Word: truths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...choice was preordained. After all, the lie in all its variations--the half-truth, the legalism, the critical omission, the elastic wordplay--is what he knows. Acrobatics--"I didn't inhale," the Flowers denial, the draft--are what brung him to the dance...
That does not happen very often in a frantic media age where tales of every conceivable variety and shade of veracity course constantly through the national consciousness. Because television is a medium designed for leaving impressions, not memories, the television age is one in which facts and words and truth are maddeningly elusive, in which national memories are extraordinarily shallow. Yet there remains one stubborn barrier to total amnesia. The law: ancient, ponderous, interminable, immovable. But fixedly real...
...Except on really important occasions," writes Graham Greene of one of his spies, "he always preferred the truth. The truth can be double-checked." It has been Clinton's good fortune that politics is not very good at double-checking. The law, however...
...worked on the Dole campaign in 1996. "Obviously there's a qualitative difference between what Gore did and what Clinton did, but there's also a unifying thread: anyone from third grade on knows they weren't being honest, and people are sick of politicians who parse the truth." What's more, says Stevens, if Gore doesn't find a way to express his discomfort over Clinton's dalliance with an intern, "his lack of outrage will start to define him. At what point does his loyalty to Clinton end and his own set of values begin...