CAMILLE PAGLIA REPLIES:

Thank you for that excerpt from my Salon column - written ten months before the attacks on the World Trade Center. Quite frankly, reading it now sends a chill through me. I warned again and again in Salon about the dangerous insularity of American culture, which was worsened by the tilt of the Clinton administration toward p.c. domestic issues and away from world affairs. (I speak as a disillusioned Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton twice.)

The abject failure of the major media to pursue the issue of terrorism in the years following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing will live in infamy. I blame the media as well as the superstructure of the Democratic party for the appalling delusionalism of the Monica Lewinsky episode, which began in 1998 and consumed the news for two years.

I have not changed my position, as repeatedly expressed in Salon: first, any politician has the right to a randy private life, but it should not be conducted on government property, especially not in revered public space like the White House. Second, any politician who has disgraced his office and his family should resign as an act of honor.

When the Lewinsky scandal broke, Democrat big wigs should have muscled Clinton out the door and let Al Gore assume the presidency. The nation would have been spared the obsessive distraction of the Lewinsky affair - with its incompetent, foot-dragging, whey-faced wimp of an independent counsel (Ken Starr) a