The Ghost of McCarthy

One can only hope the spectacle of personal-purity vows staged by a small but growing number of politicians is short-lived. Panting to please and eager to endear, these lapdogs are a pitiful sight. Such groveling to a moralistic boobgeoisie is demeaning; such self-knighting, indecent. This is one of those political phenomena that is ugly from any angle.

Proclamations of chastity and fidelity are more than an affront to good taste. As noted by others, in this case they're the height of contradiction. For months we feeders at the television trough of political junk food were fed the line "It's not about sex." So why bring it up? Why insist ad nauseam it's not about a certain something, then protest your innocence of it? Methinks, me reader, something here is ineptly askew.

Should this morality advertising take root, poised is the overarching problem of a fidelity litmus test, allowing one of three outcomes, all abysmal: unimaginative candidates with unimaginative pasts; interesting pasts precluding interesting candidates who refuse to countenance scrutiny; and unceasingly indiscreet yet good candidates who will be exposed, then hounded out of politics. We'll be cursed with the first crowd - dull, neatly pressed, plastic-coifed Dudley Do-Rights who never gained an Augustinian insight from youthful waywardness, or dared think an original thought. (One critic has pointed out that Martin Luther King, Jr. had a flawed family life and Pol Pot a spotless one. Who would you prefer as a leader?)

An equally pervasive pall hanging in the air is that of a sexual McCarthyism, to borrow Alan Dershowitz's term. Here a threat extends beyond mere, boring politicians and plants itself in the field of civil liberties: the prospect of private lives endlessly investigated. Columnist William Safire got it right when he wrote that the best answer to the sex question "Are you now, Senator, or have you ever been, involved with a person other than your spouse?" isn't a yes or no, but "Go to hell." Any other response, and especially a denial, only dignifies prying and encourages others to confirm or deny, encourages the press to probe deeper, and indeed, encourages the whole stinking process. And in the public's interest, it's none of the public's business.

Which brings us again to the causational House impeachment fiasco; a partisan, opportunistic overreaction to private behavior. Whenever a political party acts out of spite, rather than in the nation's interest, the law of unintended consequences ineluctably kicks in. In their passion to "get" Clinton, the Right has unleashed, however unsustainable, a Frankenstein monster of misplaced morality that will drive good people from public involvement, rightly offend civil libertarians, and lastly, destroy its creator.

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