Senator Joseph Lieberman, pride of Connecticut Democrats, has, by virtue of his maternal lineage, a legal right to Israeli citizenship. He celebrates this at every opportunity, leaving many of us wondering about his credentials as an American. In a nation that was established on the principle that the state would eschew religious preference, he's introducing resolutions in the Senate to favor the Jewish state. All in the interest of peace, of course.

This is ironic, because it is Lieberman's rights as an Israeli that stand as the principal obstacle to peace. To accommodate his like, Israel has for the past ten years or so been erecting thousands of units of housing in the occupied territories. Today, where Palestinians' houses once stood, there are now all-Jewish housing developments and shopping centers, gated-in, guarded by heavily armed soldiers, where nearly every resident is an immigrant.

Russians, Americans, and other outsiders in the thousands have been invited to Israel to swell the Jewish population. It's a religion that's not attracting many new adherents, and so the only hope of a permanent Jewish majority in Israel--if there is any realistic hope for that--is to import Jews.

This infuriates the former residents. Imagine being turned off your land to make room for a foreign member of an occupying power's state religion. In the Balkans, we used to call this "ethnic cleansing." In the Mediterranean, it's called Zionism, and Americans are supposed to be for it, constitutional religious freedoms notwithstanding.

Where does this leave Lieberman? It exposes him as an enemy of Constitutional government, a subversive, a Dogmacrat. He should emigrate now, while he's still young. There may be a place for him in the Knesset, Israel's parliament. There's no place for him in our government, a secular state that doesn't tolerate foreign agents among its leadership.

The 52 men and women held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries for the last 444 days of the Carter administration won't be collecting damages for their injuries. A federal court held that the agreement ending their captivity also bars them from maintaining a lawsuit against the Iranian government.

These hapless pawns sued the wrong parties. They should have brought suit against the U. S. government and the criminals who took it over in 1981. As an abundance of circumstantial evidence indicates, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and his right-wing associates had negotiated in secret with Iranian officials during the summer of 1980 to ensure that the hostages stayed imprisoned until after the election.

To avoid the prospect of an "October surprise," the Reagan campaign appears to have promised Iran a shipment of weapons after the inauguration, in exchange for Iran's pledge not to release the Americans until then. And that's just the way it happened.

Reagan escaped justice because in this country the president is above the law. Even so, the hostages should have taken a shot at him. To win election, he prolonged their captivity. That's the kind of guy he was, and they should easily have won a million dollars apiece from him.

John Ashcroft should be expelled from the bar. He advances frivolous arguments in support of clearly unconstitutional practices, and that's a violation of the attorney's code of professional responsibility.

He opposed the assisted suicide law in Oregon and lost. As he knows, we live in a federal system in which most of the power to establish public policy resides with the states. He overstepped his authority in Oregon and knew he was overstepping when he did it.

He tried to prosecute cartoons and drawings as pornography and lost. Never have our courts allowed people to be hassled by the government for mere drawings, but he took his best, feeble shot. It was a frivolous prosecution, as the U. S. Supreme Court should have acknowledged when it ruled against him.

He faces numerous challenges on the detention of immigrants, and he's had his briefs handed to him in every case that's come to judgment. As court after court has pointed out, the government's seizures of people and property under his direction have been without legal authority. He treats the Bill of Rights like a wad of toilet paper.

Ashcroft may or may not be an evil human being, but one thing's sure: As a lawyer, he's a loser. An attorney who bothers the courts and harasses his legal adversaries with causes he knows must be resolved against him is guilty of an abuse of legal process. It's time we recognized this attorney general for what he is: an unethical shyster who is unfit for public office.

Faced with a Government Accounting Office report documenting at least $14,000 in damage to the White House by outgoing Clinton administration officials, Democrats aired out their favorite defense: that the investigation cost too much.

They stole the knobs off the doors--literally ripping off two historic doorknobs from the Old Executive Office Building--and sabotaged the computers by removing the "W" key (for George W. Bush) from 75 keyboards. Their plea: the investigation, which cost $200,000, was a waste of money.

I agree. Unless the wrongdoers are prosecuted, or at least held accountable for the vandalism, it was. We know who sat at those keyboards, and we ought to go after them. I'd be looking for full restitution, $14,000 plus the $200,000 we spent exposing their willful and infantile offenses. That would shut them up.

If I had any business sense at all, I would long since have started an Internet magazine for and about corrupt public officials.

In case you didn't notice, this whole E*Clasm is about corrupt public officials, and it's just a tiny sampling of the huge contingent of miscreants of national stature. Imagine a computerized index of corrupt public officials at the state and local levels. It would be massive, and it would be a fecund source of prime invective. If things don't start to get cleaned up soon, I might just do it.

If the press had set out intentionally to sabotage justice in the case of Robert Blake, it could not have done a better job than it is doing now. The news value of this case has been exhausted, and yet the coverage continues still. It's just gossip now, and the undue attention being paid to it is not just unseemly, it's downright un-American.

Our system, out of a concern for individual rights, begins with a presumption of innocence. From the broadcast newsmongers' point of view, however, the Blake prosecution is news only if he's guilty. And so, there must be a presumption of guilt erected by the press alongside the presumption of innocence interposed by the legal system.

To say that the legal presumption is overcome by the press's underlying presumption of guilt is a gross understatement. The presumption of innocence is destroyed altogether, at law and in fact, and the newsmongers are directly responsible for the damage. Our system of justice--which is only as strong as the confidence we have in it--is thus degraded by self-described "journalists."

The newsmongers need to entertain us, and celebrities who kill are amusing to us. And so the photographers follow them around, and the helicopters stalk their movements by automobile, and people watch with interest, and if this trashes the legal system, too bad. It's really vandalism in the interest of spectacle, and somebody ought to hold the broadcast newsmongers accountable for it.