Word: monica
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...expect otherwise? If a scandal hangs around long enough and becomes familiar enough, it takes on the quality of a melodrama, pushed along by characters that quickly harden into recognizable types. Depending on your point of view, Linda Tripp is a double-crossing shrew or a courageous whistle blower. Monica Lewinsky is either a vixen or a violated innocent. (An innocent in thong underwear, but still.) And Lucianne? At a minimum, she is forever sealed in history as the New York City literary agent who uttered to her friend the most ruinous sentence of the Clinton presidency: "Linda...
...familiar story line--Linda tapes Monica, Linda plays tapes to Lucianne, Lucianne urges Linda to go to Kenneth Starr--Lucianne emerges as a type known to everyone, for better or worse. ONE WOMAN'S PLEASURE IS THE PRESIDENT'S PAIN: LUCIANNE GOLDBERG REVELS IN FRENZY SHE HELPED START, read a Washington Post headline early on in the scandal. "I'm not going to say that I did this because I'm some great Christian," she told the New Yorker during the scandal's first week. "I did it because it's f__ing fascinating! I love dish! I live...
...remade in her image. Our giddy appetite for gossip--for chicanery and sexual indiscretion and human failings in all their ruinous possibility--got bound up inextricably with moralizing and political ideology, just as it did when she and Linda Tripp decided the world should know about the President and Monica Lewinsky. So thoroughly have the high-minded elements been mixed with the tawdry ones that it may take us forever to disentwine them...
...much doubt, within a circle or two, about where Dante would have pigeonholed Linda Tripp had he been able to foresee such an apparition--a false counselor wired for replays. For all their stupefying banality, the tapes Tripp made over a three-month period of her conversations with Monica Lewinsky are self-incriminating, an eloquent and chilling record of ongoing personal treachery. What is surprising is how many contemporary Americans find Tripp's conduct as hellish as Dante would have. We live at a far remove from the medieval poet's moral cosmology. Where he prescribed eternal damnation and torture...
...side. Put aside your own views on Presidents, oral sex, interns, perjury and so on. Would you have predicted that Washington would be outraged and the rest of the country would shrug it off? If you say yes, I don't believe you. In 1998, thanks to Bill and Monica, we all learned something surprising about ourselves. That's what makes the public reaction, not the events themselves, the political story of the year...