VALEDICTION

The death yesterday of Robert L. Bartley might soften the edges of his portrait for some. But it's not likely to bring much private sympathy from the Journal's reporting staff, which tended to regard him as crazily biased.

Bartley was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom last week (see Imperial Accessories) for being a far-right ideologue who imbued the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal with a take-no-prisoners faith in supply-side economics as well as brutal treatment of the Clinton administration.

When Clinton White House lawyer Vince Foster committed suicide in 1993, the note found in his briefcase did not mention Bartley by name, but it might as well have. It said "the WSJ editors lie without consequence."

Bartley, who could be "aloof and downright disdainful of his intellectual nemeses," had hounded Foster without mercy on the Journal's editorial page for supposed Whitewater transgressions. His response to Foster's death was to dig his heels in deeper.

"For my part," Bartley wrote (see this portrait), "I can testify that getting tagged with blame for the Foster suicide powerfully focused my own attention on Whitewater." Which turned out to be a mistake. (It also spawned a cottage industry of Whitewater conspiracy theories.)

"Bartley's rants now litter the dustbin of history," former Clinton aide and political consultant Paul Begala recently pointed out (scroll down). "He was wrong about the Clinton economic program, wrong about the Clinton foreign policy, wrong about Whitewater, and pretty much every issue he ever addressed.

"But Mr. Bush says Bartley 'helped shape the times in which we live.' Well, that he did. He replaced Ronald Reagan's sunny optimism with paranoia, cruelty, and bitterness. And for our president to honor this thug disgraces the Medal of Freedom. Shame on George Bush."

Shame on him? Don't waste your breath, Paul.