Any time a journalist or “media” person opens his mouth on a historical subject, you can be pretty sure that what comes out of it will be some version of the popular Whiggish consensus that is on display at the “Newseum” run by the Gannett Corporation near its USA Today headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. But one does not have to go so far down the journalistic food chain as USA Today in order to find it. Margaret Talbot, for example, writing about the Clinton scandals in The New Republic, claimed that, thirty years ago,

few Americans of either sex would have thought there was anything objectionable about a one-sided sexual relationship between an immensely powerful man and a swoony, self-deluding twenty-two-year-old subordinate. But fathers do commit themselves to more egalitarian arrangements now, and people do think there might be something not only tacky but also exploitative about such a relationship. And the reason they think these things is, in large part, that feminism has convinced them —not so much through legislation as through patient explanation and urgent argument and the example of people who chose to order their lives differently than their parents did.

Anyone who can write these words must be suffering from the twin afflictions of extreme youth and even more extreme ignorance. Margaret Talbot has obviously never learned any history but feminist history. Yet Richard Cohen, a mature man whose education presumably antedates the age of the tenured radicals, can write