Tilting at Windmills.

• Author: PETERS, CHARLES

A King's Compliment * Hinckley's Holiday * Tripp's Step * Ground Truth * The Case of the Vigilant Taxpayer

"It's impeachment or Nothing, Panel is Told by Experts," was the headline of the lead story in The New York Times of November 10. The subhead was "Scholars Warn Lawmakers that Compromise Like Censure is Not in Constitution." Readers who managed to get to the article's tenth and eleventh paragraphs must have been astonished to learn that at least two constitutional scholars, including the only witness to appear under the sponsorship of both parties, had declared that censure was a legitimate option. One pointed out that censure had been used against five judges and presidents Jackson and Polk. You don't have to know much about constitutional law to know that Congress can pass a resolution of censure against anyone it wants to. It may not have the right to call Bill Clinton into the well of the House to listen to a lecture, as Gerald Ford recommended in The New York Times, but its power to give the lecture is beyond question.

If you are sometimes suspicious of polls, you will be interested in the range of answers that the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press got to the question, "How often do you vote?": 62 percent answered, "Always" in September 1997. But just two months later, in November, only 42 percent answered "Always." One of these figures has to be wrong. Maybe both are. Or maybe the truth lies somewhere in between.

As I watched, courtesy of C-SPAN, the world leaders who had negotiated the Wye memorandum make their statements to the press in the East Room of the White House, I was struck by the words King Hussein addressed to Clinton: "Mr. President, I've had the privilege of being a friend of the United States and presidents since the late President Eisenhower. And throughout all the years that have passed, I have kept in touch. But on the subject of peace, the peace we are seeking, I have never, with all due respect and all the affection I held for your predecessors, have known someone with your dedication, clearheadedness, focus, and determination to help resolve this issue."

To the best of my knowledge, this statement was not shown on any of that evening's news shows. It was omitted in the transcript of Hussein's speech that appeared the next day in The New York Times. The first time I saw attention paid to it was in a column the following week by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter.

It would be nice if this would turn out to be the last example of media unfairness to Bill Clinton. That's unlikely, given the number of hard-core Clinton haters who remain in powerful positions. But there have been signs since the election of an abatement of the hysteria that reigned in the press from January through October. Since the attention given the Lewinsky story is the most disproportionate I've seen in the press in my lifetime, it's good to see that at least some of my colleagues are regaining their senses.

Those of you who fondly remember Paddy Chayevsky's great satire on the medical profession, "Hospital," with George C. Scott and Diana Rigg, should be sure to see "Critical Care," a new film with Albert Brooks, Helen Mirren and James Spader. At one point, a cynical physician played by Brooks asks, "How do you avoid the trouble of preparing a living will [telling doctors when you want them to stop using expensive medical procedures to keep you alive]?"

His answer: "Don't have any health insurance."

When one of those big trucks looms in your rear view mirror, do you feel just the faintest tinge of apprehension? If so, your fears are well-founded. More than half of the 42,256 trucks inspected by Virginia State Police during 1997 were defective, reports The Washington Post's Mice Reid. She adds, "more than 20 percent were in such bad shape that authorities took them off the highway" And if you're thinking Virginia may be unusual, nationwide 22 percent of all trucks inspected must be taken off the road.

Defective vehicles are only part of the problem. In Virginia 45 percent of the...