Monica Depression
Sure,thePope'sinCubaIraqistill jerkingtheU.N.around44Copscaughtin
OhiostingPMSisn'tmental andthemicrowavedrierisdead. But get serious. There's
only one story today. And it has legs. And pants. And a zipper.
Kenneth Starr has finally found a way to make Arkansas real estate sexy. In
what USA
Today calls a "rapidly escalating inquiry" into allegations that
President Clinton had an affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and
told her to lie about it to authorities, Starr yesterday subpoenaed White House
documents, including, says USAT , logs on Lewinsky's comings and goings.
The dailies all report that Clinton emphatically denies the allegations. The
Los
Angeles Times goes further, saying the president is "infuriated" by
them.
The story was first broken by late editions of yesterday's Washington Post and LAT . ("Today's Papers" was
castigated by numerous readers for having poor news judgment, or worse, a
pro-Clinton desire to suppress news. The truth is much simpler: the story was
held out of the early editions of the papers this column is written from.)
Today, the Post slops the most at the trough, with nine different Monica
missives.
What gives the tale what the Post calls a "Watergate-like intensity"
is the news that Starr purportedly has at least 20 hours of tape recordings of
Lewinsky telling a fellow federal worker, Linda Tripp, about her alleged affair
and about Clinton's and Vernon Jordan's cover-up instructions. (Lewinsky signed
an affidavit on January 7 in which she denied any sexual relationship with
Clinton.) Tripp made most of the secretly recorded tapes on her own. But the
last one in the collection was made with the assistance of the FBI, which set
up a monitored rendezvous between the two women a little over a week ago at,
says the WP , an Arlington, Virginia hotel bar. Starr used these tapes to
get Janet Reno and the federal judges who manage Starr's activities to broaden
his net to its current gaping dimensions. (And further investigation is
required: As USAT points out, any of Lewinsky's statements on tape about
what was said to her are hearsay and probably inadmissible.)
The WP and New York
Times say Clinton denied a sex relationship with Lewinsky in his Paula
Jones case deposition last weekend. But the Post says he did testify
that he'd given Lewinsky personal gifts. (The paper also oh-by-the-ways that
Clinton acknowledged under oath for the first time that he did indeed have an
affair with Gennifer Flowers.)
The WP relies heavily in its reporting on a source it says has heard
the tapes. It quotes that source as saying the recordings include "graphic
descriptions of sexual encounters." The NYT says that the tapes also
contain "tearful passages." The paper reports that Tripp also told Starr's
people about telephone answering machine messages containing a voice sounding
like Clinton's. The NYT elaborates: the messages were played by Ms.
Lewinsky to Ms. Tripp, who surreptitiously taped them. The Times also
reports that a New York literary agent, a friend of Tripp's, has possession of
two of the tapes, which the agent describes as "shocking beyond belief."
Not surprisingly, given its historical squeamishness and the fact that it
was scooped, the NYT holds back a bit. But surprisingly, William Safire
writes that he can't believe the charges, and hopes we can get past them
quickly to the country's real business: making peace in the Middle East,
kicking Saddam's ass and...pillorying Bill Clinton in connection with all the
other scandals. (Re Saddam: note that the Clinton administration is now
confronted with a serious "Wag the Dog" problem: any strong action taken
against Saddam may be construed in the media as a manufactured diversion.)
This scandal makes blatant the degree to which the mainstream media holds a
Drudge Grudge. None of the stories in the papers today credit him for anything,
even though the Drudge Report last weekend reported Lewinsky's name and that
her allegations were on tapes in Starr's possession. In light of that alone,
it's absurd that Mike McCurry won't even address questions that mention Drudge.
After all, he still takes questions from Time --you know, the guys who
explained how Richard Jewell bombed the Olympics.
Maybe Starr's expansion of his inquiry is legally hunky-dory. But think
about it: why should you have to tell the truth about anything a
prosecutor can think to ask you about? Suppose Starr decides Bill Clinton's
video rental records might be relevant--should the president have to say
whether he's watched X-rated videos in the White House? Should the video
delivery guy have to go to jail if he doesn't want to answer that one? It's a
little odd to realize that in this 25th anniversary year of Roe v. Wade the
only sex organ that has the constitutional right to privacy is the uterus.
