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123456 TRIBUNE 11 COMMENTARY Women Act because the offenses it targeted affect interstate commerce. The same could be said of the vast majority of hate crimes. The authors of this bill have addressed that problem by limiting it to attackers who cross a state line or national border to carry out their vile deeds. But this restriction turns the law into the equivalent of a ban on purple cows. solved a problem that marvels George Mason University law professor Ronald Rotunda.

The Human Rights Campaign argues that the Byrd and Shepard episodes prove the need for change. Texas prosecutors were able to get federal funds to help pay the cost of the case, because it was covered by existing federal law. But because attacks on gays treated as federal hate crimes, Wyoming authorities not receive the same federal assistance and had to furlough esus of Nazareth warned his followers to beware all men speak well of He knew that universal praise can hide a multitude of sins. That is certainly the case with the hate-crimes law passed the other day by the U.S. Senate, which shows that irreproachable impulses can yield bad policy.

The measure expands existing federal laws against to include violent acts committed because of the sexual orientation, or This will enable federal law enforcement agents to go after criminals who single out gays, women or disabled people. The law is needed, says Sen. Gordon Smith because it a signal that violence of any kind is Actually, existing criminal laws already do that. This one sends a signal that violence of certain kinds is especially un- acceptable. Getting stomped to a pulp because gay is somehow worse than getting stomped because wearing a Red Sox jersey in the Bronx, or because someone resents your opinion of the war in Iraq.

No one doubts that people are sometimes assaulted or even killed out of bigotry. But hard to see why special laws are needed for these cases. Assault and murder are illegal no matter what the sentiments of the attacker or the characteristics of the victim. Those who carried out the most notorious hate crimes of our time, the murders of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, and Matthew Shepardin Laramie, were caught, convicted and given severe sentences.

Passing laws to punish conduct that is already punishable makes about as much sense as sending two Christmas cards to everyone on your list. But not the only defect in this bill. Another one is that it indulges a chronic impulse to turn more and more power over to federal law enforcement. Fighting crime used to be the almost exclusive province of state and local governments, but no more. Today, reports Louisiana State University law professor John S.

Baker there are some 4,000 federal criminal offenses, and the ratchet is strictly one-way: The number is allowed to rise but is never allowed to fall. wrong with that? A lot of these statutes are akin to the orange-juice squeezer you got as a wedding gift: presented with pride and received with delight, only to be put away and forgotten. They allow Congress to claim credit for taking stern action against a national scourge without doing anything useful. Even the existing federal law mostly warms the bench. The Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, says that while the FBI has counted 75,000 hate crimes since 1991, only than one-tenth of one been prosecuted as such by the Justice Department.

Any federal crime measure runs up against a new obstacle: the Supreme recent discovery that Congress pass laws without clear constitutional authority. The usual congressional pretext for meddling in state and local matters is that they affect which is a federal responsibility. But four years ago, the court struck down a section of the Violence Against five law enforcement employees to be able to afford to bring the case true that a major trial can strain local government resources. But the problem is not unique to hate crimes. Local governments have been bearing those burdens since the founding of the Republic, and they have managed tolerably well.

If Matthew Shepard had not been gay, Laramie would still have had to pay for prosecuting his killers. His case does, however, prove something inconvenient to advocates of this measure: Today, hate crimes against gays are taken just as seriously as other forms of violence, and those who commit them can expect to be punished. a great achievement, and it take a federal law. Steve Chapman is member of the editorial board. E-mail: Hate-crime laws, for no good reason Steve Chapman President Bill Clinton is back in the national spotlight to promote his autobiography, just in time to remind us of how trivial his sexual shenanigans with Monica Lewinsky were compared with the Bush spin jobconcerning its war in Iraq.

After all, no one died in Monica-gate. No one was tortured. Our international allies were shocked or amused, but not alienated. The Bush White House, by contrast, is in full spin mode to downplay a bracing conclusion of the bipartisan Sept. 11com- mission that it credible that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were involved in the Sept.

11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States. Team Bush turned on the media, insisting it never asserted any such connection. administration never said that the were orchestrated between Saddam and Al President Bush said. did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qae- Butfacts are stubborn things. So are the quotes from Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others that have asserted not only but the active collaborative rela- tionship between Hussein and Osama bin Al Qaeda that the Sept.

11commission now calls fiction. Last year, for example, Bush called Hussein ally of Al and declared battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept.11, In late 2001, Cheney said it was well that Mohamed Atta, who is accused of masterminding the U.S. attacks, had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official. The Sept. 11commission agreed with the CIA that the meeting probably did not take place.

Later, Cheney called Iraq the base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on The Sept. report, by contrast, says that there were contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative Bin Laden tried to get aid from Hussein but the Iraqi president did not respond, the commission found. By end, Cheney was hunkered down in full media- bashing mode, as if there was no significant disagreement between the administration and the conclusions. In fact, most of the evidence of ties to related to his well-known ties to Palestinian terrorism against Israel, not Al Qaeda. Either way, Team Bush delivered the Hussein-Al Qaeda message so well that a poll last year found two-thirds of Americans were convinced Hussein was tied to Sept.

11. why the administration is in full spin mode today. After turning up barely a trace of purported weapons of mass destruction, the credibility of the White House is at stake over whether Iraq was a bonus in the war against Al Qaeda or the dangerous distraction that the critics have called it. At one time, the administration tried to blame the photographed prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib on a bad More recently disclosed information indicates that some of the bad apples were near the top of the barrel. For example, Human Rights Watch, a leading international advocacy group, charged in a June 8 report that the Bush administration deliberately Geneva Convention rules, allowed illegal interrogation techniques, then covered up or ignored reports of torture or abuse.

the truth? When President Clinton misbehaved, a Republican Congress pressed him for answers. The current Republican Congress has dragged its heels with Team Bush regarding its justifications for the war and the reported abuses of Iraqi prisoners. I am sure Bill Clinton wishes he could have been that lucky. Clinton sounded properly contrite in excerpts of his Sunday CBS interview with Dan Rather. did something for the worst possible reason: just because I he said.

think just about the most morally indefensible reason anybody could have for doing As confessions go, that one is a model of concise contriteness. No equivocation. No excuses. He sinned simply because he could. That would have been an appropriate confession for Team Bush during the same week it faced questions about its use of the on as an excuse to go around most of our traditional allies to topple Saddam to skirt the Geneva Convention standards of humanitarian treatment in handling Iraqi detainees.

They did it because they could. You can get away with a lot when no one holds you accountable. A presidential election year is an appropriate time to hold a thorough national debate on such thorny issues as these, not just because we can, but because we should. Clarence Page is a member of the editorial board. E-mail: Photo by Brendan Images Commenting on the Sept.

report, President Bush said his administration claimed only that were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al No contest: Iraq-gate trumps Monica-gate Clarence Page By Jeffrey A. Krames ill autobiography, due out next week, will almost assuredly become the best-selling presidential autobiography ever published, although the 42nd president may find critical success more elusive. With a record advance of between $9 million and $10 million, it is already the most lucrative (although Ulysses S. book earned $500,000, about $9.3 million in dollars). The timing of the book could not be better.

publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, will be publishing the book in the midst of the greatest bull market for political books ever. One week this spring, nine of the top 10 works on The New York Times non-fiction best-seller list were political in nature. For the first time in years, political books are making the news rather than lagging behind it, no small feat in an age of 24-hour cable news channels and the Internet. From Ron Price of Bob of the recent spate of best sellers has provided more insight into how the current occupant of the Oval Office makes decisions than any writings that preceded it.

But presidential autobiographies are a distinct genre, and the majority of them have disappointed their publishers. One of the reasons is presidents do not write their memoirs, ex-presidents do. This reality (and the fact that ex- presidents are rarely more forthcoming than presidents) dooms many a presidential book. By the time the late Ronald Reagan published American H.W. Bush had been in the White House for two years and few readers were compelled to look back.

The same was true for Gerald Time to also found few takers. Richard Nixon, however, did better. He overcame both his disgrace and poor reviews when his 1978 memoir, made best-seller lists. That helped his publisher to recover the seven-figure advance. But most of his nine other works, mostly inside-the-beltway foreign policy edicts, achieved only moderate success.

However, the books helped in other ways. Nixon knew that the road to redemption was in his ability to play the role of elder geopolitical statesman, and books like the to cultivate that image. Clinton undoubtedly has similar legacy-mending in mind with his book. Clinton also hopes to follow in the footsteps of a predecessor he greatly admired, whose presidency was also plagued with scandals: Ulysses S. Grant.

autobiography, in 1885by a firm controlled by friend, Mark Twain, remains to this day the model that most presidential books hope to emulate. The two-volume memoir was completed only four days before Grant succumbed to throat cancer, and has been in print ever since (Clinton kept both volumes in the Oval Office). The inescapable fact is that the best-selling autobiographies have been written by the most controversial presidents. This explains, at least in part, why publishers valued book so dearly. Although there is a tight lid on the content of the 900-page tome, there are at least five good reasons to believe that book sales will eclipse all presidential autobiographies that preceded it: Scandals and impeachment: Nixon once declared, worst thing a politician can be is dull.

At least The same is true with books. Like Nixon, Clinton revealed himself to be a flawed leader while still in office, playing equally well the role of hero and rogue. That duality makes Clinton the most richly textured figure to occupy the Oval Office since Nixon. Clinton books sell: While Clinton was still in office, a cottage industry of Clinton-in- siderbooks climbed best-seller lists. And it seem to matter if they were for or against Clinton, they all seemed to sell (George Too was both).

This will be the first time we will be hearing directly from the man himself since he left office. She said, he said: More than 1.5 million copies of Sen. Hillary Rodham book were gobbled up, and readers might turn out in droves to get the other side of the story. However it turns out, pundits and publishers will be falling over themselves to declare a winner in the Clinton vs. Clinton book war.

Clinton, the book tour: This will be one of the most carefully orchestrated book tours in magazine covers, carefully placed audio snippets for news organizations, and only the beginning. Book signings will look more like parades, with hundreds, perhaps thousands, spilling out from stores onto the streets (within hours of the announcement of a Clinton bookstore appearance in Harlem, more than 650 people signed up). The election year wild card: Since no modern-day ex- president has published his memoir in an election season, the Clinton book is in unchart- ed waters. However, one can almost imagine the split screen of a Bill Clinton lighting up a crowd played against the more measured tones of Democratic presidential contender Sen. John Kerry.

This is causing no small amount of anxiety in many Democratic circles. However, road to sustained best-sellerdom is anything but assured, and depends on his willingness to deliver the goods on the most controversial parts of his presidency, from Monica-gate to the final-hour presidential pardons that tarnished his and his image. Yetone essential item missing from his may dash hopes of a critically successful presidential memoir. A legacy is often derived from a single ideological triumph. With his Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson helped to tear down a wall between the races.

Nixon toppled a wall of his own with his historic visit to China, and Ronald Reagan toppled the greatest wall of all with his oft-repeated refrain, Gorba- chev, tear down this It may not be enough that Clinton delivered on the economic mandate that got him elected, presiding over the greatest peacetime expansion in recent history. Absent an ideological wall of his own, troubles, more than his accomplishments, may define his presidency. Jeffrey A. Krames is vice president and publisher of McGraw- Hill and author of Rumsfeld Why 900-page memoir will triumph Illustration by Paul Lachine.