Whether Ashcroft is simply an old-fashioned, Bible-toting Christian or a bloodless, puritanical inquisitor (like Roger Chillingworth in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter") remains to be seen, but I think that for most Americans trying to conduct their daily lives, Democratic activists have cried wolf once too often. The saturation point has long been reached for hysterical, rote charges about racism, sexism and homophobia -- particularly when they issue from a party that professes populist ideals but has just elected the detestable, money-grubbing Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton henchman, as head of the Democratic National Committee.

If the party doesn't get its act together after the lies, mess and celebrity glitz of the Clinton years, disaffected Democrats like me will vote Green again in 2004. The Democratic Party needs to regenerate itself and recover its ethical center. As a member of Planned Parenthood, for example, I am outraged by the obscene waste of assets by abortion rights organizations whose leaders have become shills for the Democratic Party. The funds diverted to endless "emergency" ads and mailings calling for political action should directly support women's health care instead. If all the pro-choice men and women in this country would donate their money to needy women instead of to politicians and fancy fundraisers, government support for abortion services would be less critical.

Bush's cutoff of funding for overseas abortion counseling, virtually the first act of his presidency, hardly made a ripple in public consciousness (though the Philadelphia Inquirer tried to whip things up by making it the lead headline). If national support for choice is starting to slip, as has been reported, it's because of the arrogant insularity of the feminist elite, who for 20 years have ridden roughshod over the legitimate ethical objections and arguments of abortion opponents. Though I firmly support unrestricted access to abortion, I feel the nation has been polarized and doctors endangered by an intolerance and extremism that began on the secular left.

Lingering impressions from the three weeks since my last column: Bush, even at high alert on Inauguration Day, not managing to get through the oath of office without mangling syntax or rather dropping an entire phrase -- reminiscent of Diana inauspiciously reversing Charles' names at their 1981 wedding. Then the tacky, phony signs waved along the Inauguration parade route by cynical Democratic operatives who in calling a duly elected president a "thief" demeaned a day that honors history and belongs to the nation.

Next, the ineptly designed reviewing stand that sheltered everyone but Bush from a driving rainstorm, followed by the comic, befuddled dithering of the new president and his ex-president father with the stunted handles of pocket umbrellas while no one came visibly to their aid for a quarter of an hour. Finally, the grim, clenched-jaw faces of outgoing Cabinet members like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Attorney General Janet Reno, humiliatingly dragged out to a cold hangar at Andrews Air Force Base to serve as stage props for a puerile send-off rally for Bill Clinton -- who vaingloriously reviewed troops he no longer legally commanded and who callously avoided mentioning the name of his vice president, Al Gore, whose defeat at the polls was partly due to Clinton's own misdeeds.

But the most astounding recent event has been the mass recantation by liberal journalists of their eight years of Clinton idolatry. As Bush movingly called on the new White House staff to maintain the highest possible ethical standards, Bill and Hillary Clinton were slipping and sliding down the exit chute to their new base of operations in New York, where they are currently sorting through a mammoth trash heap of greasy pardons, purloined furniture, jacked-up book contracts and gilt-edged leases.

For the New York Times (in a lead editorial last weekend) to call on Hillary to end her "bunker mentality" is hilarious, since both the Times and the Washington Post let her get away with that for years, including during her Senate campaign, when she appeared only on entertainment shows with fawning hosts and evaded real questioning in a hard-news format. If only Margaret Carlson, whose scathing critique of Hillary appeared in the Feb. 5 issue of Time, would fully admit the role she and other liberal woman journalists played in the creation of the "St. Hillary" cult of the mid-1990s. It was because she was so pampered and coddled by her cooing apologists that Hillary is now disastrously ill-prepared for public life. Stripped of her White House entourage last month, she began her Senate committee work looking like a bug-eyed, droopy derelict flushed out of a train tunnel.

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