Every person who engages in power politics lives in a glass cage.

With one complete, total, and absolute exception.

From congressmen to lobbyists to big businessmen or anybody else, every aspect of the lives of people with public influence is an open book. Every journalist has the right to know everything about them.

But what does anybody know about the media bureaucracy itself?

What are you allowed to ASK about the personal lives of these people? It is our national myth that politicians are mere humans, but the press is practically perfect. The press alone has no biases, the press alone is incorruptible. The press lives only to inform the public and expose all evil with perfect impartiality.

Because of the incorruptibility of the press, the first amendment protects us all. But no one is allowed to check to see whether those who now own that amendment, the national media bureaucracy, has anything wrong with it.

Not surprisingly, this is just the way the press wants things to stay.

If anyone started looking into the personal lives or the personal political opinions of members of the press, it would be called Pure Intimidation. It would be called McCarthyism.

All the respectable conservatives would agree.

Freedom of the Press in America means 1) the right of the media to know everything about everybody else and, 2) the protection of the press from anybody knowing anything about them.

The press, in case any living person hasn't noticed it, is no longer what it was in 1787. It is one huge bureaucracy, where no member of the press ever reveals anything about another member of the press.

What if Big Oil were taking over every single local service station the way national newspaper syndicates are taking over all the local newspapers?

What if conglomerates the size of Time-Life were in the midst of a national takeover of any other local industries the way the Big Press is gaining control over all local news outlets? Does anyone think the press would assume that every aspect of this titanic nationwide takeover was entirely legitimate and honest and OK? Wouldn't there be at least some suspicion that maybe something somewhere was not being done perfectly?

Wouldn't there be some breath, some small hint, of undue pressure somewhere? There would be a lot more than that. The press would be raising bloody hell. We are having just such a titanic takeover in the national media. Will there be any suspicion about this entire, coast-to-coast, multibillion-dollar process? No way, Jose.

Has anybody heard the slightest hint that the Big Press could possibly be doing anything that wasn't highly ethical?

No way, Jose.

Who is going to question it? Liberals who control the press?

Respectable conservatives who are given that "respectable" title BY the liberal press?

No. No major liberal institution is worried about the tame little cowards known as respectable conservatives.

The national media bureaucracy has nothing to fear from their kept opposition.

But the national media are scared to death right now.

From little Geraldo Rivera, who is on tiny MSNBC trying to become a real journalist, up to Sam Donaldson at the peak, revelations about the personal life of Clinton are causing genuine terror.

Why?

There is more to it than just liberal bias.

The sheer desperation of Rivera to protect Clinton is too intense, too personal. There has got to be more to it.

I think the fear is that, if we lose respect for the president's privacy, we may soon lose respect for the media's special right to privacy.

Under Kennedy, it was understood that the President could commit adultery with a Communist if he wanted to, and his privacy was absolute. At least as long as the president was a liberal.

That absolute cloak of secrecy is being lifted.

The question that immediately occurs to anyone in the media is going to be:

"Just how high is this curtain going to go?"

In other words, "Will I be next?"

After all, there is nothing that is actually sacrosanct about the private actions of the public figure who happens to be President of the United States. Congressmen who got caught doing sleazy things have always routinely lost the next election. The exemption of the President was merely a matter of a custom that was once unquestioned.

But the absolute protection of the press from any publicity is also merely the result of a custom that is presently unquestioned!

One thing no Great Defender of the First Amendment ever mentions is that, when the first amendment was adopted, newspapers were often viciously opposed to each other. The editor of one paper would not hesitate to tell EVERYTHING about the personnel of the other paper. Back then, the public was kept informed on the press, just as it was kept informed on other things. Today's media bureaucracy is totally different from the press that the first amendment talked about. And no one EVER mentions that today.

Members of the press are public figures. Many, many of them have more power and make a hell of a lot more money than anybody in politics. But unlike anybody in politics or anybody in any other business, they do not have to answer to anybody but their bureaucratic superiors.

The press itself faces absolutely no threat of publicity.

For now.

So it is only a completely irrational rule that requires that public opinion about the press NOT be INFORMED public opinion about the press. Discussion of the political opinions of any member of the press bureaucracy is cut short. Their private lives are absolutely private. They protect each other from being questioned the way police officers protect each other from traffic tickets.

The blanket of secrecy that was supposed to protect Clinton is the same one the press hides behind. The media wants things back the way they were. But the modern threat to that security blanket really became obvious with the Clinton scandal.

Matt Drudge came up with the blue dress and would not let the whole thing die. Again and again, the media tried to kill the story. Again and again, the Internet revived the story. With people like that out there, the press could not do its usual job of spiking any exposure about a liberal president. The press is horribly upset about this, and every time media bureaucrats get together on CNN, they bemoan the fact that these people on the Internet will not obey their rules.

It is only a matter of time before even the blanket of protection our practically perfect press hides behind is torn apart by the new information sources.

God bless the Internet!

January 22, 1999, is the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, which overturned all state abortion laws in 1973. As always, the professional conservatives who are fighting abortion have the entire situation entirely backward.

Backward, that is, from the point of view of serious opponents of abortion. The professional opponents of abortion are doing very, very well for themselves.

I have been working with antiabortion leaders for a quarter of a century, on and off. I did it professionally for many years. Like the rest of the conservative movement, the antiabortion crusade is dead in the water. The reason for this is the same.

Like all professional antiliberals today, recognized antiabortion leaders do two things: 1) they make statements which give professional liberals something to complain about and, 2) they do not attack anything that would offend or threaten liberalism seriously.

As a result, recognized antiabortion leaders take up a nice, cozy place in our political hierarchy.

Now, according to the approved version, Roe Vs. Wade came as a complete shock to these antiabortion "leaders." The Supreme Court, these official spokesmen tell us, gave them no warning it was going to do something so extreme.

Before 1973, they tell us, the Court had kept to the Constitution. Only once before 1973 had the Court stepped out of line, you see. Antiabortion leaders moan and groan about what they seem to feel was the only bad decision the Supreme Court ever made before 1973: the Dred Scott Decision of 1857.

The wonderful thing about the Dred Scott decision of 1857 is that liberals agree with antiabortion leaders about it. It was a proslavery decision, and all the justices who decided it are safely dead.

This is supposed to show liberals how liberal antiabortion leaders are, at heart.

The liberals just laugh at them, of course.

Antiabortion leaders say they couldn't understand why liberals would laugh at them. So they tried to counter another reason that liberals don't take them seriously: their ideas are based on Christian teachings.

So the antiabortion leaders got some orthodox Jews and Jewish opponents of capital punishment on their side. Surely THIS would make liberals take them seriously.

The liberals are now lying on their backs, wheezing. They can't breathe they're laughing so hard.

Prolife leaders try so hard to get liberals to respect them, and all they get is more guffaws.

The Roe v. Wade decision struck down all state abortion laws. I have repeatedly explained here that it is utterly ridiculous to challenge the court's right to make this decision after accepting the 1968 Supreme Court decision which struck down all state antimiscegenation laws. In striking down all state antimiscegenation laws, the federal courts openly declared that they could do absolutely anything they wanted to.*

It appears that prolife leaders would far rather see millions of abortions than criticize the one thing that is most holy to both liberals and respectable conservatives: interracial marriage.

Every state which ratified the Constitution had and enforced and KEPT antimiscegenation laws. Every state but one which ratified the fourteenth amendment had and enforced and KEPT antimiscegenation laws. The court decided that the original Constitution and the fourteenth amendment made all state antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional.

Few, if any, states had antiabortion laws when the Constitution was ratified. If you accept the Supreme Court's 1968 decision, the 1973 Roe Vs. Wade is absolutely and, more important, UNQUESTIONABLY valid.

But the Catholic bishops all cheered on the 1968 decision on antimiscegenation laws. Liberals all cheered it on. No respectable conservative, then or now, has even dared to question it.

So, to remain acceptable to the media bureaucracy and other liberals, antiabortion leaders bravely attack the Dred Scott Decision.

Let me tell you a little story about these self-proclaimed Mouths of God who lead the antiabortion movement. They fancy themselves to be Great Theologians.

The Great Theologian of National Review and conservatism in the 1970s wrote a book that showed how the traditional Catholic ethnic groups in the North were morally superior to the Yankees - a proposition I can certainly live with.

But he did not call the Yankees by their real name. He called them "WASPs," which means "White Anglo-Saxon Protestants." To avoid calling Yankees by their real name, he insulted the entire white Protestant population of the South, too. The fact is that Southern white Protestants had exactly the same cultural and moral outlook he was praising in Northern ethnics -- the opposite of the Yankees. When we had lunch together, I pointed this out to this Official Conservative Voice of the Lord Jehovah. He freely admitted what he had said was a lie, and he would stand by it.

I pointed out to him that Southerners were largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but they had the values he was declaring superior, the opposite of Yankee values.

I said to him that it seemed he had not used the accurate word "Yankee" because the media would attack him for it. He would lose his respectability.**

He looked me straight it the eye and said "Yes."

It never occurred to him to change this just because it wasn't true. He was insulting Southerners to get liberal approval, and he knew it. I mentioned this to dozens of other big-time conservatives. Not one of them doubted what I said, and not one was the slightest bit impressed by the fact that someone claiming to speak for God Almighty would stand by such a cheap lie.

That's what Mouth of God conservatives do routinely, you see.

The fact that this guy spoke for God and Conservatism did not obligate him to tell the truth.

I get very, very tired of conservatives acting like Clinton's lies are something special. For liberal approval, conservative respectables lie all the time.

So we have a prolife movement led by people whose first priority is not to offend anybody important.

Just as with the general conservative movement, until the rank and file tosses out the present leadership, which is acceptable to liberals as a barrel of laughs if nothing else -- it is strictly a noisemaking enterprise substituting for a real opposition.

We all know that, as presently constituted, the prolife movement is going nowhere.

In our society, whether abortion is formally legal or not is going to make very little difference. The war against abortion and the war against drugs are different in that abortion is legal and drugs are not. They are alike in a far more important way: both wars are being lost.