[If it is true, I know whom to blame: Clinton. Poor Bennett, caught in the collapse of American morality that Slick Willy precipitated. The explanation's right in this 1998 National Review interview with Bennett:]
NR: What is the source of the seeming complacency on the part of the public [concerning Clinton's relations with Monica L.]?
Bennett: Short answer: Good times are rolling; there's certain degree of cynicism about politics. Long answer: Solzhenitsyn and Walker Percy have explained the spiritual depletion of the West, the marginalization of the moral. The decline in the vitality of belief in the things that sustained this country. It's the difference between us now and the us of Saving Private Ryan. It's Saving Private Ryan vs. Seinfeld.
NR: If Clinton gets away with this will it cement that difference once and for all?
Bennett: I don't know if it's once and for all. Never underestimate the American capacity for self-renewal. We may have to really take our medicine, until we start to hear the echoes. Every perjurer is going to claim Clinton as his legal father. Every adulterer is going to claim Clinton as his moral father. When we see the spillover of this, in what kids say, in what becomes routine, then I think there may be a re-evaluation.
NR: Do you think there will be that kind of trickle-down?
Bennett: Unless you repudiate it in no uncertain terms. A resignation or impeachment will constitute a kind of cleansing. But absent that, it will happen. A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, tells me that he's hearing from the marriage counselors already that all the guys are invoking Clinton. Echoes. Echoes.
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Carl
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