Last month I had the curious experience, which must be much more familiar to the eminences of the journalistic “profession” than it is to me, of becoming part of a story I had attempted to write. In my case, the story was a humble book review. I had been asked by The Washington Post to review two books on the Clinton scandals—Jeffrey Toobin’s A Vast Conspiracy and The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, mentioned in this space last month. I don’t know why the Post asked me. Perhaps it was because I had once written a piece for the TLS in which I had criticized the shortsightedness both of Clinton’s admirers and of his detractors. In my review I made a similar point, noting that, although both books had important things to say, both were flawed by excessive partisanship and a willingness to be as credulous towards the Clintons as those they criticized were towards the Clintons’ enemies.

Both books were themselves illustrations of what I took to be the one incontrovertible fact to have been established by all the swearings and deposings of the Clinton scandals, which is that opinion on the subject has become so hopelessly polarized as to make it impossible to write anything about them that is not seen by one side as tainted by association with the other. At the end of the review, I added as an illustration —with what I regarded as an elegant turn on