To: jlallen who wrote (16681 ) 6/30/1998 11:33:00 PM From: ksuave Read Replies (6) | Respond to
June 12 - Plato Cacheris and Jacob Stein, Monica Lewinsky's new lawyers, are reported to be "unhappy" the about the now infamous Vanity Fair spread of their client. The photos, The New York Times reports, "appeared to undermine the image of Ms. Lewinsky that she and her parents have tried to convey: a young, former White House intern, victimized by circumstances and hounded by the paparazzi."Perhaps the reason is not that Monica is allegedly jeopardizing her defense (how can anybody claim to know that?) than the fact that she is jeopardizing the alleged seriousness of this whole silly scandal. Far more so than the American people, the 'round-the-clock punditocracy is deeply invested in the utter gravity of Monica-gate. This is supposed to be a constitutional crisis, where everybody stops what they are doing and pays attention. Ratings for news programs go up, and pundits get paid to intone their deep foreboding about the survival of the "constitutional order." Who knows, the pundits may yet get their existential emergency if the Republican congressmen and their hand-picked special prosecutor decide it's in their interest after the midterm elections, but face it, so far most people are watching this show the same way they watch "90210." No one outside of Washington is worrying about impeachment. They are wondering whether the evil Linda Tripp will ever get her comeuppance. They want to know just what are the limits of Betty Currie's loyalty. They speculate about how Hillary is handling this. They are curious if Monica would take "the big creep" back when all this is over. And a few men I know are wondering just what is it about this guy that seems to drive even Billy Graham to distraction. "Monica in Malibu" is taken as an insult by the punditocracy for just this reason. It demonstrates just how silly they sound to most people when they drone on and on about the likelihood of impeachment. The dreams of Richard Mellon-Scaife and his buddies at The American Spectator aside, we all know that Clinton will never be successfully impeached on the testimony of one air-headed intern and the busybody "friend" who illegally taped her. All this talk of "subornation of perjury" is nonsense. Neither Vernon Jordan nor any other close friend of Clinton is going to end this presidency by admitting that Clinton instructed them to give her talking points to lie in her testimony - even if Clinton were boneheaded enough to have done it. The oh-so-serious constitutional scandal is rapidly morphing into farce. There will be no "All the President's Men" made about Monica-gate. William Ginsberg, gone but not forgotten, had already turned this flick into a Marx Brothers romp. The Vanity Fair photographs are merely publicity shots for an ambitious young girl whose career got sidetracked by foolish choices in both friends and lovers. The pundits say that means she's not serious. Well, sheesh, who ever said she was?
