I want to do a record with Monica Lewinsky.

I think Kathie Lee Gifford had a line at Wal-mart, and Monica Lewinsky had a line of handbags.

Anybody that thought that I tried to protect the president has forgotten that I asked for the expansion of the Monica Lewinsky matter.

Some of the best news stories start in gossip. Monica Lewinsky certainly was gossip in the beginning. I had heard it months before I printed it.

Presidents at the end of their second term - Reagan with the Iran-contra affair, Clinton with Monica Lewinsky - often find they are bedevilled by hostile Congressional investigations.

What Clinton did with Lewinsky was despicable but was no threat to the nation. That he lied about it repeatedly and to the public is a reason for us to cease to trust him and for him to resign.

The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines.

I haven't got the patience for small talk, although I once saw a woman standing on her own in the corner, and I realised it was Monica Lewinsky, and I had the nicest evening with her - she was charming.

The Beltway media went into caroming-off-the-walls hysterics over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, whipping itself into a flaming casserole even as Clinton's standing with the American people remained upright and firm, so to speak.

Bill Clinton was impeached primarily for criminal conduct: lying under oath and misleading a federal grand jury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Nixon would have been impeached for a wide array of criminal acts, as well as abuses of power.

I was in high school when Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his relationship with Lewinsky. We didn't have social media back then - hell, we didn't have a computer with the Internet in our home - so the details of it all escaped me.

So after the Lewinsky scandal, everything changed, and we moved from using the Bible to address the moral issues of our time, which were social, to moral issues of our time that were very personal. I have continued that relationship up until the present.

I have never lied about my relationship with Bill Clinton. The only proven liar, at this point, and the only admitted liar, is Bill Clinton; not Gennifer Flowers, not Kathleen Willey, not Paula Jones and not Monica Lewinsky, at this point. He is the only proven liar.

I still believe the Lewinsky investigation was way off from the focus of what Whitewater was, which turned out to be nothing at the end of the process. And I think that there were people who were determined as political opponents to not allow his presidency to succeed.

President Clinton invoked executive power a bunch of times... I think once he started doing that, the courts really pushed back on him. He couldn't use it for things that actually had a better basis. He used it for things that were personal, like the Lewinsky investigation, trying to block his aides from testifying.

Has Bill Clinton inspired idealism in the young, as he himself was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Or has he actually reduced their idealism? Surely part of the answer lies in Clinton's personal moral lapse with Monica Lewinsky. But more important was his sin of omission - his failure to embrace a moral cause beyond popularity.

With Bill Clinton, his lawyers always wanted him to say nothing about the Lewinsky scandal. Defendant Clinton had the right to remain silent. But President Clinton had a completely different need - political survival. That meant, in the end, that he needed to trumpet his supposed innocence and talk publicly to the American people.

I look forward to the day when being called 'another Monica Lewinsky' refers to the hard work behind a master's degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics, after spending the first act of one's life deflecting the shame of a scandal that should have rested on the shoulders of a man old enough to have known better.

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