A major American habit is to judge things by their results; and the results have been that the Clinton administration has been one of the best in America's history. Clinton has given America its greatest-ever peace and prosperity, got deficits under control, and revamped the government to make it efficient and user-friendly. By this standard he should be seen by

Republicans as a great president - as a president who has accomplished what Republicans had claimed to want to do for a very long time but were not able or willing to do themselves.

And yet we continue to see claims from Republicans in the direction of attacking Clinton, mainly on the basis of his personal ethics. It is time that this finally be addressed. A man who has sex outside of marriage has much better personal ethics than does the man who beats his wife or controls his wife's thought and behavior. Marital infidelity is a one-time, sometimes several-time, event that one can get over and move beyond. Whereas violence and control against women is an ongoing grinding daily torture from which one can get away only with great difficulty and, in many places, not at all. Since the people who attacked Clinton's ethics the most are wife-beaters, it is time to state what has long needed to be said: That Clinton's ethics are vastly superior to those of the people who had attacked him.

During the 1992 election campaign many Republicans said such things as "it is a matter of character." Reality has proven them wrong. Jimmy Carter and George Bush Jr., who both followed "traditional values" and had character that many Christians regarded as excellent, were bad for America. Same with Bush Sr; same with Gerald Ford. Whereas Clinton, whose character the Republicans maliciously attacked, brought America its greatest times. The practical lesson from Clinton is that successful policy is not a matter of character, and it's not a matter of traditional values. It is a matter of knowledge, sense and intelligence. And these things Clinton had in overabundance - and many others lacked.

As America continues to struggle under unnecessary debt and economic torpor, it is expected that people would look back fondly at better times. The Republicans look back to Reagan, but better times were achieved under Clinton than under Reagan, as well as what wasn't achieved under Reagan - fiscal sanity and vast improvement in how the government worked. Bush Jr. destroyed this economic accomplishment, and America still is not close to having recovered from this ruinous misdirection. And both parties would benefit from looking back to the successful policies of the Clinton administration and working to put them back into place.