Word: confessions
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...spin is one reason some journalists have qualms about government officials' passing through the revolving door into our profession. These qualms are too hoity-toity. Journalism should be a game anyone is allowed to play. But when folks show up claiming to be reformed spinners, they ought to confess their own past spins before they start denouncing others'. Let the person without spin cast the first stone...
Once you put an all-out scandal in motion, there's no stopping it, which is why I doubt that all this is behind us. We've gone so far as to have ABC bump a football game so we could hear the President confess that he had I.R.'d an intern after all. As overnight polls indicated that most Americans were satisfied by the apology, TV pontificators informed us that it wasn't an apology that would satisfy most Americans. It was limited, they said. This...
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...