Like it or not, Bill Clinton is now on trial in the U.S. Senate. Impeachment is--O.J. and Lindbergh notwithstanding--constitutionally the trial of the century. It's supposed to be the pinnacle of our system of checks and balances in action, an exhilarating demonstration of how American justice works. As such, it's rather revealing that the whole affair leaves such a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

The purpose of a trial is to ascertain guilt or innocence. The House of Representatives has, unfortunately, already decided the more ludicrous question, of whether the crime (lying about an extramarital affair) warrants the punishment (removal from the most powerful job in the world). They decided, absurdly, that it did. The Senate is now left with only two choices: find him guilty and elevate President Gore, or find him innocent, possibly with a demand for some symbolic penalty like a censure resolution.

Pretty weighty stuff. Too bad everyone assumes they know the outcome. And what's with pseudo-statesmen like Slade Gorton (please, no giggling) trying to broker a deal that would depend on a straw poll of how Senators would vote before having heard any evidence? Isn't evidence, like, kind of central to a trial? Not to be outdone, the White House wants a trial in which no witnesses are called, so as to avoid embarrassing Clinton. Again: the purpose of a trial is to determine guilt or innocence, not to maneuver for political advantage or to humiliate the defendant. Both sides in this sorry debacle are making a mockery of the idea of a trial.

There is some poetic justice, at least. Bill Clinton has done an awful lot in his six years to make it more difficult, in federal courts, for defendants to get fair trials. He's stripped the civil rights of immigrants, the appeal rights of death row residents, and the privacy of all of us (through expanded use of wiretaps and government spying). It's somehow fitting that he find himself in a trial in which the judge (Nixon appointee William Rehnquist) is ideologically predisposed to hate the defendant, in which the jurors aren't interested in the evidence, and the witnesses have never been cross-examined or had to testify under oath--except for the prosecutor, Ken Starr, who has violated his obligation to seek only the truth and has instead become a partisan advocate for the maximum penalty. (He's also plainly one sick fuck, but that's another issue.)

This all might be fitting for the Pervert-in-Chief, except that in real life the odds are much more stacked every day against people who do stupid things and get caught. They don't have teams of lawyers and spin doctors, or 70% approval ratings. What the casual observer is likely to take from impeachment is not that (as in Watergate) the system works. It's that the system is really, really screwed up, and has little or nothing to do with either justice or reality. Truly a lesson for our times.