Jo Ann, it could. There have been people playing with this stock from day one.Certainly at 13.5 this would be a good buying opportunity and I will add to my stash.
There are still shares out there now that can be used for shorting. But if you short now with Monday coming up, I think you got to be crazy, or willing to loose money to prove some point that is not yet clear to me as to what it is. Perhaps shorts who hold out for 10 months against the mounting evidence of Vivus' effectiveness and forthcoming sales have personalized this and want to prove themselves right at any cost. Perhaps similar to what El Presidente and Hillary are trying to prove now?
Speaking of El Presidente and Hillary which are so much part of the news these days, I thought you might enjoy this editorial of today's wsj. ( note how there are some similarities between the washigton story and Vivus' story, including " the media "; think; it's all about sex(ual) dysfunction, gg!! )
January 28, 1998
Pandora's Boxer Shorts
By MARK STEYN
Two weeks ago President Clinton declared most of storm-ravaged northern New England a federal disaster area. Constitutional scholars are divided as to whether Mr. Clinton has the legal authority to declare his pants a federal disaster area, but clearly they are. From ABC's "Crisis in the White House" to CBS's "The White House Under Fire" to NBC's "Pants on Fire" (I quote from memory), the U.S. media are finally giving this story the sort of in-depth treatment they normally reserve for "El Ni¤o Watch" or a new fat pill.
There are exceptions, of course. On Sunday, National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" opened by wondering if we shouldn't be "putting the brakes on a rush to judgment." A rush to judgment? The American media have been enjoying a six-year crawl to judgment, and there's really no need to put the brakes on when you've only just gotten into first gear. The current "feeding frenzy" is no more than a first, belated step toward an all-you-can-eat salad bar that has been blinking invitingly at them for half a decade.
Sex Is the Story
For those of us whose journalistic principles (I use the term loosely) were formed in the more brutal precincts of Fleet Street, there has been no more puzzling sight since 1992 than that of the Washington press corps studiously averting its gaze from Mr. Clinton--like a genteel dowager on the subway trying to avoid catching the eye of the gibbering derelict across the aisle. Even today, the press still don't "get it"; even now, the network anchormen patiently explain how it's important to separate the sordid details of sex in the West Wing from the serious, grown-up stuff like perjury, suborning, obstruction of justice. They're missing the point: The sex is the story.
Anyone who's not interested in whether the leader of the free world is a serial pants-dropper is not, in any recognizable sense of the word, a journalist. This is the central, defining fact of his presidency. Because of the mainstream media's squeamishness about the subject, the president has been able to use sex as a shield for all his other dissembling. Bob Dole was unable even to raise the "character" issue because "character" meant cocktail waitresses, troopers standing guard, etc., and to raise such matters was considered bad form.
Unfortunately, "character" was also the category covering fund-raising abuses, FBI files, Travelgate, etc., so they never got raised either. For Mr. Clinton, sex has been a giant metaphorical condom rolled down over the White House to protect him, while managing to infect almost everything else in sight. In this, he has been assisted by some bizarre allies, including feminists who've bored on about our phallocratic society for 20 years but who, confronted by a numbingly literal phallocracy, decided simply to keep their heads down.
The media have mostly gone along with this. The 1992 and '96 elections, we're told, proved that character didn't matter: Mr. Clinton was elected because he could do the job. Never mind that supposedly serious news organizations like CBS have been happy to run endless pieces on the more genial aspects of Mr. Clinton's "character"--i.e., the president gets a dog; the president names his dog; the president's dog falls out with the president's cat; the president's dog gets a subpoena from Kenneth Starr and the feds raid his kennel. Oh, hang on--they decided not to run that one.
If it's illegal to solicit campaign funds on federal property, then surely it ought to be illegal to solicit oral sex on federal property from a federal employee while occupying a federal chair on federal broadloom. Yet one of the curious, telling details of the weird bond between the president and the press is the way, in the last week, they've instinctively embraced the same defense on sex as Mr. Clinton does on fund raising: Everybody does it. Grover Cleveland and Warren Harding did it, FDR and Ike did it, Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Fran‡ois Mitterrand did it.
As with the fund raising, it's a bogus equivalence. Thousands of miles from home, bearing extraordinary burdens in the middle of a war, Gen. Eisenhower embarked on a discreet relationship with an aide. That is not what happened in Little Rock or in the White House. Seasoned commentators have bemoaned the fact that the U.S. isn't like France, where Mitterrand was buried with both his wife and mistress in attendance. But come Mr. Clinton's passing, an equivalent gathering of his womanfolk would be the biggest windfall for the nation's charter buses since the Million Man March.
The world is laughing at America not because its people are prudish about sex but because its president is banal about sex. Mr. Clinton has brought to the White House not Continental sophistication but only the relentless obsessions of West End farce, of "Run for Your Wife" and "When Did You Last See Your Trousers?"
In the London tabloids, that would be enough. The rule is cherchez la femme and then find some spurious "public interest" to justify printing it. In America there is a public interest. This is the only country in the Western world in which the consort of the head of government is given a semiformal role, an office and a staff. Most Canadians couldn't even name the wives of their governor-general and prime minister. Carol Thatcher once recounted to me a late-night train journey her father took during the early days of her mum's premiership. Just before the train pulled out of Paddington Station, a group of patients from a mental hospital, homeward bound after a day trip to London, piled into Denis Thatcher's otherwise deserted carriage.
The bossy lady in charge began a head count: ". . . eight, nine, 10 . . ." Coming to Sir Denis, she paused: "Who are you?"
"I'm the prime minister's husband," he said.
Without missing a beat, she counted him--"11"--and continued.
This is the agreeably anonymous lot of most first ladies and gentlemen--and why shouldn't it be? Corporate CEOs don't take their wives to work every day; why should the president? Yet the Clintons have massively expanded the reach of the first lady into almost every area of government. Mrs. Clinton is the most powerful first lady in history. Those of us who value executive accountability have never been comfortable with this. Mrs. Clinton's presence in the White House derives from the fact of her marriage to the president. If that marriage is, as it appears to be, a sleazy travesty of what most Americans understand by the term, that is a matter of explicit public concern.
But there's more. Such energy as remains in the Clinton presidency is devoted mainly to what one might call "family issues." This week the first lady has been doing the rounds promoting her proposed federalization of day care. Why should America's families have a massive experiment in social engineering inflicted upon them by this of all families? Sympathetic as we might be to Mrs. Clinton's dismal situation, that's no reason to let her dismantle everybody else's family.
Yesterday Mrs. Clinton used NBC's "Today" show to launch a hysterical counterattack. To blame her husband's present predicament on "a vast right-wing conspiracy" is, at one level, ludicrous: Monica Lewinsky, like Kathleen Willey and Sheila Lawrence, is a loyal Democrat. Coming a week and a half after her husband reportedly 'fessed up, under oath, to his affair with Gennifer Flowers--the allegation he dodged six years ago--Mrs. Clinton's accusation is especially contemptible.
This isn't about right-wing or left-wing; if there's anything to be said for Mr. Clinton's sexual adventures, it's that they seem to be admirably nonpartisan. But the first lady seems determined to play Johnnie Cochran to her husband's feeble O.J., drowning one specific act in a sea of generalized conspiracies. Meanwhile, if she wants a character witness, she could do worse than the Hollywood actress Mary Stuart Masterson. "He's a terrific president," said Ms. Masterson. "I've met him. He never hit on me."
X-Rated Presidency
Mr. Clinton, it is said, has spent most of his time since the election contemplating his place in history. He must know now that he won't have one. His will be the X-rated presidency, the one you can't teach in school--or anyway not until junior high, and then only in health class. What are we to tell our children of his political demise? Which exhibits in the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library can we show them? Miss Lewinsky's black cocktail dress, presumably back from the cleaners by then?
How odd that this president should be rendered politically impotent. It is a cautionary tale: Even with the supine American media, Pandora's boxer shorts, once dropped, are not easily buttoned up again.
----------------------------------------
Mr. Steyn is the theater critic of The New Criterion and the film critic of The Spectator in London.
-----------------------------------------
TA |
