thin. But there is a danger that as the late-night comedians make sport of each new report, the public will instead get used to such stuff; that they will accept it as normal. Therefore, leaving calculations of the effects on Clinton's length in office aside, it may be better for the country's moral health for us to learn the worst all at once rather than in dribs and drabs. All the more reason for Clinton's grand jury testimony to be released in all its glory, as we have repeatedly advocated. Republicans would employ themselves more usefully by putting pressure on this point than by calling for Clinton's resignation or speculating about the Starr report. So far, only Steve Forbes has had the wit to do so.

Reno Justice
Attorney General Janet Reno's re-opening of the investigation of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination is far worse than a waste of taxpayer money. When the review inevitably concludes that James Earl Ray, acting alone, was responsible, it too will simply be dismissed by the conspiracy-minded as more proof of their theory. Evidence will not dispel free-floating paranoia, because evidence is not what gives it rise. . . . Meanwhile, Miss Reno has approved a preliminary 90-day inquiry into whether an independent counsel should investigate whether Al Gore broke campaign-finance laws. This is well past ridiculous. If Miss Reno really needs more time to muse on this question, perhaps she should go on a retreat for a few months--as a private citizen.

Feminists Hate America
She does have a way with words, that Maureen Dowd. But some readers who appreciate her vitriol toward the Perp in the White House might not realize just how liberal she is. Today's column, stealing a page from Wendy Wasserstein in yesterday's New York Times, laments that Tobacco Bill "has turned Hillary Clinton into Tammy Wynette, popular with Americans now that she has been stripped of her swagger and humiliated by her husband." Yes, that's the way we Americans like our women: humiliated, ridiculed, barefoot and pregnant. We just can't handle "strong women." Except, that is, for Danielle Crittenden, who said this in NR recently: "I'd rather be barefoot at home than on my knees at the office."

Justice Powell
This will be in our new issue, out Friday, but so much revisionism is appearing in print that we'll quote it now: "When President Nixon appointed Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court, he thought he was getting a strict constructionist. But as so often with Republicans' appointees, Powell decided to play a different role: that of the judicious judicial liberal. Whenever Harry Blackmun struck out for new liberal territory, Powell was right behind him, occasionally pulling him back to more easily defended territory. For this service he was called the Court's "swing vote." His most famous opinion, in the 1978 Bakke case, posited a meaningless distinction between using race as the factor in university admissions and using it as a factor; it thus presaged President Clinton's equally duplicitous slogan "mend it, don't end it." The "Virginia gentleman" gave noblesse oblige a bad name by supporting Roe v. Wade because, he later said, it was unfair that his daughter could get an abortion in Switzerland while poorer lasses could not. Powell drew the line at making sodomy a constitutional right--and apologized for it as soon as he left the Court. David Souter now plays the Blackmun role; Powell has found an all too worthy successor in the man who replaced him, Anthony Kennedy. R I P.