Word: tells
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...apparent troubles there) but one who levels with the people in all matters, who says it straight and doesn't dissemble. "The reaction now will be to look for just the opposite [of Clinton]," says G.O.P. media consultant Alex Castellanos, "someone who can look you in the eye and tell you hard truths about big things and serious things." Even Democrats like Sheinkopf agree. "This scandal will redefine our politics," he says, "and take it back to basics. The candidate who succeeds will be plainspoken, honorable, not a lot of fluff. People want a President with fewer complications...
...politicians, says presidential scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "tell the truth selectively." Bill Clinton has been accused of telling the truth slowly. This is not the same thing as lying. It's a sin of omission, not commission. It's like the difference between lying as a legal issue and as a moral one. The definition of perjury is far narrower than what your grandfather would have considered a damned lie. The legal bar of truth is awfully low. Bill Clinton can be "legally accurate" and still be lying through his teeth. "Religion and law are fishing at the opposite ends...
Bella DePaulo of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, who has done several studies on lying in everyday life, notes that no one is totally honest all the time. "The tendency to tell lies," as Jean Piaget wrote in 1932, "is a natural tendency, spontaneous and universal." One of DePaulo's studies, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that people told at least one lie a day, and that more socially adept folks stretched the truth more often than the less sophisticated. There's a reason the devil is always depicted as a smooth-tongued fellow...
...only tell you I was motivated by many factors. First, by a desire to protect myself from embarrassment...
...created equal. St. Augustine enumerated nine categories of lying, several of which would go into the category we call white lies. Such benign falsehoods make the world go round. No. 6, for example, is a lie that harms no one but helps someone else. This is when you tell your friend who is getting chemotherapy for breast cancer that she looks marvelous...