Osama missed, Monica on the mind. sad to say, there does seem to be some evidence that President Clinton may not have considered the rleasing of hgih-explosive missles into Sudan and Afghanistan was not as intellectually capitivating as the sex ties and audio tapes of his fiasco with Monica. Looking into the crosshairs, searching for Osama bin Laden, Clinton may have blinked and missed in more ways than one.

Advisors say he was engrossed in the preparation of a legal brief for the sex scandal, when the Pentago under his authority attacked and missed a terrorist enclave, destroying a meager pharmaceutical production facility and the innocent negihborhood surrounding it. And all of this is covered on the national news in graphic detail. Those guys in the Pentagon should remember the old carpenter's saw, "measure twice, because you can only cut once." And, even if this is not how it happened, it's the way everyone thinks it happened.

Then next, he opened his mouth and removed all doubt department: Bill Clinton was skating along on the vacuous and evaporative inconceivability that he and Monica were just playfully teasing each other with sophomoric touching and talking when the curtain finally came crashing down on his dream world yesterday. Supporters were left shaking their heads.

In his speech, Bill did two really bad things, forgetting the three most important good things:

Good Things: First, when you apologize, do it unconditionally. That is the recognition of error part. Second, the exhibit true remorse, because only when you feel the wrongness of what you have done can you approach the third element of forgiveness: redemption.



Bad things. What he did do was apologize insincerely for effect only. It was for disappointing people (it's not him, really, it's them) and for misleading them (again, he didn't actually lie, he just left stuff out, misleaadind, that's not lying, really). And secondly, he decided, after lengthy consultation with highly paid advisors, that he would launch (shades of Hillary's Right Wing Conspiracy Theory) a "Kill The Messenger" campaign, despite the fact that he had just completely legitimized Starr's investigation by admitting (sort of) that it was all too true. In his conflagatory defamement of Kenneth Starr, which may be deserved, he hoped in discrediting the accuser, the accusations would also be smeared. But, people are smarter than that. However bad Starr is, it doesn't mean the accusations of messing around with an intern on the People's time were untrue. In trying to divert the slime to his pursuers, he headed himself off at the pass. As he attacked the messenger, he legimitimized the message. So, up until last Monday night, many of us who like his policies and were still wandering around in the hazy dimension of "the benefit of the doubt," where either he was only casually goofing around with this Monica madness or he was twisting with guilt and would finally come clean and let us forgive and move forward. But then the reality hit us when he opened his mouth and removed all doubt. It reminded me of a nusery rhyme: