Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Boston Globe Professor Eileen McDonagh, visiting scholar at Radcliffe College, amok in make-believe: Some will assert that if a woman consents to sex, she has consented to...
...Bernard Lewinsky, father of the virginal Monica, offers a somewhat excessive historic taxonomy of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr during an interview with the learned Barbara Walters...
...And when he was younger, he would hop into a helicopter and fly unannounced to a factory somewhere that was in trouble, and all of a sudden the factory just came to a stop, everybody was standing around...
...We have all had to look at malnourished bodies and feel guilty if we had a good meal...
...Incidentally the McCarthy to whom Dr...
...And consent to a risk doesn't legally obligate a person to consent to the consequences of that risk...
...Clinton was nearby...
...Lewinsky refers is not Eugene: "To pit a mother against her daughter, to coerce her to talk, to me it's reminiscent of the McCarthy era, of the Inquisition, and even, you know...
...FEBRUARY 16, 1998] Wall Street Journal Whilst discoursing with his usual stupidity on the morality of recent presidents, the oaf Al Hunt beholds cigar-smoking, Bourbon-drinking, poker-playing, and Republican Warren Gamaliel Harding, and renders judgment: ...Warren Harding, a truly bad man...
...to 6 p.m.: It was odd and, some said, ironic that President Clinton issued his strongest denial of an affair with a White House intern at a news conference called to tout his childcare initiative, including more after-school programs for kids and teenagers...
...We're home, they're congregating...
...Scratch the surface and sniff...
...The second was justified, rightly, as especially important because the hours from 3 p.m...
...to 6 p.m...
...Folks just drop in, as in Dostoyevsky...
...By comparison, President Clinton looks pretty good...
...FEBRUARY 16, 1998] The American Spectator • April 1998 85...
...For those of us who had dismissed him as a garrulous, blow-dried, lip-biting occupant of the oval orifice, this comes as a slight shock...
...With many concubines and wives, he covets another man's wife, "knows" her, then sends her husband off to war to be killed...
...And an hour later, they'd set up some subcommittees somewhere to try to straighten what was going wrong—an extraordinary way of governing...
...I have friends who have lived there for many decades and loved the place...
...he doesn't trust it...
...FEBRUARY 16, 1998] Time Star-struck, pretty Margaret Carlson visits the Clinton White House during that fabulous dinner for Prime Minister Tony Blair...
...FEBRUARY 16, 1998] 84 April 1998 • The American Spectator Kalamazoo Gazette In the correspondence page of a great Midwestern gazette, surely a joke: Monica Lewinsky has become world famous, and I frankly do not care to have millions spent to find out what she has done that is acceptable or not acceptable...
...But King David without a doubt broke at least four (coveting, adultery, killing, lying...
...I have been there three times...
...I'm for Monica and anything from a size 12 up...
...Forget for a moment all the Beltway halitosis breathed upon his image...
...he wants love...
...He'd stand up in the helicopter and say, 'What's gone wrong here?' And rank-and file people would speak out...
...What Monica has done for women is prove you can be chubby and still be beautiful and desirable...
...FEBRUARY 10,1998] The Nation Professor Katha Pollit hands down morally astute, sexually hygienic insights that she has gleaned from a recent peregrination to the grocery store: Can it really be that President Clinton will have to step down from the White House because he had — omigod — extramarital oral sex with an adult human female not his wife...
...His predicament, I think, consists of his being at once a romantic and tragic character, built with enormous energy and prodigious hungers, and a flaw as certain as a gene...
...God is unhappy with him and slaps him on the wrist by taking his first born of Bathsheba but gives him a pat on the back by giving him a second son (Solomon), by Bathsheba...
...CURRENT WISDOM Boston Globe Professor Eileen McDonagh, visiting scholar at Radcliffe College, amok in make-believe: Some will assert that if a woman consents to sex, she has consented to pregnancy...
...The apparently vindicated Gennifer Flowers spoke last week of an incident in their affair in which Clinton wanted her to do it with him in the bathroom of the Governor's mansion while a party was in full swing and Mrs...
...That's about —how many acres did you tell me it was...
...He is vividly in the present tense and dares you to join him there...
...FEBRUARY 17, 1998] Washington Post Policy wonk E.J...
...Not rape, not sexual harassment, not child molestation or sleeping with his best friend's wife, nothing painful or kinky or involving drugs or costumes...
...JANUARY 20, 1998] The White House Halfway through his Call to Arms against Saddam, the Forty-Second President (and only president to successfully beat the draft) lapses into the bizarre: "One of these presidential sites is about the size of Washington, D.C...
...Children and women have died of anorexia...
...Sex would have been the least of it...
...It's awful...
...Now we can enjoy...
...Blair's life is a bore, such are the glamorous charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and sex for jobs or silence against her president that Miss Carlson simply goes wobbly in the knees...
...In the society of nonstop surveillance, the small town drops in on the metropolis...
...Todd Gitlin, imperishable prose fashioned to elicit chuckles, tears, goose bumps and belches, in sum, all the customary intellectual responses of America's "vast left-wing conspiracy": As my mother pointed out the other day, soap opera characters rarely phone each other to say, "Come on by...
...are the time when teens get into the most trouble and need something useful to do...
...This in a country where half the kids over 15 have as many piercings and tattoos as lifers in the gulag and the front cover of this month's Reader's Digest, on view in every grocery store, trumpets an article within as "Surprising Health Benefits of Sex...
...speaks out for a policy that might yet keep our children out of Our President's reach between those deadly hours of 3 p.m...
...We're not talking about a few rooms here with delicate personal matters involved...
...Just getting the most coveted ticket in Washington—to dine with those two powerful heads of state —lent the evening an illusion of invulnerability: that all is right in the world because all is right at this moment...
...And though Mr...
...If, however, he felt that he was playing a high-risk romantic game, he gladly would have become a fool for love...
...But I am worried about, as everybody who is concerned for the future of Cuba is, [is] what's going to happen when this extraordinary man is no longer around...
...FEBRUARY 3, 1998] ABC's 20/20 Friday Dr...
...Anyone who is not given sufficient love as a child will spend the rest of his life looking for it, and so he has...
...At the risk of putting aside the great scandal in favor of what we used to call, quaintly perhaps, "the issues," what hope is there for a sensible child-care initiative this year...
...JEANNETTE D. EDWARDS Kalamazoo [FEBRUARY 13, 1998] National Press Club During a lecture at the National Press Club folk singer Pete Seeger, the Peter Drucker of Communism, launches a few thoughts on one of the great industrial managers of the Communist world, also a superb prison warden and bankrupt: "[Cuban dictator Fidel] Castro is a very interesting boss, one of the most interesting in the entire history of the world...
...FEBRUARY 5, 1998] Time Roger Rosenblatt, hopeless romantic, revolves the scortatory exertions of the Boy President in his school girl mind and perceives Romance everywhere, even in public toilets: Clinton does not want sex...
...Remember, he was one of the greatest leaders in history...
...Forget the dog-in-the-manger, down-inthe-mouth neo-puritanism of the op-ed tumbrel drivers, and see him instead as his guests do: a man in a dinner jacket with more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex...
...In the world of gossip, too, people are always dropping in on each other—insinuating, overhearing, entrapping, accusing, sucking up pellets of mis-, dis- and plain information, interrupting each other in closets off the Oval Office...
...We watch, they visit...
...As the President of the United States walks with Hillary and the Blairs into the State Dining Room, his height, his sleekness, his newly cropped, iron-filing hair, and the intensity of his blue eyes project a kind of avid inclusiveness that encircles every jaded celebrity he passes...
...He probably loves Hillary Clinton as much as he is able to love any woman, but he is essentially faithless...
...FEBRUARY 1, 1998] The New Yorker Miss Tina Brown, girlish and in the raptures during a state dinner hosted by a charming sexual predator accused of indecent exposure, perjury, obstruction of justice, and arrested adolescence: Bill Clinton most of all...
...40,000 acres...
...There was the President, charming and being charmed by the bicoastal Masters of the Universe: Steven Spielberg, Barry Diller, Jack Welch, Warren Buffett, Tom Hanks, Ralph Lauren, John F. Kennedy Jr., Tina Brown, Anna Wintour, Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings...
...you could stretch it and say the Hitler era...
...As a romantic he is capable of shocking recklessness...
...Bad luck seemed as far away as it must have seemed in the ballroom of the Titanic...
...Main Street may be dead but not in the Oprah'd, Springered, Monteled, Laked, Drudged world where Page Six is always Page One...
...How can anything be wrong when Stevie Wonder and Sir Elton John have come to sing to you...
...The loop passes through your own living room...
...She, I believe, understands this and, in a brave and practical way, has become the manager of his predicament...
...If he were merely going for a quickie, it would have been monumentally stupid to imperil an entire political future...
...Amid the clichés about his charm, his glamour is undersung...
...Well, the worst President Clinton may have done is break two of the Ten Commandments...
...Cool it, girl: Like a brightly lit ocean liner on a dark sea, the White House floated above the scandal for five hours, as 240 guests clinked glasses and basked in the glow of being rich, of being powerful, of being there...
...Billions have been made by proclaiming a product fat free...
...No one is condemned to live alone...
...He never got enough as a kid (dead father, abusive stepfather, absent mother), and he cannot get enough of it now...
...But sex doesn't create pregnancy—it creates only the risk of pregnancy...
...No one is really out of it...
...Dionne, Jr...
...I love butter — it's good for you —and chocolates...
...FEBRUARY 20, 1998] New York Observer From the pen of Mr...
...Stardust rubs off on the rest of the rubes who want to feel in the know...
...It was eerie...
...It's as if feet were not yet vestigial organs, as if Alexander Graham Bell had never lived and the befaxed, bemodemed, bewebbed world had been aborted before its time...
...FEBRUARY 16, 1998] Contra Costa Sunday Times Correspondent Robert S. Armstrong, another of Boy Clinton's disciples in the belief that the Ten Commandments is a multiple choice test: Do we need a leader who is as perfect as King David with the blessing of God...
...Yet because of that childhood deficit, he doesn't believe in love, either...
...In many ways, he doesn't make decisions, he delegates much more...
Vol. 31 • April 1998 • No. 4
