The Starr report on President Clinton is a vindictive, pornographic document that offers air-tight proof that the president perjured himself in a sexual harassment case. It is impossible to defend the president against these charges, and yet it’s impossible to defend the charges themselves.

So now what do we do?

First, this nasty, meant-to-embarrass report. Do we need to be told that Monica Lewinsky knew Altoids, those “curiously strong peppermints,” to be an enhancer of fellatio pleasure? Do we need to know, as we’re told at footnote 81 of Part 2 of the report, that the commander in chief finished his encounters with Lewinsky by whacking off into the kitchen sink? Apparently, yes.

We’ve moved into the postverbal world Marshall McLuhan warned us against, in which an argument (such as “the president committed adultery and lied about it”) no longer suffices. What’s needed instead are lurid pictures and atmosphere to make you “feel like you’re there.” If it’s not like television, it’s not real.

The president, who’s supposed to be the master of this type of postverbal communication, this manipulation of imagery and mood, now finds two can play at that game.

The president claims that the Starr proceeding—and the Paula Jones case that gave rise to this part of it—is an attempt to “criminalize my private life.” The president is absolutely right. In the Jones case, for instance, the president was “asked to identify all women who were state or federal employees and with whom he had had ‘sexual relations’ since 1986.” This is an appalling impertinence, and if it can be inflicted on a sitting president, it can be inflicted on anybody—as it routinely is.

This, of course, means an end to any privacy right. The Office of the Independent Counsel claims to respect sexual privacy, but the exceptions it makes in this case are so wide-ranging as to render any remaining privacy right meaningless. Leaning heavily on sexual harassment law, the OIC argues, basically, that privacy is unlimited unless anyone decides he wants to ruin you. Then it’s nonexistent.

That’s the way sexual harassment law was designed to work. It was never anything more than the use of police-state tactics—informers, anonymous testimony, indoctrination, no presumption of innocence—to help feminists get in the courts what they couldn’t get at the ballot box or in the workplace. To Hillary, or to her in-law Barbara Boxer, who would happily have seen Clarence Thomas swinging from a tree during his confirmation hearings, one is tempted to say, “How do you feel about sexual harassment law now? Do you ‘get it’?” Yeah, this is terrible when it happens to your president, or your husband. But this is your law—and it’s been used exactly the same way against thousands of people who did far less to deserve it than the First Goat.

It works no differently now that it’s being used to moralist, not feminist, ends. A Republican congressman recently lamented on This Week that letting the president off the hook would “gut the sexual harassment laws.” Well, it would be about time! One would be accusing him, Starr, and all the others of moralistic humbug if the president’s defenders hadn’t been even more full of it.

Stalking Feat

Four things illustrate the tawdry corruption of this whole business:

1. What made it clear that the president had no right to forgiveness was his Aug. 17 plea for forgiveness.

2. What made it clear that the Starr investigation has absolutely no case for impeachment was its case for impeachment.

3. What made it clear that the president is a pathological liar is his lawyers’ argument that he was not a pathological liar.

4. And what made it clear that Monica Lewinsky was the stalking slut her enemies claimed her to be was her attempt to tell her own story in a favorable light.

Lewinsky’s character is the most interesting aspect of this entire episode. According to the Starr report, this woman is exactly the calculating, unhinged, Fatal Attraction-style bunny-boiler temptress that the nastiest people in the White House tried to depict her as. Not even Sidney Blumenthal could improve on her.

It was Lewinsky who initiated contact with Vernon Jordan (who comes out of this report quite well, incidentally). She just thought he’d be good to know. She demanded a job in the UN and threw it back in the president’s face when UN Ambassador Bill Richardson offered her one on the spot. She looked at the fact that she’d given the president a few hummers as a license to tyrannize everyone she ran into in the White House, from Secret Service agents, to the “meanies” who wanted her out of there, to the presidential secretary Betty Currie.

After reading this report, and seeing him on television in his grand jury testimony, one feels a deep, newfound sympathy for the president. One can’t condone his repugnant record of adultery, of course, but at the time the Paula Jones lawyers found Lewinsky, he had been trying for a year to cut her out of his life—in the nicest way possible, but firmly resisting her every sexual blandishment.

And yet there ought to be a limit to our sympathy. His defining act of low-down personnel scumbaggery is that he wanted to order Currie to come into the White House to take care of Lewinsky the weekend Currie’s brother was killed in a car accident. Do you wonder why she was willing to talk freely? More generally, do you notice that the people who are least surprised by this account are the people closest to the president? His top adviser George Stephanopoulos, his top consultant Dick Morris, his chief of staff Leon Panetta, his spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers—not one of them has come out and said, “Gosh, that’s not the president I know.” Reporters will not have failed to notice, too, that practically every single “rumor” we’ve heard for the last six months, which the White House has dismissed as groundless and we’ve been too scared to print, has turned out to be true. Eleanor Mondale’s visit to the Oval Office that so angered Lewinsky, the cigar, the masturbation—all of them are here.

High life of high crime

Lawyers for the president have tried to do two things: show their client shouldn’t be impeached and keep him out of jail. They’ve been successful at the first: Clinton attorney David Kendall has correctly argued that “high crimes and misdemeanors” was understood by the framers of the Constitution to mean crimes against our system of government or against the Constitution itself.

Republicans, most loudly the leggy pundette Ann Coulter, have taken to claiming that the term is so vague that it can mean most anything Congress wants it to. How convenient for Republicans, who did not make this argument under Nixon.

Coulter is wrong and Kendall is right. The problem is not that the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. He has not.

The problem is that he’s a Lying Sack of Manure. Who else could say during grand-jury grilling that his answer to a simple question “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” At another he implies that the hummer he got from Ms. Lewinsky was not sexual because the part of her that he made contact with—her lips—is not a sexual organ. If he thinks that a meeting in which one of the parties ejaculates can be described as “non-sexual,” then perhaps he can name some non-sexual meetings that involve ejaculation.

What a ride this is going to be. Because, unfortunately for the president’s foes, there is no Lying Sack of Manure clause in the Constitution.