RUST COMMENTARY: ARKANSAS PRESS: DEDICATED NEWSPAPER PEOPLE

I attended the Arkansas Press Association meeting last weekend in Little Rock.

That state's association is a very supportive group of dedicated community newspaper people who pride themselves in the objectivity of their columns and news coverage.

I enjoyed myself immensely in the home state of my father and many of my relatives. I found no support and much pain with the moral proclivities of their former governor, President BILL CLINTON.

I sat with and then heard RODNEY SLATER, a Clinton Arkansan who was appointed to the head of the U.S. Department of Transportation. He was there to receive the headliner award.

This former college football captain and member of the national champion college forensic team is an accomplished and sincere speaker and person. I told him that he did Bill and Hillary proud in his acceptance remarks, which also included a summary version of some of the achievements of the Clinton administration.

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Where have all the FOBs (Friends of Bill) gone? "While we have begun a new year, I expect that this investigation will continue to face many of the same old obstacles," House Government Reform and Oversight chairman DAN BURTON (R-Ind.) said in his statement last week opening the Bruce Babbitt-Indian casino portion of the campaign finance irregularities probe. "Twenty-four witnesses have either fled the country or refused to return for questioning. Forty-six witnesses have taken the Fifth. This is a total of 70 people -- some of them close friends and appointees of the president -- who have refused to cooperate with this investigation. I think that fact is just astonishing." -- Capital Briefs

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The following is a column in Little Rock's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last weekend:

At last, a Clinton legacy

"Assume for the sake of crazy, far-fetched argument that President Clinton is lying about Monica Lewinsky. The line from the president's increasingly cornered defenders is that this doesn't matter, that this is a lot of huff and puff about nothing more than a married man's bit of on-the-side stuff. And, anyway, Ken Starr has committed acts a lot worse than anything the president did, not that he did anything.

No. The Lewinsky matter is not about the minor and personal question of whatever an individual does in the pursuit of happiness behind closed doors. And it is not about the diversionary question of prosecutorial misconduct. It is about the largest most central and most public of questions: whether we demand that the president obeys the law, whether we accept that the president lies to us.

There are a great many laws on the books of this country, many of them onerous and some of them odious. Nevertheless, we are all required to obey them all. You have to tell the truth under oath, and so does the president. You may not conspire to obstruct justice, and neither may the president. You must not paw women who come to you seeking employment, and so, too, must not the president. To excuse the head of government from the laws that govern the rest of us is not to tolerate one man's peccadilloes; it is to tolerate the corruption of democracy.

And it is this fomenting of corruption that is the great problem with Clinton. The president has always had around him a constellation of defenders -- the planet Rodham, the moon Blumenthal, the satellites Carville and Begala -- who are prepared to do whatever is necessary in defense of anything Clinton does. These are people who believe in total-war politics, and they accept, to borrow from Churchill, that Clinton is so precious that he should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Fine, if that's as far as it goes. But year by year, scandal by scandal, the defense of Clinton has made the rest of us accomplices to these lies. The most serious consequence of this has been to devastate what is left of liberalism's claim to be the philosophy of morality in politics.

In 1992, Clinton said that his enemies were targeting him for a woman he didn't sleep with and a draft he didn't dodge. Liberals knew in their hearts that both claims were lies, but they told themselves that this didn't matter.

In the Whitewater affair, liberals were presented with a case of political corruption of a sort that they had classically fought, a conspiracy by a circle of political insiders to loot a savings and loan and to defraud a government loan program for women and minorities. Whitewater, too, liberals decided, didn't signify.

When Hillary Rodham Clinton was found out to have made $100,000 on a no-risk $1,000 investment in commodities deals with a lawyer who represented one of Arkansas' largest regulated businesses, liberals who had taken to the streets against Reagan's Decade of Greed said, Oh, never mind. When the Clinton 1996 campaign subverted the entire system of campaign finance laws, liberals said, Well, everybody does it.

And now this. On "Meet The Press" Tim Russert asked Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, whether the allegations that the most powerful boss in the world had sexually exploited a 21-year-old female intern raised questions about Bill Clinton's treatment of women. No, no, said Pelosi, they raised questions about Ken Starr's treatment of women.

"There's a point of sensitivity that women have about Kenneth Starr's attitude toward women; how he's investigating, exploiting Monica Lewinsky, how he used Linda Tripp to do that," said Pelosi, with a face so rigidly straight it seemed it might crack. "The Susan McDougal case comes back to mind because here again is a humiliation of a woman because she won't tell him what he wants to hear in that case. And now you see the humiliation of Betty Currie." Yes, Susan McDougal was humiliated, and so was Betty Currie. But the agent of their humiliation wasn't Ken Starr; it was Bill Clinton. And he is the agent, too, of the humiliation of Nancy Pelosi.

The problem with Clinton is not that he lies; it is that he makes liars out of everybody else. The problem is not that his moral standards are low; it is that he requires that everybody else lower theirs to meet his. By the time he is finished, so, too, will be the quaint idea of a higher ground in politics. At last, a legacy. -- Michael Kelly

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Federal debt will keep rising even though the deficit is sinking. (Deficit is annual red ink. Debt is the accumulation of yearly deficits.)

Reason ... borrowing from trust funds, especially Social Security. The government treats the money it borrows from the funds as routine revenue. That's why the '97 deficit was only $22 billion but debt rose $188 billion to $5.4 TRILLION ... equal to about 70 percent of our annual economic production, the highest since the mid-1950s when we were paying off wartime bills.

Debt has been climbing fast since '82, when it was equal to 35 percent of our annual economic output. That compares with 50 percent when World War II began and 124 percent by the time it was over. There's no level that signals trouble, but high debt could create other problems if a recession comes along. About 15 percent of federal spending already goes to pay interest on the debt. -- Kiplinger Washington editors

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.