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FELLATIO, FONG & QUESTIONS 27 AND 28
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Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?
He could choose to answer the obnoxious questions truthfully and give tacit acquiescence to that unprecedented invasion of his privacy, an invasion to which no citizen need ever subject himself under the Constitution.
     Imagine that! Asking young men who'd been stripped of every vestige of their constitutional rights -- the kind of rights even normally enjoyed by foreign nationals under the Constitution -- to pledge to go and fight for Uncle Sam! The fact that tens of thousands of them did, and with unmatched heroism, made the question even more of an outrage.
Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power or organization?
     It's like asking you to swear that you have stopped beating your wife. If they answered no, they would be branded traitors. If they answered yes, innocent men and women whose only crime was being born Japanese American would be branded former traitors -- in other words, without the ability to seek redress for the government's atrocity. There was no way for a Japanese American to answer the questions and retain a shred of self-respect.
     That's precisely the kind of Catch-22 with which Kenneth Starr confronted President Clinton. He could choose to answer the obnoxious questions truthfully and give tacit acquiescence to that unprecedented invasion of his privacy, an invasion to which no citizen need ever subject himself under the Constitution -- at least theoretically. Or he could refuse to answer it and, given the then prevailing climate on Capitol Hill, be legally ordered to answer it or face a trumped-up obstruction of justice charge.
     The course President Clinton ended up taking won't qualify him for sainthood, but it wasn't unreasonable, or even particularly dishonest, especially for a sitting president in retention of his sanity. He answered the question in the strictest legal sense into which its meaning had been narrowed during his deposition in the Paula Jones case. I've read the definition of "sexual relations" in the Paula Jones case and agree with Clinton that it would not cover a situation in which he only received oral sex.



     The truth is that the judge in the Jones case simply screwed up by approving a leaky definition, but under the circumstances -- a gross, politically-inspired effort to destroy his privacy, family life and the dignity of his office -- the President wasn't under even a moral duty to take it upon himself to broaden the definition.
     And now the Republican leadership hangs on for dear life in the way a pitbull has to hang on or risk getting trampled to death.
     And Matt Fong is thought to be a beneficiary of the resulting fallout to the extent it will energize a higher percentage of core Republicans to turn out to vote out of office an incumbent democrat perceived to have been a laggard on distancing herself from Bill Clinton.
     It's a shame. Matt Fong's victory, if victory it will be, will in the long run be tarnished by its association with this whole Clinton sexual witchhunt. Given our history in this country, I can't imagine that any Asian American would want to be associated with any witchhunt of any kind -- racial or sexual.

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