POLITICS WATCH : Charging Too Hard

. . . I have here in my hand a list of 205 (persons) that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.

--Sen. Joseph McCarthy,

Feb. 9, 1950

I had a senior law enforcement official tell me that in his judgment up to a quarter of the White House staff, when they first came in, had used drugs in the last four or five years.

--Rep. Newt Gingrich,

Dec. 4, 1994

If the political education of Americans has taught anything in the last four decades it’s that unattributed allegations of misconduct puffed up with impressive sounding numbers that no one else has ever seen are best treated with extreme caution, if not outright doubt and rejection.

Gingrich, soon to be House Speaker, offered his wild-swinging charge in response to a question about why he considered President Clinton and his wife members of the “counterculture.� He cited no source and he named no names in what appears to have been an effort to depict a White House overrun by dopers. And so everyone working there has been slandered.

Irresponsible is the mildest description for such shameful rumormongering. Gingrich dismisses his own acknowledged smoking of marijuana while a student as youthful behavior, yet insists without offering a shred of evidence that the Clinton White House continues to tolerate drug use. The incoming Speaker is building himself a big and very nasty credibility problem.