c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ Which was the greater irony _ that the presidential impeachment crusade ended on the eve of Presidents Day or on the eve of the penitential season of Lent?

I choose Lent.

If we saw only the lofty images of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, we might think this 12-month drama was about presidential greatness: unmasking a weak and immoral president, saving the Republic by punishing or protecting its leader.

But, in the end, this drama wasn’t about a single man or his sexual misbehavior. Try as they did to paint Bill Clinton as dangerous and off-center, the president’s accusers never made their case. They had plenty of evidence _ vanloads of it _ but the public didn’t buy it, and as the end-game began, all but the zealots were edging off stage.

The better context, it seems, is Lent, that season of the Christian year which begins with the story of Jesus being offered instant power, instant wealth, instant renown in exchange for allowing evil to hold sway.

The impeachment drama was about Kenneth Starr, who emerged not as a patient judge doing his job, but as a rigid fundamentalist whose single-minded pursuit of Bill Clinton was grounded in hatred, not law.

His manhunt was going nowhere until right-wing crazies fed him a sex case and a scorned woman agreed to betray a friend. His willingness to abuse a witness in order to snare her testimony was a chilling reminder of the lip-quivering senator from Wisconsin, whose bullying turned even a five-star general into a coward.

The impeachment drama was about Henry Hyde, a self-confessed adulterer who presumed to sit in self-righteous judgment over another adulterer, all the while quoting snippets of Scripture.

The impeachment drama was about Linda Tripp, the betrayer of friendship who claimed her 15 minutes of fame by doing the equivalent of standing up at a congregational meeting and announcing, with ill-disguised glee,”Well, let me tell you what I saw the pastor doing last weekend.” The impeachment drama was about the so-called religious right, who patrolled the wings, mailing lists and checkbooks in hand, to keep their troupe on script. If they had stayed quiet, this drama might have ended differently. But, once again, the right wing overplayed its hand, offending American common sense, and causing people to wonder, do we really want to make common cause with the Jerry Falwells of this world?

Before the klieg lights cooled, Republican Party centrists were meeting, not to plan another assault on a vulnerable president, but to ask how the party of Lincoln can escape the religious right. The heart of this drama wasn’t the ability of a slippery Clinton to get away with trespass. It was the frightening specter of the right wing.

The larger context for this drama came clear: the banning of books, the bombing of abortion clinics, the hounding of gays, efforts to put women in their place, tax breaks for the wealthy and nothing for the lazy poor.

The mood of the drama came clear: meanness, hatred and hypocrisy.

In the end, the American public pulled back, not because people are stupid and can’t be trusted to run their own affairs, but because they don’t believe meanness posing as high-minded morality and narrow-mindedness posing as biblical integrity are the best we can do.

People might have sounded morally vacuous as they told pollsters,”This Monica thing isn’t that big a deal.”But that persistent thread of common sense kept a right-wing coup from prevailing.

Now, as Lent begins, we can shudder at how close we came to letting wealth and power rule our commonweal. And we can ask, if that isn’t the moral chorus we want as our ethical anthem, what is?

It is time for the faithful to put aside conveniently packaged snippets of self-justifying Scripture, to read our entire Bibles, to confess our own sins, and to claim a national purpose that isn’t grounded in a secretive pursuit of dirt to use as a political weapon.

The impeachment drama’s outcome wasn’t a Valentine to Bill Clinton. It was the people casting aside all of the scoundrels and reclaiming the ethical helm of their nation.

DEA END EHRICH