LETTERS: TIRED OF RIGHT-WING ALLEGATIONS

To the editor:

I am weary of having it supposed, as my rightist brothers claim to suppose, that Mr. Clinton's veracity even entered into the typical U.S. citizen's decision to vote for him. More probably it was a realization of the danger of having the two houses of Congress and the presidency all in the hands of a political party that prostitutes itself so completely and abjectly to Big Business, the Wild-eyed Religion and to the Pentagon. Mr. Clinton's rightism is bad enough but still a deal more moderate than Mr. Dole's would have been.

Certainly M. le President should not have let himself be put in the position of either lying -- especially in a courtroom setting -- or else destroying his marriage. Suppose that it was true that he had imposed himself on everyone wearing skirts who came within his reach. Suppose further that Paula Corbin Jones' allegation of what happened in that hotel room was a lie. Would it not then follow from these two suppositions that his past sexual history was absolutely irrelevant to the truth of the matter at hand? The optimal course, when he was being deposed in the Jones case, would have been to state that no questions about his own past sexual history would be entertained -- in other words, the same protection that Mrs. Jones herself enjoyed.

I am not so shocked, by the way, that someone in a position of power would try to color outside the lines occasionally. It happens all the time. What would shock me would be the notion that the governor of a state, this time assuming that what Mrs. Jones alleged was true, had such a pedestrian taste in women. At least JFK risked his political career and marriage on (so to speak) no less a woman the Goddess of Sex herself.

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.