President Bill Clinton now allows that, well, yes, since you asked, he does suspect that special prosecutor Kenneth Starr may be out to get him and the first lady.
No kidding.With Starr's reported plan to subpoena Sherry Rowlands' diary, the special prosecutor goes from conducting what may be the world's longest fishing expedition to outright dynamiting the pond.
What possible standing could hooker hearsay have as evidence? Election mechanic Dick Morris brought not only cash but shameless boasting to his commerce with Rowlands and will testify that she simply misheard if she thinks she heard anything incriminating. Who's to know?
This whole Whitewater probe has been iffy from the start, less the investigation of a crime than an endless search for one. The business took a decidedly dubious turn when the first prosecutor, a respected and fair-minded Republican, was bounced for Starr, a conservative GOP activist with up-front political ambitions.
Two-and-a-half years and Scrooge only knows how many millions of dollars later, what have we really learned?
That the special prosecutor has managed to convict a few obvious back-home financial fiddlers in Arkansas, figures less extraordinarily corrupt than tediously typical of the savings and loan and real estate hustles of the 1980s.
That the White House had a prefect right to fire its travel staff but bollixed the process. And that the first lady says she wanted the office cleaned out but didn't order the staff fired.
If there's discrepancy in that - and there's at least tension - it is nothing worse than workaday political spin:
- That Arkansas has impressively scuzzy politics but Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, though up to their necks in it for years, seem to have been less compromised by it than most.
- That the White House acquisition of FBI files on past Republican officeholders was probably only the blunder the White House says it was.
The House investigating committee usefully fingered ineptness and indifference in White House security but went into partisan fantasy when it speculated the names had been squirreled for an eventual "enemies" list, a la Nixon.
Might-have-beens don't hack it. No wayward federal action was taken against anyone on the list. Some "enemies."
Now the scare-du-jour is that because the president won't rule out pardons, he must be planning them.
This from pretty much the same folks who brought you, at the end of the Bush administration, the pardons of former officials Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert McFarlane and three others - all accused not of ancient and obscure missteps, but of unconstitutional acts in office during the Iran-contra mess.
For a refreshingly contrarian view of Whitewater - and for once, an understandable rundown of it - check the book "Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater" by Gene Lyons and the editors of Harper's magazine.
Starr may eventually fan all his smoke into flames and make Lyons et al. the fools, but from what we know so far, Lyons sounds like the last sane voice in the din of the asylum.