Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (7625)	2/18/1998 3:28:00 PM
From: Father Terrence	Respond to of 20981

TRIPP: "ALPHASHIP SLIP NO BLIP."

To: Grainne who wrote (7625)	2/18/1998 4:20:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20981

Hi Christine! I agree with you about Newsweek, it has made Time look really bad. I think that McCurray is sending up trial balloons to see what lie they can get away with. Did you see University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato on CNBC last night? He said that the Clinton administration was easily the least ethical in U.S. history! He counts 39 scandals. -So far. David Broder predicts Slick is history in today's WP: We should not forget the one positive thing that emerged from the long ordeal of Watergate, the certain knowledge that Americans in the 1970s were as deeply committed to the fundamental idea of the Constitution -- the rule of law -- as the men who wrote the charter in the 1780s. It took months to puncture the public's desire to think well of a president they had but recently reelected. But once the facts were clear, Nixon quickly lost his political and popular support. The rule of law requires any American to give truthful testimony when sworn as a witness in a legal proceeding. If it turns out that President Clinton has not done that, the props of public opinion now supporting him will collapse. I would bet anything that Americans will once again say no one is above the law. washingtonpost.com Today's Maureen Dowd dovetails nicely with Kurtz': February 18, 1998 LIBERTIES / By MAUREEN DOWD President Irresistible WASHINGTON -- We've all been wondering what explanation could be bold enough, brazen enough, majestic enough to get Bill Clinton off the hook. The President's more thoughtful defenders know it will be hard purifying all those damning facts. "Maybe there'll be a simple, innocent explanation," the White House spokesman, Mike McCurry, mused to Roger Simon of The Chicago Tribune. "I don't think so, because I think we would have offered that up already." And former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta said on ABC's "This Week": "At some point, he's got to tell the American people the truth of what was behind this relationship. Obviously, there was something more here." Like Ann-Margret in "The Cincinnati Kid," using her nail file to saw down jigsaw puzzle pieces to make them fit, White House aides are jamming messy Monica facts into a plausible picture. Before we get the Official Explanation, there will be trial balloons. Mr. Clinton and his aides might try a Sex Addiction Defense. Except that Dick Morris got there first. They could use a Twinkie Defense. Bill and Monica were both junk food addicts. She could have been sending over a lot of Ho-Hos and Ding-Dongs in those courier packages. The President who grew up wearing Big Boy jeans and the girl who was too tubby to be in the high school "in" crowd could have been swept away on a Slurpee sugar high, comforting each other for their body image disorders. The one White House aides have been quietly testing out on reporters is the Troubled Girl Defense: The Great Feeler of All Pain, who also bears the scars of a turbulent upbringing, was just being kind to Ms. Lewinsky because she was a child of a difficult divorce. Because Bernard Lewinsky's parents were German Jews who escaped to El Salvador, the White House even speculated about family Holocaust scars. The Troubled Girl Defense could segue into the Troubled Slut Defense. White House aides note that her friends say Monica arrived in Washington like a heat-seeking missile to seduce the President. But there's a flaw. If Monica was fragile and/or a stalker, why did the American representative to the U.N. and the most powerful lawyer in Washington serve as her personal headhunters? Of course, if evidence emerges that the mentor and his ward did have sexual encounters, Mr. Clinton would look horribly callous for exploiting the damaged young thing in a relationship that was lopsided in every way. It's the sort of outrage that would make feminists go berserk, if there were any feminists left. But the White House can avoid that trap. It can opt for the sublimely simple Tom Jones Defense: The President is a chick magnet. It's not his fault he's irresistible. It was floated on "Meet the Press" by Gene Lyons of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a reliable apologist for the Clintons through every scandal. "If you take someone like the President, who a lot of women would find attractive if he came to fix their garbage disposal, and you . . . make him the President of the United States, the alpha male of the United States of America, and you sexualize his image with a lot of smears and false accusations so that people think he's Tom Jones or Rod Stewart, then a certain irreducible number of women are going to act batty around him." Mr. Lyons has a point. Larissa MacFarquhar wrote a batty talker in The New Yorker asserting that Ms. Lewinsky was not a victim because she got to have sex "with a man who is (a) the President and (b) a babe." And even the hard-boiled, ultra-urbane editor of that same journal of ideas was so dazzled by his raw appeal at the Tony Blair dinner that she took leave of her senses, describing the President as "A man in a dinner jacket with more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex)." In her "Fax from Washington," Tina Brown sounded like a Tom Jones groupie ready to throw her room key onto the stage. Myself, I see Mr. Clinton more as Conrad Birdie. But with his animal magnetism running so strong, perhaps I better steer clear of the White House. I might lose my clarity of thought and forget what I already know: His explanations will never fit together, even with a nail file. nytimes.com Btw, don't forget to see The American Experience tonight on PBS.