bill clinton

Chris Knight's avatar

It’s been a truly fascinating journey for me these past few months after finding an online archive of The Pendulum, Elon University’s student newspaper.  I’m finding articles written by me that I had forgotten about.  I can really see the person I was then, and contrast him with the man who I am today.  There is a lot of growth there.  Some things changed in the intervening decades while others remained starkly the same.  I think my beliefs evolved, while staying true to the heart meat of my being.

So here’s my essay from The Pendulum‘s October 1st, 1998 issue… gadzooks that was twenty-five whole years ago!  Well, this one calls for some background.  A year and a half before this was published Joycelyn Elders – the former surgeon general under President Clinton – visited Elon and spoke one night.  And I was a hot-blooded American youth “full ...

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Visiting the Reagan Presidential Library over a year ago impressed upon me the Gipper’s charm and cordiality toward Gorbachev.  Yet Reagan was also fiercely resolute in his conviction that people desire to forge their own destinies.  It was the two Cold War leaders riding horses together as much as it was Reagan’s defiance at the Brandenburg Gate that ended the threat of communism in Europe.

It was a fine example of the “neo-noblesse oblige” that had been the template since World War II.  Countless perished in that conflict due in no small amount to the failure of “gentleman diplomacy” on the part of the upper crust.  But for its time, that was sanity.  And then a new sanity dawned with the rising of a false sun over Hiroshima.

Yet Ronald Reagan… was insane.  Or so we were told by pundits and academics.

Speaking of peace while drastically building up the ...

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Feelin’ extra cynical and disgusted about some things this morning…

So the Republican party thinks it can “win back” control of Congress from the Democrats in this year’s election.

How does that matter? Really… how does that matter?

I have been observing politics for most of my life. I’ll admit that once upon a time I did believe that there were fundamental differences between the Democrats and Republicans and that those were “the only” parties that seriously existed. So I was in the same mindset as the vast majority of Americans.

Then I grew out of it. Woke up. Came to my senses. Saw things for how they really are…

Saw too much of what’s running this country as one big damned fabrication. Not a government of enlightened individuals but a glorified puppet show entertaining the masses with smoke and mirrors.

And now, now… it doesn’t bother me one whit ...

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… the first news in what became known as “the Monica Lewinsky scandal” came out, when Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report broke the word that Newsweek was sitting on a story about a sexual affair between President Bill Clinton and a 23-year old White House intern.

Those were very crazy days. Can’t believe it’s been ten years already. I still remember watching Clinton on live television wagging his finger at everyone and claiming that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky!”

I have a friend who teaches history, who predicted all the way back in 1992 that Bill Clinton would be the first in a long series of presidencies that lacked honor and ability and real sense of duty. When the Lewinsky scandal came out, I couldn’t help but think back to what he said. And now ten years later, in the closing months of ...

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