To: tejek who wrote (197652 ) 8/13/2004 2:34:13 PM From: Tenchusatsu Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1573902 Ted, If that's all it took for you to switch camps, then I think that's rather sad. People make mistakes......some mistakes are bigger than others. No leader is perfect......they are all human. Clinton's mistake was a big one but it hurt no one expect Monica and his family. And his mistake does not take away from the good he did this country. To me, the issue is one of credibility. Bill Clinton had two chances to come clean. The first was when the scandal first broke, and he said with a pointed finger, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." The second was that infamous speech he made after the discovery of the blue dress. Even then he didn't come clean, and he even tried to draw a huge wall of separation between his public and private life. That did it for me, because I firmly believe that the wall is nothing but an illusion. Clinton was trying to maintain that illusion for political purposes only, and that was when I finally lost trust in the guy. Before then, I thought Clinton was indeed a good guy, an intelligent and rational moderate who just wanted to run the affairs of the nation. I also believed the portrayal of the Gingrich conservatives as nothing but a bunch of extremists with agendas. But after seeing how Clinton squirmed his way out of a Lewinsky, I finally realized the truth, that I was being duped by a master politician. But even before that, I had already given up most of my liberal leanings, so once the scandal broke out, it wasn't hard for me to switch camps. Would I have switched camps anyway had it not been for the scandal? Perhaps, but that's hard to say, given that this whole nation might have been very, very different had it not been for the scandal. Tenchusatsu