Monica Lewinsky

LIKE EVERYONE else in America, I wasn't going to watch. But then at 9 last night, a man burst into my house and placed a gun to my temple and said: "Turn on the Monica interview and nobody gets hurt.""Look, I got cable!" I screamed. "We could watch `Star Trek: Voyager' or `Beverly Hills Cop II' or ""We're watching Monica Lewinsky on `20/20,' " he said.So I handed him the remote and got out the Doritos and the Diet Coke, and we watched the whole thing.It sure was an eye-opener.There was Barbara Walters, the most annoying woman on the planet, gazing at Monica with those basset-hound eyes and nodding sympathetically at all the right times, even though you just know she was thinking: "C'mon, chubby, get to the good stuff.

When Orioles designated hitter Aubrey Huff walked into a Florida radio studio last week, he probably never thought he was about to join a fellowship that includes Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears and Michael Vick. But in the week since he impugned Baltimore's nightlife and shared the Bubba the Love Sponge studio with a naked porn star, Huff has become a subject of Internet infamy. He's in hot water with fans and club executives over a radio appearance that never could have circulated five or 10 years ago. And he's learning a prime new media lesson: If you're a public figure, assume that anything said near a recording device will be heard by anyone and everyone.

WHILE THE Monica Lewinsky affair has slowed the wheels of government in Washington, it has had much more dangerous effect on American policy in the Middle East. Not only has President Clinton not been able to prevent the deployment of surface-to-air missiles which Russia sold to the Greek Cypriot side of the divided island of Cyprus, a development that threatens to lead to war between two NATO allies of the United States, Greece and Turkey.The Greek-Turkish conflict on Cyprus has been simmering since the 1970s, when Turkish troops landed in northern Cyprus to protect the Turkish community of the island, which felt threatened by a right-wing Greek Cypriot plan to unite Cyprus with Greece.

The guy who defended Bill Clinton vis-a-vis Monica Lewinsky has a new cause: Martin O'Malley's tax fling. Lanny Davis, the White House special counsel promoted during the scandal to pundit-in-chief, insists that O'Malley does not want financial relations with the vast majority of Maryland wallets. Further, he says, the Marylanders (like himself) who would pay more taxes should welcome a gubernatorial money grab. "All parts of the state and all income groups benefit from different parts of this package," Davis wrote in a commentary in Wednesday's Sun. "That is its genius."

THE SADDEST people who need to get a life are those for whom 22 hours of Tripp-Lewinsky tapes are not enough.In releasing these tapes, Chairman Henry Hyde of the House Judiciary Committee catered to a key demand of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal: the insatiable prurience of much of the American people.No other purpose is served. The transcripts were already public, with whatever information there is to convey. Only the voice remained a mystery, with what light it might shed on Ms. Lewinsky's attractions.

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in his mistress's arms." - Gene Lyons, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette."Franklin Roosevelt died in his mistress's arms." - David Nyhan of the Boston Globe.And so it has been going, pundit after pundit, not to mention partisan apologists for Bill Clinton, in assessing his sordid affair with Monica Lewinsky. Such statements are meant to mitigate Clinton's shame, but they are, in fact, false, and one of the most obnoxious, odious comparisons I have ever heard.Roosevelt's private life was "Romeo and Juliet" compared to Clinton's "Deep Throat," romantic tragedy versus pornography.

WASHINGTON -- At the end of a 1994 news conference, Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked if she should have known that debts from the ill-fated Whitewater land deal needed to be paid off."Well, shoulda, coulda, woulda -- we didn't," the first lady snapped, somewhat dismissively.Four years and several scandals later, there is new pondering over what should have, could have or would have happened that might have altered the course of events leading to the latest Clinton administration crisis to grow out of Whitewater, the Lewinsky scandal.

There are the tapes, which may be truthful. There is the dress, possibly stained -- or is it just a T-shirt?There could be witnesses, perhaps Secret Service agents. There were the White House visits, maybe late at night. There is the presidential deposition, which may contain an admission of previous transgressions.Rarely has there been a news story in which the stakes are so great, the coverage so massive -- and the solid evidence so scarce.As soon as the story of White House intern Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton engulfed airwaves, newsprint and cyberspace 11 days ago, journalists began to speculate about impeachment.

An article in yesterday's editions of The Sun incorrectly reported when former White House aide Mary Ellen Glynn learned of the reasons for Monica Lewinsky's transfer from the White House staff to the Pentagon. Glynn did not learn of the details of the transfer until this year.The Sun regrets the error.WASHINGTON -- When she finally emerged from hiding this week, there was little to see of Monica Lewinsky but an elusive figure in a black town car, her long dark hair hanging lushly by her face, her stony expression easing slightly into a smile as her lawyer chatted with her.A week into the presidential crisis, this image was watched with rapt attention by an international audience.

Even by the standards of those libertine French, this would be cradle-robbing.The French believe the perfect affair is one between a man and a woman half his age plus seven. The amour President Clinton is alleged to have had with Monica Lewinsky, however, would have paired a 49-year-old man with, not the French ideal of a 31-year-old woman, but someone a full decade younger.Scandale!And yet, for all the sound these allegations have spawned, there is surprisingly little fury about the age difference.

CHICAGO -- Everyone knows Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and everyone has a different reaction to her. Some find her as irritating as fingernails on a chalkboard. Some find that she makes their skin crawl. Some run screaming from the room. And some want to drink a gallon of rat poison while lying across a railroad track. The conventional wisdom is that the New York Democrat and former first lady will be a formidable presidential candidate because she has lots of money, veteran campaign aides, a shrewd political sense and a close connection to a president beloved by Democrats.

William R. "Billy" Martin is used to waiting in the spotlight. The Washington lawyer waited as Monica Lewinsky -- who called him her "minister of defense" -- testified before the grand jury in 1998. He waited with the family of missing Washington intern Chandra Levy, publicly pushing investigators to follow leads that eventually led to the discovery of the 24-year-old's body. But it is this waiting, the type he'll be doing today in Baltimore's federal courthouse, that can be most frustrating to a lawyer accustomed to knowing the answer to every question arising in a courtroom.

HOW IT BEGAN BILL During the government shutdown in late 1995, when very few people were allowed to come to work in the White House ... I'd had an inappropriate encounter with Monica Lewinsky and would do so again on other occasions between November [1995] and April [1996]. HILLARY Bill told me that [Monica Lewinsky] was an intern he had befriended two years earlier when she was volunteering in the West Wing during the government shutdown. He had talked to her a few times, and she had asked him for some job-hunting help.

CHICAGO - To err is human; to forgive, divine. But if it's all right with you, I'll leave the divine virtues to the Almighty when he passes judgment in the next world. In this world, winning redemption has gotten entirely too easy. Standards of decent behavior are slipping, and one way to uphold them is to declare that some types of repellent behavior are not forgivable. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. But these days, hardly anyone wants to be so mean. Which is one reason Pete Rose thinks he can interrupt 14 years of lying and expect a prompt remission of sins from the commissioner of baseball.

ARLINGTON, Va. - The resignation of two top editors at The New York Times last week was the journalistic equivalent of bringing down a president of the United States. But the initial reaction from inside the journalism establishment does not augur well for any lessons that it should learn from this affair. The New York Times will investigate, study and examine what happened, but it is unlikely the newspaper will reach the right conclusions. The problem for the Times and for much of "mainstream journalism" is that large numbers of people no longer trust what they read (or see on the broadcast networks)

WASHINGTON - So, have you got your duct tape yet? What about your plastic sheets? As you're surely aware, no less an authority than the federal government has recommended that we keep both on hand as protection against a bioterror attack. We are told we should be prepared to tape off windows and vents to keep out airborne poisons that might be unleashed against us. I haven't hit the hardware store yet, but I imagine the scene - especially in Washington and New York - is not unlike that in Florida whenever a hurricane takes aim at the peninsula.

When John Nicol, director of technology for MSNBC's Internet news site, came to work at 7 a.m. Jan. 22, he smelled trouble. MSNBC's powerful computers were being strained to the limit by Web surfers frantic for the latest on some former White House intern named, uh, Lewinsky.Nicol launched an emergency plan developed after the October stock market drop, when investors desperate for market data nearly halted MSNBC in its electronic tracks. Technicians swiftly stripped the luxuriant MSNBC front page to a bare-bones report of the scandal for quick downloading.

WASHINGTON -- So, you're stuck at the center of a White House sex scandal. What do you do?If you're Monica Lewinsky, you take the back passages at the Watergate apartments and slip into shops connected to the swanky complex. You do not browse at the Yves St. Laurent boutique -- reporters are there looking for you -- but you do get yourself to the beauty shop to address your pressing personal maintenance issues, such as eyebrow waxing.The Watergate is best known for scandal, of course, but it is also a good place to pick up a $2,215 Mongolian lamb jacket for apres ski. Or a $1,500 bottle of Hennessy cognac in fine French-leaded crystal.

Monica Lewinsky and the term social conscience might not seem like they belong in the same sentence. But, if there is anything still resembling a social conscience in American television, it is found in documentaries. It was that way in 1961 on CBS when the network aired Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame, about the plight of migrant workers in America, and it is that way today mostly on public television's PBS and premium cable's HBO. HBO's American Undercover series, its showcase for documentaries, returns tonight with Monica in Black and White, a controversial film made possible by America's finest television channel paying the former intern who had a sexual relationship with President Clinton to talk about it. HBO declined this week to say how much it paid Lewinsky.

You can credit Monica Lewinsky for the shove James Bamford needed to write his second mammoth book on the National Security Agency, the mammoth eavesdropping agency at Fort Meade. Bamford, working as an investigative producer for ABC News, had been intending for a while to write a chapter to update his 1982 book The Puzzle Palace, working in his spare time. But jetting around for television reports on everything from campaign finance corruption to terrorism, he found he had no spare time.