Truest statement of the week

Now that the impeachment trial is over, it’s time for progressives to get back to their drawing boards and let Bill Clinton clean up his own mess. If, as NOW president Patricia Ireland said, “There’s no way that Bill Clinton can look into the cameras and deny it and have anybody believe it,” that is a problem entirely of the President’s own making, and it would be a grave mistake for feminists, environmentalists, trade unionists and civil rights and civil liberties advocates to lend him a penny more of their moral capital. For six years too many progressives have given Clinton the benefit of the doubt, whether it was their ill-founded hope that he wouldn’t sign the Personal Responsibility Act or the equally ill-founded skepticism about the existence in an unlaundered state of a certain blue dress. We’ve seen Jesse Jackson hailing “our President” as the bombs were falling on Iraq and Barney Frank defending–wittily, tirelessly–the man who signed the Defense of Marriage Act. As the anti-impeachment slogan put it, enough is enough.

-- Katha Pollitt, "Re: Juanita Broaddrick" (THE NATION, March 4, 1999).