On the Right - Pardon Clinton !#*!(Brief Article)(Column)

NEW YORK, JANUARY 16

The meeting of Tory intellectuals and men of affairs pondered the question: Should Clinton be pardoned?

Important to wait until after he is indicted, one man said. If Bush pardons him before an indictment, there will be those who will argue that he would never have been indicted, and that therefore the pardon was a kind of ex post facto slander, as in, I forgive my wife for committing adultery, when in fact she had been chaste. But the advocate of permitting due process to go on at its own pace held his ground: The organic judicial process should be permitted to go its own way. After all, if a grand jury isn't persuaded that Bill Clinton committed perjury in the Paula Jones business and, later, in his deposition in the White House, then any hope for rectilinear thought lapses, and justice is become a plaything.

A seasoned observer says: Look at it this way. The loss of critical Senate seats by tough-minded conservatives-John Ashcroft in Missouri, Spence Abraham in Michigan, Slade Gorton in Washington, Bill Roth in Delaware-has tipped the scales in Washington. Although the GOP has a formal majority, with 50 senators and the deciding vote of the vice president, the loss of critical stouthearted men affects the deployment of power. Now hear this: If President Bush antagonizes wobbly Republicans and sullen Democrats by declaring a posthumous war on Clinton, the victim may be not Clinton himself, but a Bush program. Bush can get right away an end to partial-birth abortion, a substantial revision of the death tax, critical reinforcement of the military-why endanger such substantial goals by vitalizing Clinton loyalists and the hordes of people who will maintain a sympathetic position towards the ex-president? Isn't it better to pardon him, and be done with it?

The dominant view in the discussion says this: American justice can go no further in addressing miscreant behavior by a president than to impeach him. Yes, the procedure isn't consummated where the Senate fails to convict. You have here coitus ...