July 10, 2002

TED BARLOW (permalinks not working -- you Blogger types need to call Stacy Tabb and find something more reliable) says that I was wrong to cite Media Pundit's take on the Harken affair.

Barlow may be right: I missed it, being blissfully unaware of the news while on vacation last week, and I haven't really caught up. Barlow does, however, say that those discounting this scandal should apologize for hyping Whitewater.

I hope he doesn't mean me. I never thought much of Whitewater -- in fact, my 1997 book The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business and Society (Free Press) was spurred in part by my belief that too much was being made of minor ethical lapses in the Clinton Administration. Lanny Davis has even used it as a text in his political communications class at GWU.

So I don't think I can be accused of being a premature Clinton-basher. It was only later that I came to believe that Clinton was a sleazeball's sleazeball, but that's another story, and it doesn't have much to do with Whitewater.

In the meantime, will all those (er, all us?) who said Whitewater was no big deal now change their stories, too?