The president in the attic.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Bill Clinton

Who is Bill Clinton?

In 1999, Washington discovered the politics of the insane. President Bill Clinton, fresh from procedural exoneration in a dismal impeachment trial, was credibly accused of having brutally raped a woman 21 years earlier. Then, nothing happened.

The allegation was made by Juanita Broaddrick, a wealthy Arkansas nursing home operator with no known ties to the president's enemies and no apparent agenda, and was reported in the mainstream press in February in a lengthy op-ed essay in The Wall Street journal, in a front-page news story the next day in The Washington Post, and later in a notoriously delayed 30-minute NBC Dateline piece that offered independently discovered evidence that tended to confirm her account. But nothing happened.

Among the appalling details of Broaddrick's story was Clinton's use of his teeth in the alleged attack: Her description of his savage biting of her upper lip is described by rape cops as a known M.O.; rapists will use their teeth to terrify and subdue their victims. Broaddrick says that as a result, her lip was swelling badly even before Clinton left the hotel room where, she says, the attack occurred. She attributes to him the exit line that may yet become his rhetorical signature: "You'd better put some ice on that."

If this story is true, it has profoundly disturbing implications about the president's character. Yet the day after this scene appeared in The Washington Post, the capital's Sunday talk shows were devoted to the possibility that the president's wife might run for a Senate seat. These programs did take up the rape allegations later, after NBC finally ran its piece. And then nothing happened.

Nothing, at least, that did not indicate the lunacy to which the capital has descended under Clinton. The president declined to address directly charges that he was a brutal criminal; instead, his lawyer, David Kendall, offered a terse denial: "Any allegation that the president assaulted Mrs. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false."

But language and plain meaning have been assaulted repeatedly by Clinton, and Washington actually parsed this statement in search of the smug alibis of logic the president is pleased to allow himself. Let's see, 20 years ago Jimmy Carter was president, so is Clinton really denying that Carter assaulted Mrs. Broaddrick? In 1978, there was no Mrs. Broaddrick; she was then Juanita Hickey, so maybe Clinton isn't denying that he assaulted Mrs. Hickey...