SCRAPBOOK

...MIKE MCCURRY, EPTSTEMOLOGTST Ken Starr may want to subpoena Mike McCurry's bookstore receipts to find out whether F. H. Bradley has been on the White House spokesman's reading list...

...Meanwhile, Tripp is off on a brief vacation to an understandably undisclosed location, after which she will return to an unsettled professional future...

...No, I really don't want to know...

...Tripp, incidentally, is a political appointee, who serves, in the delicious lingo of the government, "at the pleasure of the president...

...There she was met by three members of the Pentagon's office of general counsel, who asked her to leave and escorted her from the building...

...I don't have any thoughts," he answered another...

...On Wednesday, he did almost as well, answering 71 of 85 Monica questions with philosophical explications of the impossibility of truth...

...Not surprisingly, the GAo has called into question Goodman's work, charging that there was a failure to review how "countries of concern" could use American supercomputers for "military and other national security applications" (supercomputers can be used in the development of nuclear weapons...

...After this performance, the philosophy department of every college in the country should be knocking at the door of America's new-found epistemolo-gist, our home-grown EH...

...A Pentagon public affairs officer, she's been working from her house since the Lewinsky scandal broke, and it looks like that's where she'll stay...

...This spring, she was removed from her job as director of the Pentagon's Joint Civilian Orientation Conference and was reassigned to write an administrative manual...

...The study was conducted by Seymour Goodman, whose longtime bias in favor of relaxed controls was chronicled in these pages by Matthew Rees ("Sell Them Anything," September 8, 1997...

...To increase the pressure, Wallace has leaked word that he's reserving a choice chunk of time on 60 Minutes' season debut this fall, just for Tripp...

...Tripp's luck with friends—with one in particular, anyway—is famously bad, but it may have just gotten worse...

...I don't have any factual basis to give you a speculative answer...

...McCurry's discourse with reporters last week on "ontology" puts The Scrapbook in mind of the late-Victorian philosopher, who was something of a neo-Hegelian, something of a neo-Platonist, and something of a nut...

...What is widely reported and what is the truth may or may not be the same thing...

...Last week, she shared a five-hour dinner with CBS's Mike Wallace, who, Tripp sources say, is "putting on the full-court press" to get her to sit for an interview...

...So far Tripp isn't biting...

...This is kind of a minimalist construction, I grant you...

...So Boss Clinton marches on, organizing everyone around him to fool the feds, imposing a code of silence— omert...

...You know more than I know," he retorted...

...And, "They can't run a story like this unless somebody says, 'Yeah, I did it with him.' " Well, Flowers said she "did it with him," and now Monica Lewinsky is set to do the same...

...She subsequently made one trip back to her old office to retrieve personal materials...

...And last week, we heard that Lewinsky will tell the grand jury that Clinton said to her, "If there are two people in a room and something happens and they both deny it, there is no way to prove it...

...The tapes she made of the then-governor showed us Clinton in all his glory, pressing the themes of his lifetime: "If everybody's on record denying it, you've got no problem...

...She'll have testimony to give at congressional hearings and—who knows?—maybe at a trial as well...

...At Tuesday's press conference, of 78 questions asked about the Lewinsky affair, McCurry replied to 66 not with an answer but with a description of the epistemological complexities in ever attaining to knowledge...

...Moreover, the GAo says the Goodman study rested on an unproved assertion that exports of supercomputers were "uncontrollable...

...But that could change soon...

...He reached a new peak at last Tuesday's press conference...

...She'll be busy this fall, anyway...

...In any case, Tripp sticks with the story she gave the grand jury: She had nothing to do with authoring the talking points, and further, Lewinsky herself, upon giving Tripp the papers, told her friend that "this is what the president wants you to say...

...SCRAPBOOK TRIPP'S TRTP AND OTHER MATTERS No sooner had Linda Tripp finished her final day of testimony before the grand jury last week than word leaked out that her old pal Monica Lewinsky was crediting Tripp herself, of all people, with authoring the now-famous "talking points...

...Perhaps Cuomo should now hold a press conference to say, "Who looks like a mafioso now, Bill...

...Here's a woman who told us all we need to know about Bill Clinton, and America kind of shoved her aside—shut up, lady, we've got a New Democrat to elect...

...And McCurry has been doing a lot of dwelling on the difficulties of knowledge...

...I'd only be speculating as a layman...

...I don't know," he replied to one query...

...Lewinsky gave Tripp the talking points, interestingly enough, two days after Tripp (unbeknownst to Lewinsky) had begun cooperating with Kenneth Starr—an odd time, surely, for a witness to compose a memo to herself about how to commit perjury...

...Last week, the Chicago Tribune reported that a forthcoming General Accounting office analysis will fault the administration for relying on a flawed study to justify exports of supercomputers to countries like China, India, and Pakistan...

...I have no way of judging...

...Who knows...

...Bradley...

...Here's one more thing that Clinton told Flowers on those tapes, after she'd remarked that she heard Mario Cuomo was a "mafioso": "Well, he certainly looks like one...

...But as McCurry now reaches the final months of his tenure, he seems to have decided to raise even higher the intellectual tone of his occasional Socratic discourses with the press...

...According to the Tribune, the GAo study finds numerous other shortcomings in the Clinton export policy, including its failure to determine how supercomputers are used once they arrive in other countries...

...The senior Commerce Department official for exports, William Reinsch, has described the GAO study as "seriously deficient...

...And McCurry is nothing if not wary...

...Her requests to return to work at her old office have so far been denied...

...on the other hand, if you dwell on the difficulties of knowledge long enough, it is reality that starts to look wobbly...

...And, "If everybody kind of hangs tough, they're just not gonna do anything...

...I don't have any clue," he explained...

...In the announcement week before last of his impending departure, McCurry mentioned that one thing he'd look to do in his retirement is some teaching...

...When a reporter asked whether he was willing to state flatly that the president has told the truth about Lewinsky, he replied, "I can only report what I ontologically know...

...CHINA SYNDROME All the news about subpoenas, stains, and the Secret Service has overshadowed the ongoing investigation of how the Clinton administration's relaxation of export regulations on high-tech products may have undermined American national security...

...THE SCRAPBOOK suspects the word he was groping for is not "ontology"—the branch of metaphysics that studies reality or being—but "epistemology"—the study of knowing...

...The contrast between his straightforward answers on other subjects and his complex, nuanced, and uninformative answers on Monica Lewinsky has been apparent since the scandal broke: In March, when The Weekly Standard's Tucker Carlson asked him if he wanted to find out what went on between Bill and Monica, McCurry replied, "God, no...

...Sounds like a case of what psychiatrists call projection—ascribing one's own flaws to others...

...GENNTFER'S VTNDTCATTON Can't Gennifer Flowers get any respect...

...Bradley published a famous book in 1893 called Appearance and Reality, arguing that the dilemmas, complexities, and confusions of knowing what's real are so massive that reality itself must be a delusion and the notion of truth a snare for the unwary...

...Early on, credible reports had it that Lewinsky quoted the president as telling her, "There is no evidence, so you can deny, deny, deny...