The world's press is still
far from agreeing on a name for it. "Monicagate" seems to be quite popular,
having been used in countries as far apart as India (the Asian Age) and France (Libération). But the Paris
evening newspaper France-Soir calls it "Sexgate," and the Italian
newspapers have generally plumped for the even more ludicrous "Sexygate."
"Zippergate" was taken up by the Irish Sunday Independent . The serious
German newspapers, which tend to avoid catch lines anyway, are calling it
nothing at all, while the British ones have so far sensibly resisted "gates" of
any kind, using straightforward catch lines like "The White House Scandal" or
"The Clinton Scandal." But the British Sunday tabloids excelled themselves by
managing to demean even a sleazy sex scandal with revolting front-page
headlines of which perhaps the worst was in the Sunday People --"I'll
Give You My Baby Gravy."
Monday was a day on which
the European pundits who hadn't yet managed to get their hands on the story
rushed to have their belated say, many of them posing as Old World
sophisticates bewildered by the simple-minded puritanism of the United States.
In La Repubblica of
Rome, its main female columnist, Natalia Aspesi, wrote: "Seen from Italy, the drama which is imprisoning
Clinton and his loyal wife, which is endangering not only his presidency but
even the economy and politics of the United States, if not of the entire
planet, appears an amusing, absurd and incomprehensible triviality. Our
presidents and prime ministers have never had such problems, partly because
they are almost always Christian Democrats, or at any rate very Catholic, at
least in words, and partly because they are almost always ugly and old and
shadowed by energetic wives who do not permit them any distractions, or they
are widowers pledged to chastity." But if they did commit such indiscretions,
she added, they would be much more popular.
In
La Stampa of Turin,
Italy, Gabriele Romagnoli wrote that even Houdini couldn't have got himself out
of Clinton's mess, because America could not have tolerated the commonplace
nature of his offence. "A society based on hypocrisy can forgive the sins which
don't belong to it, those which it dreams of committing, but not those which it
commits every day," he explained.
In the conservative Daily Telegraph of London, Barbara Amiel, the Canadian
columnist who is married to the newspaper's Canadian proprietor, Conrad Black,
wrote in an op-ed article headlined "Stop this madness" that Clinton was a
victim of political correctness. "It has come to this: the natural desire of a
young woman for an aggressive, handsome and powerful middle-aged man and the
reciprocal pleasure that such a man has in the flattering attention of a pretty
young girl--these totally mutual and consensual instincts that are built into
the human psyche, whether one likes it or not--have created a tempest in the
United States that could lead to a constitutional crisis. Indeed, this natural
libidinous reaction could well have a major impact on the lives of
Palestinians, Israelis and Iraqis, not to mention the world economy."
After
saying that "the one great contribution that Clinton could make" would be to
"expose the sexual political correctness that distorts our law and our lives,"
Amiel concluded, "One wonders what Mrs. Clinton is really feeling through all
this as she manages Bill's defence team. My own view is that, like Lorena
Bobbitt, she is sharpening the knife to remove the one major impediment that
stands between her and her shadow presidency."
The president's member featured as a subject in numerous
tasteless cartoons. One on the front page of Corriere della
Sera of Milan showed Bill lying disconsolately in a double bed beside
Hillary, who is saying, "So it's the dollar that's dropped, then?" The liberal
Guardian of London
had a cartoon on its editorial page showing Monica Lewinsky dragging Clinton by
his penis off his presidential pedestal into a throng of hysterical,
knife-waving enemies. Beside it the paper's editorial--titled "Tell
the truth, Hillary"--said the first lady "needs to tell Americans why she
is still standing by her man--why the peace and prosperity of the 1990s are an
achievement for which he deserves credit. She persuaded her nation why Bill
Clinton was fit to be president once before. She needs to do so again. And she
cannot afford to fail."
In Israel, the daily Ha'aretz reported from
Washington Sunday that the Clinton sex scandal might trigger a wave of
anti-Semitism in the United States. It quoted an official of the
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith as saying that the fact that the fate of
the administration hung on the word of a 24-year-old Jewish woman had already
produced accusations of a "Jewish conspiracy" against the American people on
Internet sites operated by radical right-wing and white supremacist
organizations. Another Israeli daily, Yediot Aharonot , commented, "We
used to think, in all good faith, that the fate of the peace process was in the
hands of a Jew born in Prague calling herself Madeleine Albright. Apparently
it's in the hands of another Jew, Monica Lewinsky, born in Beverly Hills."
Monday, Ha'aretz
published an op-ed article by Danny Rubinstein, saying, "In the Arab world and
among the Palestinians, many people believe that because Monica Lewinsky is
Jewish the Washington sex scandal is nothing but another stunt by the Israeli
Mossad, intended to distract the attention of the American public and of
President Bill Clinton away from the peace process. In East Jerusalem on
Saturday you could hear perfectly serious people saying the timing of the new
scandal could not possibly be a coincidence. According to that version, the
Israelis were alarmed by the possibility the president might take a
pro-Palestinian stance, and quickly cooked up the new sex scandal."
The daily El País of Madrid devoted a whole
column to the unpromising scandal of Domingogate--a story from its Washington correspondent about how
Monica's mother, Marcia Lewis, had included in the original manuscript of her
book The Private Lives of the Three Tenors a passage "imagining" a love
affair between her and Plácido Domingo. The tenor had issued a statement
admitting to having seen her around the place at the Los Angeles Opera but
denying she had even interviewed him for her book--let alone participated with
him in an "imagined" romance. The same newspaper had a scoop over the weekend
about how Fidel Castro's daughter had applied for asylum in Spain, but was
likely to be denied it.
