Scandal

WASHINGTON -- Of all the trends in modern U.S. politics, none has been more destructive or dispiriting than the emergence of the permanent scandal state. In the quarter century since Watergate, it has become routine for each party to try to destroy the leaders of the other by attacking their ethics on the job, their morals at home -- or both. At every turn, the news media has followed the parties step for step, trumpeting each new allegation and digging tirelessly for new ones.The swirl of charge and countercharge has reached a crescendo with the Republican drive to impeach President Clinton for trying to conceal his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.

AS THE mind-numbing Lewinsky scandal winds finally to its anticlimax, it is getting to be time for an ethical debriefing. Everyone involved needs to engage in some serious self-reflection, and I have some suggestions as to the shape that self-reflection should take for each of the major players.President Clinton needs to do some soul searching, if he has not already. He needs to ask himself what things are really most important to him. He needs to ask himself whether he is an addict, and if so whether he wants to get some treatment.

After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905, by Patricia Beard. HarperCollins. 416 pages. $25.95. Patricia Beard started working seriously on this book in the late 1990s, as WorldCom, Tyco and the rest blossomed in rotten glory, and publishes it now, as the scent of scandal lingers in corporate suites. Good timing. Her subject - riches, envy and iniquity at the Equitable Life Assurance Society in the early 1900s - is a dandy, overlooked gem of business disgrace.

Washington. -- A funny thing happened in the middle of the scandal known as Whitewater. Somehow it became transformed into a day of reckoning for the '80s. Whitewater has fattened on the alleged hypocrisy that Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton made out like the very yuppie bandits they ridiculed during the campaign.It is true that the Clintons scored valuable points with beleaguered voters with all their talk of helping ''people who work hard and play by the rules'' only to be shafted by the greedheads who profited off the Reagan-Bush '80s.

In the end, the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1994 hid its scars well.Last Wednesday's graduation ceremonies betrayed a few reminders of the trauma of the last year and a half, but not many.You couldn't see the void left by 24 midshipmen expelled for cheating, or the 64 who received lesser punishments and were not allowed to toss their hats with their classmates, or the one killed in a terrible automobile accident.The skies above Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis were clear. So were the faces of the young men and women who paraded onto the field.

WASHINGTON -- Ah, justice! How wondrously do its wheels spin! On one hand, a president gets acquitted by the Senate after lying to a grand jury and being found in contempt of court for giving a false deposition. On the other, a common citizen who complains about senatorial foot-dragging in the trial against that president faces six months in the slammer and a $500 fine.This strange confluence of events culminated the other day with the federal judge in the Paula Jones case ordering President Clinton to reimburse her lawyers and others for about $90,000 in expenses, and then a jury convicting a man of disrupting Congress by shouting from the Senate gallery.

THE CENTRAL Intelligence Agency is getting most of the heat for the latest human-rights outrage to emerge from the ugly little wars that continue to plague Central America. It should, since one of the spy agency's Guatemalan "assets" has been implicated in the brutal murders of a U.S. citizen and the Guatemalan husband of another U.S. citizen. But the CIA is not the only culprit.A little-known Pentagon operation that trains Latin American military officers also has blood on its hands in this latest tragedy.

Pfc. Lynndie R. England, the Army reservist who became one of the most visible figures in the Abu Ghraib scandal, has given birth to the child she conceived with another soldier implicated in abuses at the Iraqi prison. England, 21, gave birth to a boy about 9:25 p.m. Sunday, a military source told The Sun yesterday on the condition of anonymity. No other details were available. Roy T. Hardy, an attorney representing England's family in Fort Ashby, W.Va., declined to comment. England, who was shown in photographs holding a leash tied to the neck of a naked prisoner and pointing at the genitals of another, faces a court-martial at Fort Bragg, N.C., in January on 19 charges of abuse and indecent acts.

Rear Adm. Thomas C. Lynch, whose fast rise in the Navy stalled when he presided over the Naval Academy during its largest cheating scandal, has been assigned to a new Pentagon post that will chart the future of the Navy and Marine Corps.The 52-year-old academy superintendent yesterday received his orders to become director of the Navy's roles and missions study group, under the chief of naval operations.The admiral will oversee a staff of 10 that will study will review the types of military operations that may be required in the post Cold War era."

NBC couldn't have cooked up a better ratings-grabber if it had brought in Jeff Gillooly to arrange yet another whack-a-mole with an Olympic figure skater. There's been some transcendent camera work this week, particularly with the downhill skiing and speed skating, along with dramatic competition, and lovely vistas on all three of the network's channels, which include CNBC and MSNBC on cable. But the network has clearly recognized that the murky stew of sport, pageant and commerce has been transformed into a glorious bouillabaisse with a single ingredient: scandal on ice. Ratings for the first six days of the Winter Olympics on NBC proper were nearly 20 percent above those registered by CBS during the Nagano games four years ago. More than 150 million Americans have tuned in since the opening ceremonies.