Vince Foster

Because I have chosen the path of truth, I have been vilified by spokesmen for the Administration I proudly serve as a political appointee. The very same Administration which is now trying to portray me as a disgruntled White House staffer, with a penchant for involving myself in scandals, has promoted me twice, given me a political appointment overseeing a critical public relations program at the Pentagon, consistently given me the highest possible annual...

Here is the statement released by Linda R. Tripp yesterday.Because I have chosen the path of truth, I have been vilified by spokesmen for the Administration I proudly serve as a political appointee. The very same Administration which is now trying to portray me as a disgruntled White House staffer, with a penchant for involving myself in scandals, has promoted me twice, given me a political appointment overseeing a critical public relations program at the Pentagon, consistently given me the highest possible annual evaluations and awarded me numerous certificates and merit pay increases.

BOSTON - We now return to our regular programming. The aliens have left. The natives are back. The parking spaces have disappeared again beneath four-wheeled creatures. And the citizens of Boston were rewarded for their good behavior with a free production of the play aptly named Much Ado About Nothing. Before the entire convention disappears into our attention-deficit-disordered memory hole, allow me to return to the magical moment when push came to "shove it." Yes, that moment when Teresa Heinz Kerry told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's Colin McNickle to take his question and you know what.

THE REPUBLICANS are learning how to cringe. They have owned the propaganda airwaves for so long now, and suddenly Michael Moore smacks the hell out of them in Fahrenheit 9/11. Enraged moviegoers spent $22 million watching the film over the weekend. They enter theaters as an audience and emerge as an electorate. But the Democrats ought to duck for cover, too. Over the weekend, the Charles Theatre's very walls seemed to bulge. The place was sold out, one performance after another, two theaters at a time.

WASHINGTON -- Late in 1992, news surfaced that members of the Bush administration had attempted to comb State Department files in search of a letter young Bill Clinton was said to have written renouncing his citizenship while a student at Oxford. (No letter was found.)Washington erupted in indignation. From every quarter came demands for an investigation -- and the State Department duly instituted one.Vice-presidential candidate Al Gore said, ''The White House is using the State Department in a blatant attempt to politicize the entire bureaucracy in a failed attempt to discredit Bill Clinton.

LOS ANGELES -- Bill Clinton got where he is by pretty much accepting the golden rules of American celebrity, beginning with ''There is no such thing as bad publicity,'' and ''As long as they spell your name right . . . ''So he got zinged a little the other night when a New York disc jockey named Don Imus, a man candidate Clinton had courted in the 1992 campaign, was invited to speak in the relatively polite society of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association....

Washington. -- Secretary of Defense Les Aspin has quit. The White House definitely wielded the hook; one day after the resignation, President Clinton cheerfully presented the nation with Mr. Aspin's successor.Still, Mr. Aspin was not dragged off the stage kicking and screaming. Rather, he seemed wearily resigned, burdened by his own mistakes and his wounds from the political battles he had been forced to fight.The news media portrayed the change as a "classic White House shuffle." Yet, Mr. Clinton has suffered several high-level losses since summer, in a pattern that makes his administration something of an anomaly on the Washington scene.

SACKCLOTH and ashes don't fit comfortably on the Washington pundit class. After the release of Vincent Foster's note last week blaming the press for some of his unhappiness, there was a moment of self-examination.But only a moment. Then came the rationalizations. After all, Lani Guinier, Clarence Thomas and lots of others got it much worse than Mr. Foster, who was untouched outside the pages of the Wall Street Journal.And Mr. Foster was obviously a deeply troubled man whose suicide raises many still-unanswered questions.

Washington. -- One Whitewater puzzle is this: Why have the Clintons been so ruinously resistant to revealing everything about what probably are, at worst, dealings too minor and complicated to arrest the nation's attention, and concerning which a political statute of limitations has expired because an election has intervened?The answer may be: Revelation would disarm an administration dependent on sowing moral disdain for opponents. That is, Whitewater may be trivial, other than as a deflator of moral pretensions.

Washington. -- "The mood of this capital . . .'' was the way James Reston of the New York Times used to begin columns about the drift of the ship of state. Well, the mood of this capital is poisonous. The air is heavy with hazy humidity, fear, loathing, lying, sanctimony and hypocrisy.It's a slimy, desperate place these days, worse than I have ever seen it. At least during the hot summer of Watergate 20 years ago, politicians and press alike believed they were dealing with high crimes. They saw themselves doing the most important work they would ever do, trying to guide the democracy through a true crisis in the balance between men and the laws they made.