LETTERS: CONSERVATIVES ON HIGH MORAL HORSE

To the editor:

Now that it has been demonstrated through party-line votes on crucial procedural questions that I have a better chance of being elected pope than President Clinton has of being ousted, does anyone actually think the House impeachment managers intend to accomplish anything with taped depositions of the three allowed witnesses, Lewinsky, Jordan and Blumenthal, other than to bring out, in the manner of those who purvey erotica in adult bookshops, other salacious details of the president's dalliance? I am here to tell you that despite all of President Clinton's vaunted licentiousness, to which I stipulate and which I reprehend, there is still nothing quite equal to a group of social conservatives on moral high horses in the way of taking the most sublime delight at seeing phrases like "oral sex" in print or at uttering them so that their pleasure at letting these phrases roll luxuriously off their tongues can almost be cut with a knife. It is almost like watching a gourmet about to go hog wild in a five-star restaurant. I yield to no one in my admiration of the self-control that allows them to keep from fluttering their eyelids and drooling whenever the subject turns to Monica. Richard Mellon Scaife has a good run for his money -- literally -- but the game is over. All that happens in the Senate from now on is simply for the prurient pleasure of my misguided siblings of the right.

DONN S. MILLER Tamms, Ill.