If Bill Clinton has debased the Presidency--which he obviously has--Kenneth Starr's prosecution of him, and the process by which his detractors are attempting to clean and gut him, is a far larger crime. It is debasing the very notion of government itself.

As has been made fairly obvious in any of the last 100 or so issues of ETS!, I'm not a Bill Clinton fan. I also think his--let's be charitable-- problematic behavior around younger, less powerful women should disqualify him from public office. But the talk of impeachment following Kenneth Starr's report on four years of investigation of whatever isn't at all about Clinton's behavior with women--it's about whether he lied.

Americans know that Bill Clinton lied--any idiot knows that all politicians lie reflexively. Moreover, they still give Clinton extraordinarily high approval ratings.

When Richard Nixon was brought down by his venality, of course, his defenders also claimed (correctly) that "every president did it." But in that case there existed broad unanimity that the behavior in question--unleashing the combined forces of the federal government on political enemies--was out of bounds. By comparison, the behavior by which his enemies hope to ensnare Clinton is pathetically trivial, and behavior that many Americans don't seem to find much wrong with at all.

The inescapable conclusion is that Starr, Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, and their cronies are simply using the law to bring down a political opponent by any means possible. And the corollary is that a spectacle that will obsess the capitol and the nation's media for months to come is over nothing more than political turf, having nothing to do with law, ideology, or policy--let alone governing and the public good.

Is it any wonder people hate politics? Is it any wonder so few people voted this week, or in any other election? If the entire purpose of governance is not to balance opposing interests and craft public policy, but simply to decide, schoolyard style, who the biggest bully (and purveyor of graft) is at any given moment, most people will be repulsed and turn away. And this is why the current spectacle of Starr's report is so bad for the country. If it were about Clinton's actual behavior toward women--or, goddess forbid, about, say, his policies and their impact on women or children or the poor--it could provoke a healthy debate and a useful check on power.

Instead, power will go unchecked, because people will stop paying attention. They already have. Clinton will survive intact; he's too skilled a politician, and has meant too much to this country's economic elite. But if, amidst this sordid mess, he and his persecutors help convince large swaths of the public not to care about what those idiots in Washington are up to, even when they're robbing us blind, he has done yet another enormous favor for the titans of greed.