Sex and death in Washington.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Ethics of Monica Lewinsky scandal and execution of Karla Faye Tucker - Column - Brief Article

The Progressive's late editor Erwin Knoll once told me he got terribly depressed as a reporter in Washington, D.C., during the dark days of Watergate. I.F. Stone told him to snap out of it. "This is the greatest show on Earth," Erwin remembered Stone saying. "And you have a front-row seat."

I wonder what I.F. Stone would say about the media frenzy in Washington today. In this era of 'round-the-clock news, everyone has a front-row seat. But the public spectacle we're watching ain't exactly Watergate. Some of my friends at the news weeklies have been pulled off their other assignments to dig around in Monica Lewinsky's underwear drawer. One reporter I know was called back from the Southwest, where she was working on a story about abuses by the border patrol, to phone the Lewinskys' neighbors and find out what they think.

It's worse than depressing. It's an existential crisis. Here's a story full of human baseness on all sides--from the President to the independent counsel to the duplicitous Linda Tripp. Every day there are new details--semen stains, grainy video footage, idle gossip reported as fact. It's all pretty unappetizing. And unlike Watergate, it has no significance whatsoever for our democracy.

Oh, I know, there is plenty of material to spin. "The Feminists," for example, are getting tossed every which way. Columnists from George Will to Maureen Dowd to Frank Rich to Bob Herbert blame "The Feminists "--whoever they might be--for not joining the attack on President Clinton for allegedly having oral sex with his twenty- one-ye ar-old intern in the Oval Office. This, say the pundits, is an outrage, since feminists generally condemn sexual harassment.

There is, of course, an important difference between harassment and consensual sex. The feminists I know are divided over how appalling it is when a powerful older man has an affair with a young, vulnerable employee. Certainly it's in bad taste. But it's not illegal. Nor should it be, so long as the woman is a consenting adult.

Then there's the difference between private boorishness and a betrayal of the public trust. I got off the Clinton bandwagon when he cut food stamps for immigrants and ended welfare for millions of impoverished women and children. If he commits adultery, even if he lies about it, it doesn't make much difference to me.

Finally, there has been a lot of hashingout of sexual-harassment law. The most enlightening reporting I've seen on this was Jeffrey Toobin's article in...