WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2002 — It was the afternoon of Thursday, August 20, 1998. A half-dozen of us were gathered around a TV in a private office down the hall from the newsroom. The United States had just launched missiles at two suspected Al Qaeda bases, an alleged chemical-weapons plant in Sudan and a training camp in Afghanistan. And we were laughing.

That was the same month, if you recall, that Bill Clinton was finally forced to admit what he had denied for months: that he had, indeed, had a sexual relationship with "that woman," Monica Lewinsky. Congressional Republicans and the media were in a fury, demanding his resignation or impeachment. Surely, we thought, Clinton's cruise missiles must have been aimed more at shoring up his sagging poll numbers than at punishing those who had attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania several weeks earlier.

I thought about that day this past Sunday, when the New York Times weighed in with a massive special report arguing that, for the better part of a decade, the US had repeatedly ignored or paid insufficient attention to signs that we were likely — someday, somehow — to become the victim of a terrorist attack. From the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, to Clinton's bungled response in 1998, through George W. Bush's halting steps pre–September 11, the Times argued, the US blew repeated attempts to crush Osama bin Laden.

Now, Clinton surely deserves some blame — maybe quite a bit, actually. His actions weren't just inadequate, they were incompetent: the Sudanese target turned out to be a pharmaceutical plant with no ties to chemical weapons.

But a far greater share of the blame must be assigned to a broken-down political system aimed more at destroying Clinton than at governing the country, egged on by a news media consumed by celebrity scandal. Their appetite whetted by such stories as the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the death of Princess Diana, the media obsessed over the Clinton-Lewinsky affair for a year, from the first revelations in early 1998 to Clinton's acquittal at his impeachment trial in early 1999.

I will freely confess to enjoying the Clinton-Lewinsky story as much as anyone. For an opinion-monger, there is nothing more satisfying or comforting than knowing that every time you're stumped for an idea, you can write about oral sex. And I haven't changed my mind about what the outcome should have been. I believed then, and I believe now, that the exposure of Clinton's tawdry, exploitative behavior rendered him unable to govern, and that he should have resigned. I mean, what are vice-presidents for? With Clinton gone, we could then have taken a long, hard look into exactly why special prosecutor Ken Starr was sniffing Lewinsky's thong in the first place. Equally important, Al Gore could have governed — and responded to terrorist attacks — without cynics doubting his motives.

But it's time for the media — me included — to admit that we all went a little nuts in 1998, and that the public we're supposed to serve would have been better off if we had spent as much time questioning the motives of Clinton's enemies as we did speculating over what, precisely, he and Lewinsky did with that cigar. Sleazy as Clinton's behavior was, impeachment was a grotesque overreaction to what was, at root, just a sex scandal.

As Joe Conason writes in this week's New York Observer, "Whatever the various failures and flaws of Mr. Clinton's tenure may have been, his efforts against terrorism compare favorably with the frivolous preoccupations of his critics.... The Times reporters appear to be laboring under the assumption that Mr. Clinton could have mustered a full-scale unilateral invasion of Afghanistan to capture the Al Qaeda leadership — at a time when the Congressional majority was seeking to impeach him."

Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh today notes that Clinton was bogged down by the scandal in August 1998, but he really doesn't give it sufficient weight. "Certainly the ammoniac partisan atmosphere created by then Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress contributed," Lehigh writes. "And yet, whichever way one slices it, the root cause of that politically debilitating scandal was the mind-numbing lack of self-discipline on the part of a man who gambled his future for a dalliance with an intern less than half his age."

Well, yes. But though the affair was surely Clinton's fault, it was the Republicans, a special prosecutor whose "report" was clearly the work of a deeply troubled individual (see "Starr in Our Eyes," News, September 18, 1998), and a sensation-craving media that turned that affair into a presidency-wrecking crisis that transformed Clinton into an ineffective cypher and probably ruined Gore's chances of winning a decisive victory in his own right. (Of course, decisive was what Gore needed to overcome the whims of the pro-Bush Supremes.) And, as we now know, there were a lot more important matters that Congress and the press should have been paying attention to.

The headline of Lehigh's column is "While Clinton Slept," a play on John F. Kennedy's Harvard thesis–turned–book on Britain's pre–World War II indifference to Hitler, Why England Slept. (The title of that book, which Kennedy may or may not have written himself, was in turn a twist on Winston Churchill's While England Slept.)

Frankly, a more apt headline would have been "While the Media Snickered."