Politics gets ugly uglier.

Michael Barone:

American politics today is not just about winning elections or prevailing on issues. It's about delegitimizing, or preventing the delegitimization of, our presidents.

He goes on to comment on the Democrats' lingering bitterness over the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Whether you agreed with it or not, it was a foreseeable outcome of his behavior with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office and then lying about it under oath, basically trying to cover up embarrassing behavior. That was pretty much what Nixon would have been impeached for, had he not resigned.

(Certainly, one can argue that covering up a burglary was more serious in absolute terms than covering up sexual exploitation of a willing subordinate, but after the feminist response to Clinton's lifetime of using women to gratify himself, I came to realize that their demands of society to stamp out sexual harrassment was hypocritical. They weren't really so much feminists as Democrats.) In relative terms, a "penny-ante burglary" wasn't so much more serious than "just sex" and "just being a man" as those who tell us that Watergate was an attempt to overthrow the Constitution would have it. It always seemed to me that by the time Richard Nixon became President, the Constitution had been overthrown for nearly 40 years. He was more a victim of his own ineptitude and basic inexperience in dishonesty. Can anybody imagine Jack Kennedy having made such tapes and keeping them? He'd have destroyed them and then said it was standard policy and the country would have bought it.

Today, who hasn't thought how ironic it is that Bush's most vocal and angry critics are members of a group named MoveOn.org, formed to oppose Clinton's impeachment, and now probably the largest group supporting impeachment of George Bush. How weird it is that none of these people seem to harbor any bitterness toward Bill Clinton for squandering their last great grasp on political power and forcing parents across the country to explain oral sex to their children?