Just because certain people can't give up Clinton hating as a way of life doesn't mean this column has to debunk
every spurious or exaggerated allegation against America's most controversial celebrity couple.

    Sure, we could point out that Republicans scandalized by the Clintons' taking possession of $190,000 worth of gift furnishings didn't say boo when Ronald Reagan's rich benefactors loaned him $2.5 million for a California mansion.

    That said, elected officials in a democracy, whether their name is Clinton or Huckabee, ought to accept no gifts more tangible than the esteem of their fellow citizens. And a U.S. senator who just banked an $8 million book advance ought to buy her own damn silverware and china.

    Given all the theatrical outrage over Bill Clinton's last-minute pardons, however, it's also worth recalling that
eight years ago, then-President George Bush bestowed "Get Out of Jail Free" cards upon former Secretary of
Defense Caspar Weinberger and several high-ranking GOP functionaries involved in the Iran-Contra affair.
Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh had indicted Weinberger for allegedly hiding some 5,000 pages of
handwritten notes he'd taken during meetings at which the arms-for-hostages scheme was hatched.

    According to Walsh's book, "Firewall," Bush himself had dissembled about being "out of the loop."
He did not sell guided missiles to that country, Iran.

    Ironically, it was Weinberger who had warned that the idea was both foolhardy and illegal.
    "The only way for [Bush] to avoid the revelations that would emerge at Weinberger's trial," Walsh wrote,
"would be to pardon Weinberger before the case went to trial."

    So he did. Odd that so few Washington pundits and no Republicans at all appeared to recall the incident
last week, don't you think?
    But something more substantive does need to be said about Clinton's pardon of Susan McDougal.
Indignant editorials in The New York Times and The Washington Post portrayed Susan as an unworthy felon who,
in the Post's words, "became a celebrity for thumbing her nose at Kenneth Starr's grand jury and refusing to
answer its legitimate questions."

    As she's done her time and then some, it's hard to understand why anybody would object to her being pardoned. Besides, the simple fact is that Susan testified for three days in a Little Rock federal courtroom in 1998, undergoing sharp cross-examination and answering every question Office of Independent Counsel prosecutors threw at her. Although both newspapers failed to report the substance of her testimony, a jury found her not guilty of obstructing justice. After interviewing jurors, the OIC decided not to retry her for criminal contempt.
    The inability of prosecutors to produce evidence contradicting Susan not only gave credence to her oft-stated fear that Starr would punish her for testimony exonerating the Clintons, but also made her original conviction look pretty shaky as well. Basically, the OIC convicted her of guilt by association with her ex-husband Jim McDougal's crackpot efforts to save his tottering real estate and financial empire, then to shift the blame for its collapse on somebody else. She'd done foolish things, but there was never any evidence of criminal intent.

    The real significance of the 1998 trial, however, wasn't simply Susan's exoneration, but also what it revealed about Starr's scorched-earth tactics in keeping the Whitewater crusade going for years after any fair-minded prosecutor would have shut it down. Had her name been Susan Smith instead of Susan McDougal--a baby killer instead of a political prisoner of a kind we supposedly don't have in the United States--it's likely both the Times and Post would have protested the barbaric treatment the OIC accorded her: strip searches, constant shuttling from one jail to another, months of solitary confinement, inadequate medical care that finally persuaded U.S. District Judge George Howard to release her.

    Ultimately, Starr had her shipped out to California to face felony theft charges so flimsy that angry jurors who acquitted her later traveled to Arkansas at their own expense to support her against Starr's juggernaut. You'd think that might have gotten somebody's attention. But alas, because Susan also was a prisoner of the Washington press mob's own Whitewater delusion and its addiction to OIC backstairs press leaks, they all looked the other way. Shame on them all.
    Did Susan sometimes appear to enjoy all the attention? She did. Among other things, the woman's a great ham. Her ability to charm national TV audiences and articulate her case must have driven the humorless fanatics in Starr's OIC crazy.

    But she's also a classic American hero, a woman whose courageous defiance of a political vendetta cloaked in the law helped save the Clinton presidency. Too bad Clinton's own extravagant folly in the Monica Lewinsky matter prevented him from being able to do anything on her behalf until the very last day of his presidency.