• Now that the impeachment process has moved on to the Senate, someone has raised the question as to whether Bill Clinton will be tried as an adult.

• People who oppose school vouchers say that we should improve the public schools instead -- but they never specify any time limit. Are we to continue through all eternity to pour more and more billions of dollars down a bottomless pit, without regard to whether or not any improvement results and without ever considering any alternatives?

• Lots of people say that they tell the unvarnished truth. But, if you had a monopoly on the sale of varnish, you would become a zillionaire.

• I am sure that Supreme Court Justice Byron White was not the only Rhodes Scholar who turned out well, but I cannot think of another one off-hand. Yet it is all too easy to think of Rhodes Scholars who become fatuous jackasses, including the president and a number of those around him.

• Legal prohibitions against assassinating foreign leaders are another of those feel-good declarations which ignore trade-offs and the enormous costs they can entail. Would it be better to assassinate Saddam Hussein or to continue killing innocent Iraqi civilians?

• If the president cannot be impeached for "his private sex life," then how can he be censured for his private sex life? The only basis for doing either is that perjury and obstruction of justice are not his private sex life.

• There is a lot of hype going on about high-definition television. But is it really worth it to pay more money to see the same junk in sharper detail?

People who oppose the privatization of Social Security say that putting pension money in the stock market is too risky because the stock market cannot guarantee as stable a return as Social Security. True, but misleading. In a bad decade, the stock market may pay only twice what Social Security pays, and in a good decade perhaps four or five times what Social Security pays.

• For every time that I have regretted making a hasty decision to break off with people who were negative factors in my life, there have been at least 20 times when I have regretted not getting rid of them sooner.

• When people are trying to see how far they can push things, that is the time to let them know that they have already pushed things too far.

• Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

• It is going to be a lot harder for courts to prosecute rapists if perjury about sex cannot be punished. Or are we supposed to apply that principle to just one man?

• It is scary how many people cannot see beyond words to the realities underneath. How can anyone talk seriously about one parole officer "supervising" dozens -- if not hundreds -- of parolees who are on their own 99 percent of the time? And what about statements that people are "living below subsistence"?

• When Susan McDougal was acquitted of embezzlement charges, she immediately began saying that the charges were all part of a scheme by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. It so happens that the charges were brought before Judge Starr became special prosecutor. But who cares about facts any more?

• Many of the people who are called "the homeless" could more accurately be called "the rentless." Often they have a roof over their head, but someone else is paying for it, usually the taxpayers. Similarly, many of those who are called "the hungry" are in fact being fed every day, but at someone else's expense.

• I get disgusted with people who call contradictions "complexities."