Clinton’s Impeachment

* Re “Is It the Right Verdict? Well, It’s All Relative,” by Jonathan Turley, Commentary, Feb. 12: Once again someone explains the public’s support for keeping President Clinton in office by proclaiming that we have become “a nation of moral relativists.” Such a position romanticizes the past and ignores our history. If anything, the standard for personal conduct has been raised in our time. What has changed is the rate at which information of all types is transferred, along with the consequent erosion of personal privacy. In an earlier time, a time of back-room deals, male dominance, public corruption and the buying and selling of judges, Bill Clinton would have never been impeached, much less convicted.

I don’t know whether or not “the framers denounced relativism in every form.” I suspect that “moral relativism” is itself a “New Age” term. It does seem that from the time of the founding fathers to the present, we have been a practical people, which has sometimes put off the idealists among us. In their wisdom, the framers decided that a two-thirds vote in the Senate should be required to unseat the president, thereby protecting us from both factionalists and idealists. The system works!

JACK WIDMARK

San Pedro

*

Ann Douglas had some very important things to say about the deeper cultural meaning of the Clinton impeachment (Opinion, Feb. 14). It was therefore most unfortunate that her message was obfuscated by hyperbolic linguistic gyrations characteristic of academia, necessitating Herculean efforts at deconstruction in order to fully elucidate its gravitas. I, for one, would be delighted if Douglas reissued her essay under the old KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Sister!

ALITTA KULLMAN

Laguna Hills

*

Re Legacy of a Scandal section, Feb. 13:

Now that it’s over, it appears to me that we have a president who smoked pot but didn’t inhale; dodged the draft but feels free to send our sons into combat all over the world; shook his finger in the face of the American public and blatantly lied to us and, thereby, increased his popularity by 10%; had extramarital affairs but not “sex,” because he made up his own definition of the word; perjured himself before the grand jury and was never held accountable; and, finally, was impeached by the Congress and immediately sainted by 74% of the people. What is it the other 26% of us just don’t get?

NORMA JEAN ALL

Downey

*

Now that the impeachment trial is over, are the feminists going to take their heads out of the sand? They get my vote for greatest disappearing act of 1998.

RAYMOND E. CERVANTES

Alhambra