Word: starrs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When, however, words and memory are entirely instrumental, as they are for Clinton, truth is defined not epistemologically but politically. Days before going before the Starr grand jury, the White House was reportedly polling and floating trial balloons in the papers to determine what confession would fly. The truth is not what happened. It is what sells. And because Clinton is so good at selling, he has never needed truth as it is conventionally understood...
Assume that Ken Starr had not amassed a mountain of conflicting testimony and circumstantial evidence, up to and including the famous dress. Assume that the Lewinsky question, like the Jones and Flowers and Kathleen Willey questions, remained an issue of he-said she-said. Does anyone doubt that Clinton would still today be sticking to his original story...
...hides an adulterous liaison. One study showed that while women committing adultery tend to blame themselves, the men cast the blame elsewhere. Women feel shame when they lie; men regret. A woman will say, "I lied; therefore I'm no good." A man will say, "I lied, but Ken Starr forced...
...struggle between the President and Kenneth Starr, framed until now as a legal-political showdown, seemed to boil down this week to a subtler but perhaps more basic dispute: the conflict between the Clintonites' desire for something known as "closure" (a New Age buzz word drawn from the vocabulary of family therapy) and the cry from other quarters for what used to be called justice (a term one associates more with the Old Testament). Indeed, if an alien were to view the tapes of Clinton's recent TV defenders, he, she or it might be inclined to think that "closure...
...closure and justice overlap? Not necessarily. Should the President's approval ratings reach 100% next week, it would certainly represent closure to the Lewinsky case, but it wouldn't also mean justice had been done--particularly if Starr's report to Congress were to contain persuasive evidence of crimes. When Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate, that was closure too, it can be argued--but his pardon by Gerald Ford was viewed by many, even to this day, as an unsatisfactory moral ending...