Whore City — Oh, heck, let's just impeach him again.

          With Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton subverted the legal system and sullied the presidency.
          With Marc Rich, he perverted the legal system and may have traded a constitutional power for personal benefit.
          He can't argue that our interest in this transgression is a violation of his privacy.

          The Clintons ran a cash-and-carry White House. They were either hawking stuff or carting it off.

          Beyond Denise Rich's $3 million fund-raising lunch and personal donations
          — $450,000 to the Clinton library, more than $1 million to Democrats,
          $10,000 to the Clinton legal defense fund, $7,375 for Clinton furniture —
          let's hope Bill Clinton has a Swiss bank account set up by Marc Rich.

          Otherwise, it would not be worth sliming the Constitution, his legacy and his party.
          Bill and Hill are tornadoes, as James McDougal memorably observed,
          twisting through people's lives and blithely moving on.

          But this time, they may not dance away from the wreckage. The egg may have hit the fan,
          as Congressman Steven LaTourette put it at the Congressional hearing on the Rich pardon.
          This time, maybe the user was used. Bill Clinton was manipulated by a man who made billions
          manipulating foreign markets. Marc Rich bought a pardon with the money he made betraying America.

          Bob Dole once asked where the outrage was. It finally materialized in, of
          all places, Dan Burton's hearing room as Denise Rich sent a letter taking
          the Fifth. The committee examined e-mails, telephone records and letters
          that provided a rare road map into a chic sewer of money and influence, a
          far cry from the salacious bodice-ripper peddled by Kenneth Starr.

          Eric Holder, former No. 2 at Justice and the latest casualty of the Clinton twister, offered lame
          and contradictory excuses about why he failed to rebut the argument of Jack Quinn, once Mr. Clinton's
          White House counsel and Monica apologist. Meanwhile, Mr. Holder was being touted as a possible
          attorney general in a Gore administration, where Mr. Quinn might be chief of staff.

          First Mr. Holder said he did not make a fuss because he did not know who
          Marc Rich was. Then he said he did not make a fuss because he assumed
          a pardon would not be granted to a known fugitive.

          At the hearing, Representative Christopher Shays scorched Mr. Quinn:
          "Mr. Rich traded with Libya when we had the embargo, he traded with
          Iran when we had the U.S. hostages being held captive, he traded during
          the 12 years with Iraq when we had our conflict, he traded grain with the
          Soviet Union when we had an embargo, he traded with South Africa with
          the apartheid government when we had that embargo. . . ."

          At the hearing, Democrats who had decried the virulent partisanship and
          wacko behavior of Dan Burton — including his re-enactment of the Vince
          Foster death by setting up what he called "a head-like" thing in his back
          yard and shooting into its mouth with a .38 — were echoing the complaints
          of Mr. Burton and fellow nutbag and Clinton hater Bob Barr.

          Even some black Democratic lawmakers, Bill's biggest defenders, were
          appalled. Representative Elijah Cummings said that when he returned to
          Baltimore's inner city, people would ask him "about a guy who evaded
          taxes . . . when they can barely afford to go to H & R Block to get theirs
          filled out. . . . And they are going to say, `Mr. Cummings, how can that
          happen when the police are arresting us for simple things?' "

          The potent combination of Mr. Rich's money and the access of Mr. Quinn
          and Denise Rich to the White House was destined to be a winner. As long
          as they could stay "under the press radar," as Mr. Quinn put it in an e-mail
          to another Rich lawyer.

          Ms. Rich and her pal, another close friend and Clinton benefactor, former
          D.N.C. finance chairwoman Beth Dozoretz, pushed the pardon, sometimes
          monitoring events from Ms. Rich's ritzy lair in Aspen.

          "POTUS," as one e-mail reports, phoned to buck up the girls from time to
          time with encouraging updates. If only those pesky White House lawyers
          would drop their objections, he was ready to green-light the pardon.

          Ms. Rich also buttonholed Mr. Clinton at a White House reception on Dec.
          20, snatching him away from Barbra Streisand for a pardon tête-à-tête.

          In the world of the Clintons, people who need people are the luckiest people in the world.