WHEN WILL SOMEONE STAND UP TO SENATOR MOSELEY-BRAUN?

When, oh when will somebody in the United States Senate stand up to Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun? Recall when that chamber used to be known as the World's Greatest Deliberative Body? How long ago that seems.

Her own ethical problems aside, the lady is proving a major pain in the backside. There were at least two outbursts last week from Sen. Moseley-Braun: a tearful one over whether to renew a patent on a flag for the Daughters of the Confederacy; and another over her objection to an (entirely valid) analogy Sen. Orrin Hatch made between 1973's Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision on abortion, and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857.

Serious objections to Senator Braun's claiming "personal offense" have absolutely nothing to do with her being black or female. The point is that she is attempting to silence discussion on vital issues simply by alleging that she is "personally offended" by a line of reasoning one of her colleagues is using.

You cannot run deliberative bodies this way. If the standard for permissible discussion in a body whose job is to debate and decide tough issues is whether its most sensitive member is "personally offended" or not, then you simply cannot conduct the people's business.

In a couple of generations, the national Democratic Party has taken us from a tough-minded Harry S Truman ("If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen"), to Carol Moseley-Braun's "I-am-personally-offended-and-therefore-you-have-to-shut-up." This is nonsense and bizarre nonsense, at that.

All this was too much for columnist Ed Yoder, a distinguished moderate/liberal commentator and a better than average historian. Yoder dismisses Sen Moseley-Braun's trivialities with these well-chosen words:

".... A more serious point is that in the clammy climate of political correctness now sweeping the land, we are evolving false standards of historical judgment, such that real history is in danger of becoming a dismal mush of sentiment and emotionalsim. It is, after all, fact that there was a Confederacy, and indeed it was, after all, Mr. Lincoln who decided, rather belatedly, that the Civil War was to be over slavery.

"After a bare six months in the Senate, Sen. Moseley-Braun is doing more than her share to drive real history down the memory hole, on the pretext that it gives her personal pain. Is this to be the test of what's discussable in the Senate and its committees that it gives personal pain to one or another senator? If so, a long silence is about to descend on the world's greatest deliberative body. Though come to think of it, silence would be an improvement on the sorry show of groveling on the Senate floor last week."

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Bill Clinton's biggest problem is that, as Mona Charen bluntly put it, "He lies. The President lies casually, skillfully, frequently and even as a first resort." Well, he's been caught fibbing again. Consider this item from a news article in the Wall Street Journal:

".... At one news conference this week, he said small business owners would be able to escape the tax increases if they reinvest in their businesses.

"That's not so. Upper-income owners of ... Subchapter S corporations the profits of which are taxed at individual income-tax rates face higher income-tax rates on their profits whether they reinvest them or not ..."

So government will confiscate the seed corn of profits, the only source of future growth, rising real incomes and new jobs. As stated before in this space, this is sheer madness, this notion the people who brought us the House post Office and Bank scandals can "invest" our money better than we can.

A caller to Rush Limbaugh's show this week rightly observed that it will be easier for small business to recover from record flooding than it will be to recover from Bill Clinton's tax-laden economic "plan."

Oops. Would that "personally offend" Sen. Moseley-Braun?