Word: tripp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there isn't 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...
That, in fact, is what Tripp invited us all to do in late July, after she completed her testimony before the Starr grand jury: "I understand that there has been a great deal of speculation about just who I am and how I got here. Well, the answer is simple. I'm you. I'm just like...
Really? Show of hands, please. How many of you would do what she did? Tripp's supporters argue that she had no choice. She possessed, thanks in part to her own inveterate busybodyness, explosive hearsay information about presidential sexual misconduct. And Lewinsky, the voluble informant, was allegedly urging Tripp to commit perjury in the Paula Jones civil lawsuit. What else could Tripp do to buttress any testimony she might be forced to give except start taping Lewinsky...
Unfortunately for Tripp, this line of defense amounts to a condemnation: she hoodwinked a friend in order to protect herself. Even the most rabid Clinton haters, who would welcome any means of getting a philandering perjurer out of the White House, must, or should, wonder: What would life be like if everyone, all friends and loved ones, behaved like Linda Tripp...
...will be a deadly game in which each side sees who can take more pain, the President or the Republican Party. Or the American people as a whole, who will have to sit through a trial that may end up featuring the detailed testimony of Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. When Representative Houghton had his meeting with the President on Wednesday, he gave him a gift, a new biography of Isaiah Berlin, the late political thinker who taught at Oxford University when Clinton studied there in the late '60s. One of Berlin's favorite epigrams was from the philosopher Immanuel...