Word: confessed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...American citizen to try to imagine what he would do if confronted by the squalid and surreal choice facing his President: stonewall or confess. One person--one only--made the disgusting mess: Bill Clinton. Let him find...
...since the confessionalist camp advises truth telling rather than continued lying (though truth telling of a manipulative kind), I think that option deserves deeper exploration. The confessionalists have not made their case with sufficient imagination, envisioning only one way for Clinton to confess--staring at a camera in the Oval Office, reading a TelePrompTer. The dramaturgy is flat. Even Richard Nixon in his 1952 Checkers speech--the prototype of aggressive self-defense through televised "confession"--used poor Pat as a studio prop and, of course, conjured up the adorable, absent...
There are all kinds of interesting ways to confess. Long ago, Jimmy Carter startled America by admitting, in a Playboy interview, to "lust in my heart"--not a confession at all, really, but coy, juvenile exhibitionism. Playboy would not be a good forum for Clinton. Jimmy Swaggart wept and chewed the furniture on the soundstage of his TV ministry. Without the gnashing of teeth, Clinton might at least entertain the idea of a group format. He is good at the Oprah-type give-and-take. If confession becomes inevitable, best to take control of the drama and stage-manage...
This doesn't mean coming clean isn't the right thing to do--just that it isn't the panacea some make it out to be. Imagine if Clinton were to confess, reversing his finger-wagging denial and replacing it with a tortured definition of sex to help explain his earlier claims of innocence. Even if he said he did it to spare his family, the support he enjoys among a majority of Americans would sink like a stone. It's one thing to have an abstract notion that he actually had an affair and covered...
...spectacle of Lewinsky running the gantlet of cameras into the federal courthouse, the rumors that the DNA tests on the dress would prove his undoing, the growing consensus that he was walking into a perjury trap, led outsiders to assert that he would soon have no choice but to confess all--and insiders to suspect essentially the opposite: that he would admit not a single thing, deny any romance, dismiss Lewinsky as a fantasizing stalker and even consider refusing to turn over a blood sample that could match his DNA to the stain on the dress. Fight...