Word: subtext
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...outside-the-courthouse spin team peddled the view that Boies' opening statement was based on "loose and unreliable rhetoric and snippets that were not in any reliable context." But court watchers were already arguing whether Gates' statements were actually perjurious or merely Clintonesque. Some saw an even more sinister subtext to Boies' opening statement and the incorporeal, larger-than-life double-tongued creature he described as luring unwitting followers to his crusade for world domination. Could the U.S. government really be suggesting that Gates is evil incarnate...
...abrupt meter change. Only Bacharach, for instance, could interpose the cheerful mood of "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" with its underlying theme of disillusionment and the unspoken death of big dreams; while the arrangement glistens with organ bursts and the light trace of strings, the tragic subtext plays out in throwaway verses and quicksilver harmonic twists. Desolation never sounded so hummable...
...made her most direct reference to the Lewinsky scandal since the Starr report was released; on the campaign trail in Seattle late Thursday, she lashed out at Congress for "doing stuff that doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the long-term future of America." The subtext: Either Hillary's been spending too much time lately watching "Casablanca" reruns, or she really has come around to the view that the problems of three little people -- herself, Clinton and Lewinsky -- really don't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy (GOP-dominated) world. At the same...
...coerced confession doesn't count as much as a voluntary one, but he very deliberately chose not to give that back in January, when there was still a chance the lies might work. Still, if Clinton's sex life was his own business and not ours, then the subtext was that it was up to Hillary and Chelsea to punish him, up to them to forgive him. Whatever righteous indignation we may feel was Hillary's to express; any crockery we feel like breaking was hers to throw. And if she can put this behind her, the thinking goes, surely...
Consider: when David Kendall, the President's lawyer, appeared on the White House lawn on Monday following his client's grand jury appearance, it wasn't justice he called for in the matter, as defense attorneys normally do, but that other, warmer, fuzzier outcome. The subtext of his word choice was unmistakable: strict, old-fashioned justice for the President might prove harsher, colder and more damaging than simply putting the whole matter behind us, in the manner of a bad romance or a quarrel with noisy neighbors. A senior Administration official quoted in the New York Times sounded a similar...