Washinton Insight

ANOTHER VIEW: In the last few months, it’s become common for entertainers and Hollywood figures to denounce the Republican effort to impeach President Clinton as a threat to civil liberties or a conservative plot to reverse the sexual revolution. But Henry “T-Bone” Burnett, a Los Angeles-based composer and record producer (whose credits include albums by the Wallflowers and Elvis Costello), is challenging the Republican drive from another angle. Burnett--who describes himself as “a Christian born in St. Louis”--recently sent letters to all 100 senators and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, complaining that the effort to impose moral standards through the political process may taint the way many Americans look at religious leaders themselves. “My concern is that the Christian church is becoming a fountain of despair,” Burnett wrote to one senator last week. “We are not expressing faith, hope, love, mercy, grace and the joy of God. Instead, the church sounds carping, rigid, judgmental and filled with false witness,” Burnett wrote.

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POLICY ELITES: It was a reunion of sorts, a coming together of well-known names in the usually celebrity-shy ranks of diplomacy. Anthony Lake, former national security advisor, was there. So was Lloyd N. Cutler, onetime legal counsel to presidents. The occasion, in the majestic Benjamin Franklin Room, was the swearing in of Morton Halperin, 60, as director of the State Department’s policy planning staff. The post long has been a magnet for academic types and deep thinkers, folks like George F. Kennan and Paul H. Nitze, so prescient that policies were named for them. Halperin, a former National Security Council staffer under Presidents Nixon and Clinton, has long written on foreign policy issues but angered a Republican Senate with his criticism of the CIA and opposition to U.S. military interventions abroad. He did not win confirmation as assistant secretary of Defense in the early Clinton years. Tuesday, in sight of family and friends, he took allegiance to a vaunted position that does not require Senate confirmation. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright won a round of applause when she welcomed him, saying, “Good guys do actually win in the end.” He replaces Gregory Craig, who moved to the White House to become Clinton’s chief impeachment defender.

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VAST AND PROUD: It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a convention! Wearing First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s slur as a badge of honor, the Conservative Political Action Conference is looking forward to its annual confab later this month. “Members of the ‘Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’ Announce 26th Annual Conference,” shouts the official press release.

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A VIEW OF BOSNIA: Hollywood and Washington will merge again next week when the first lady and 450 others attend a reading of Eve Ensler’s play, “Necessary Targets,” about women in the former Yugoslavia who have been raped, forced from their homes and separated from their families. Glenn Close will represent the American political appointee whose life is transformed by the suffering she sees on a fact-finding trip to Bosnia, and Calista “I’m Not Anorexic” Flockhart will play a Bosnian war victim.

--From The Times Washington Bureau