In a column last week in the New York Post, Dan Seligman thoroughly embarrassed the New York Times editorial page by comparing its positions on impeachment over the last four months. From the assertion that "the rule of law is too vital to be sacrificed," the Times editorialists evolved in a brief few weeks after the election to the position that the "removal of this weak man would impose [a trauma] on the people and the political system." The rub was not that the Times had ever insisted Clinton be impeached (it had always favored censure), but that it had once insisted Clinton confess to his perjury as a precondition for censure. Otherwise the "rule of law" -- magnetic north for the editorial page's moral compass until the elections -- would be dangerously weakened.
When it became clear the president wouldn't confess, however, the Times editorialists found themselves painted into a corner. They could have stuck to their principles and pointed out that -- absent the presidential confession -- "a Congress that gave up on impeachment and opted for mere censure was complicit in his crimes," as Seligman put it, dryly adding: "It is, after all, possible for editorialists to say what they think is right even when they know they won't prevail." Instead, the Times suspended its earlier principles and indulged in the pretense that its standards hadn't changed at all. The editorial page's position, claimed a Nov. 20 editorial, had proceeded from "the political consensus of the American people." Except that it hadn't. Law and political consensus are not the same thing.
Rewriting history "seems almost self-destructive," Seligman notes, "in an age when Nexis makes it so easy to look up stuff from the past."