KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WORDS GET STRONGER AS LIBERALS SEEK DISTANCE FROM CLINTON

The scene was Thursday night on CNBC's "Hardball," hosted by the incomparable Chris Matthews, formerly speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and chief aide to the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill. Matthews was interviewing a journalist from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Bill Clinton's hometown newspaper. This guy did something you don't hear very often in the days since liberalism became the philosophy that dare not speak its name: Not once, but three times in a brief interview, he proudly proclaimed that he is a liberal. It was clear that he badly needed a haircut and generally resembled a graduate assistant at some university, circa 1969. He further stated that as a longtime supporter of President Clinton, he had voted for him twice for president and governor many times before that.

Whoever this journalist was, he has awakened to smell the coffee in the Era of Clinton. He boldly declared that it is time for Clinton supporters and liberals to stop lying to themselves -- or, as Pat Buchanan phrased it recently, "Denial is NOT a river in Egypt!" Here is what this long-haired Arkansas journalist said of the president of the United States:

"Bill Clinton is to the lie what Mozart was to the concerto."

That may just go down as Clinton's epitaph, a dead-on description from a friend. Ouch.

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That devastating description of the president came on the same day that Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., delivered the rebuke that will go down in history alongside former Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker's famous query about Nixon: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

The sound from the Senate floor late Thursday afternoon was of the Democratic dam beginning to break. "The transgressions," Lieberman said, "are too consequential to just walk away." Making clear that this certainly isn't some private problem, Lieberman said the president had "diminished the office he holds" and degraded our values in "one of the worst messages being brought by our culture." Lieberman is an Orthodox Jew who refuses to campaign on the Sabbath.

Lieberman's courageous remarks brought immediate agreement from Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Nebraska, and from a senior statesman in the Senate's leading intellectual, Sen. Pat Moynihan, D-New York. Kerrey said years ago that the president is an "unusually good liar," while Moynihan's first response to the news in January was that the president suffers from "some sort of disorder." Moynihan added, "We have to resolve this," and that those in Congress must "discharge our sworn duty."

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At dinner with my Missouri Senate colleagues of both parties last February, a couple of weeks after L'Affaire Lewinsky broke, a Democratic colleague got everyone's attention by asking of us all, "Who believes President Clinton is going to finish out the rest of his term?" Every hand at the table went up except two. One was the colleague who asked the question; the other was mine.

To the vigorous objections of Democratic colleagues who pooh-poohed the controversy, I responded, "Maybe. But I'll tell you this: The day is fast coming when you will want him gone more than anyone." To this they agreed.

I have never wavered from the view that this president will be forced out early from the hallowed mansion he has disgraced so thoroughly. If we are to remain a constitutional republic, he must go.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.