For the past eight years, an endless procession of conservative moralists -- politicians, journalists, commentators and general blowhards -- have denounced President Clinton as the most disgraceful, lying, conniving, lascivious, hippified, stoned, intern-groping, morally relativist president ever to disgrace the Oval Office. Many of them were seething with righteous indignation the moment the skirt-chasing, draft-dodging, non-inhaling good ol' boy took the oath, but when the Monica Lewinsky affair broke their wrath assumed towering, Jonathan Edwards-like proportions.

The impeachment leaders in the House and Senate led the way, intoning pious denunciations of the president as a truth-evading, slippery, slimy scoundrel. The most vociferous was Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., who did a superb imitation of a Southern Baptist minister preaching with a nasty hangover, spewing out a stream of invective against the cancerous, satanic lizard coiled up in the West Wing. Fellow Republicans Alan Simpson, Trent Lott and Tom DeLay thundered on and on about the president's disgraceful behavior. Rep. Henry Hyde invoked the great battles of the past as he implored his fellow congressmen to do the right thing and impeach the lawbreaker.

The juiciest invective, however, came from outside the corridors of power. Moralist without portfolio William Bennett, almost apoplectic with rage that a sheep-like nation was letting the Great Satyr off the hook, sent forth a vein-bulging screed titled "The Death of Outrage." Rush Limbaugh flogged his Dittoheads daily with rapid-fire denunciations of the equivocating hound from Arkansas. And, of course, much of the rest of the press -- especially the pack-followers in the Beltway -- hastily doffed their reporters' fedoras to don the black wigs of cut-rate moral judgment.

I often wished, watching this endless orgy of moral condemnation, that I could live to see what these worthies would do if the equivocating, evasive, cunning, legalistic good ol' party boy they were eviscerating suddenly turned out to be a Republican. Call me cynical, call me a victim of decades of morally relativistic brainwashing at permissive public schools, but I had a sneaking feeling that the whole moral-outrage thing was a complete fraud, a sham, merely a handy technique used by partisan hacks.

If it was their boy, I suspected, the "outrage" would magically disappear. The thunderbolts of opprobrium would suddenly become a nudge-nudge, boys-will-be-boys wink and nod. The miscreant's evasive, slimily legalistic behavior would -- kazaam! -- be transformed into a high-minded concern for the feelings of one's family. And the revelation itself would -- press avail! -- be attacked as a political dirty trick.

I never thought I'd see it happen so soon, before the current POTUS had even vacated the White House. But it just did. And guess what? The whole moral outrage thing was a complete sham.

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