Word: liars
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...weekend allowed. "That doesn't seem real to me," said one. "They have no secrets," argued another. "They know each other. They know each other backward and forward." She had to profess ignorance, in this view, because the alternative to being a trusting sucker was being a cold-blooded liar. A longtime Democratic official, who has never been in Clinton's camp, watched the mopping-up operation and marveled at the way the Clintons had used their own misery, if that's what it was, to grow new arms and legs. "Do I think she may have been hurt? That...
Lewinsky had several other good reasons to do that. First, if Clinton's semen was on the dress, it might be useful at a later time in case he and his operatives called her a liar, deluded or crazy, as they were planning to do. But the real power of the dress was not to punish Clinton but to smoke him out of his denial. Her privacy destroyed and her dignity under siege, the last thing Lewinsky wants to do is spend the fall and next spring answering prurient questions from Congressmen about her private life. The sheer possibility...
...most poignant of all confrontations with truth is confession. Yet in his nationally televised confrontation with truth, Clinton revealed a notion of truth as endlessly self-reflecting as a fun-house mirror. It has the vertiginous feel of Epimenides' paradox, which (in one version) reads, "All Cretans are liars. I am a Cretan. Therefore I am a liar." (But, of course, if I am a liar, I'm lying about being a liar, and thus I'm not.) The lies-feeding-lies circularity is deeply disturbing. You feel you can never climb...
...human attribute.) Moreover, humankind cannot bear "nothing but the truth." Meursault in Camus's The Stranger is incapable of lying and is executed for it. Prince Mishkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot is a man of perfect honesty who brings disaster to everyone he meets. And in Liar, Liar, Jim Carrey, who has played a few idiots in his time, is even more insufferable as a truth teller than as an inveterate b.s. artist...
...flip it. Most of the country thinks you are a liar and a cheat. A zealous prosecutor is working overtime to put you into early retirement. Every single night, the comics who truly write the first draft of history spit on you and smile. Your attempts to hide behind the powers of your office have diminished them as a result. Your hands are tied overseas; at home your agenda is dead. Your only daughter is back from college, and whatever you decide to say, you have to explain to her first. Your wife looks...