Word: arens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...until now, polls have shown that a majority of the American people aren't unduly put off by Clinton's presumed fooling around (especially if it happened back in Arkansas). For one thing, in an era in which no one besides felons and welfare mothers is held responsible for his or her actions, compulsive womanizing has inevitably been redefined as sexaholism: the old kind of touchy feely meeting the new kind of touchy feely, which certainly sounds like President Clinton. One imagines that his tomcat aura may even have helped him in those precincts of the electorate that had come...
...prosecutor appointed to unravel a land deal (remember Whitewater?) bootstraps himself into a civil suit and thereby compels testimony about the most intimate matters, we will soon have a government that can get to anyone. Everyone has something embarrassing to hide. When we aren't all dealing with a President we're ready to string up, this unfettered intrusion may be what haunts us most. What a Hobbesian choice: lie and face prison or tell the truth and face public humiliation. The perjury follows, even though the act--reprehensible though it might be--did not flow from official duty...
...Lewinsky was born--recall the radical-feminist critique of sex as purely a matter of power and exploitation. Under some circumstances the critique seems not so radical. It explains why, for example, professors are enjoined from dating their students. Immaturity and infatuation make you vulnerable, even if you yourself aren't aware of it, and decent people in positions of power do not exploit the vulnerable for kicks. Here the logic of common morality is inexorable, and the conclusion is harsh: If the President had sex with her, he is not a decent man; he will be understood as such...
...catches: they carry a jumbo $11,000 price tag, and they aren't wired to display movies in the upcoming high-definition TV standard. The first HDTV sets, due out this fall, will look more like refrigerators than wall hangings, and there still isn't any HDTV for them to show...
BAGHDAD: Seasoned thespians they aren't. But when it comes to putting on an international song-and-dance in the midst of crisis, no one has better timing than Saddam Hussein and Madeleine Albright...