_______________WHO'S LYING ABOUT MONICA NOW? BY DAVID CORN (10/29/98)
	What does a liberal do when, horror of horrors, he doesn't like a conservative message? In the case of David Corn, a writer for the liberal magazine The Nation, he tries to smear the messenger -- in this case, me -- by accusing him of lying, as he did in his Oct. 29 Salon article, "Who's lying about Monica now?" Salon magazine owes me a retraction. So faulty is the logic on which Corn bases his false accusation against me that one wonders if it was malicious. What I told reporters, including Corn, at lunch this past Tuesday -- that if candidates were to pile on the president on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, it "could be overkill" -- is what I would tell them today. What I told reporters this past Tuesday -- that the National Republican Congressional Committee's final wave of advertising would be "broad" and be focused on issues -- is what is true today. What I told reporters this past Tuesday -- that this election is not a referendum on impeachment -- is what I would tell them today and what I will tell them after the election, whatever the results. If Republicans had truly wanted to try to make this election about impeachment, you would have seen impeachment hearings in these final weeks of the campaign. The NRCC is running advertisements in 33 states across the country during this final week of the campaign. We are airing a total of 31 different ads. None of these ads are an "assault based on the Lewinsky scandal," as Corn describes them. Only those who have a permanent case of Potomac fever would perceive any of them that way. Even the three generic ads that either allude to the scandal or show a visual of the president, running in fewer than half the markets in which we are airing ads during this last week of the campaign, are about something much bigger than President Clinton's scandal. Rather, they are about the deeper, broader issue of what's at stake in this election: namely, the very different directions in which Democrats and Republicans would lead our country. The ads contrast Democratic solutions, which lead to bigger government and higher taxes, with the Republican record of tax cuts, a balanced budget, welfare reform and a plan to save Social Security. These ads are not about Monica Lewinsky. They are about the deep philosophical differences between the two parties, and President Clinton becomes the symbol of everything mainstream America dislikes -- not just about Clinton himself but about his party. President Clinton is the head of his party. He and his party have ideas with which Republicans strongly disagree. That is what this campaign is about. Mainstream Americans get that message when they see these ads. (I say that with confidence, having tested them extensively with mainstream Americans.) That David Corn doesn't get it is not my problem. But that Corn accused me of lying because he doesn't get it is his problem and now, Salon's. I insist on a retraction. -- John Linder, Chairman NRCC Let me see if I can sum it up in slightly less space: "Those nasty, mean-spirited Republicans wouldn't tell a room full of reporters their strategy in the final week of the campaign! Oh, heavens, they went so far as to give us the wrong impression! How dare they make an issue of the President lying under oath? Those hypocrites!" And the GOP is issue-less? -- Keith Vollero Richmond, Va. If I were writing a response to this article it would be, "Who's crying now?" It appears that Democrats and liberal reporters can't stand that Republicans have some easy fodder for campaign ads. If I were a Republican Committee member seeking to determine an ad campaign, of course I would play up to the dominant issue in this election. Would I then say, in a specific forum, "I don't think we'll use the Monica issue in this campaign"? Maybe. Because, like our president, I could say to myself: "My response to these kinds of questions about the ad campaign depends on how I define 'use' or what the word 'issue' really means." Silly, isn't it? But the point is well taken that Republicans have every right to go after the president and all those who have loyally backed his lying, adultery and coverup, using the issue to their best advantage. Think of how many ads circulated in the Bush/Clinton campaign about the famous "Read my lips ..." matter. I personally haven't seen a single ad about the Clinton/Lewinsky thing, but it wouldn't matter to me if I did, nor would it matter how harsh the ad would be. I and many others here in Wyoming have already decided that the president should be impeached if all the facts warrant it because he betrayed the trust of that great office. And finally, anyone -- politician, media person or whoever -- who tries in any fashion to defend a disgraced president has nothing left to do but complain when another person grabs that issue and runs with it. Sorry, but your own party has set the precedent and now you have to live with the consequences. -- William J. Bagley LaGrange, Wyo.
_______________THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BENIGNI BY CHARLES TAYLOR (10/30/98)
	I never thought I would read another review by Charles Taylor after his brutal and undeserved attack on Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. However, I could not agree more with his review of Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful." The question I have been asking myself is, what compelled Benigni to make a movie about the Holocaust? Surely, he wanted to milk the audience for all the sympathy he could get -- and a cheap one at that. Benigni hogs the whole movie with his wild antics, and a natter that would drive the Pope to murder. The entire cast is made up of extras, except of course for some scraps thrown at the wife and son. I loathed the film and question the judgment of jurors at Cannes and other festivals. The Holocaust is beyond anyone's imagination and Benigni should have stayed far away from tackling the subject he can never comprehend, not even in his wildest imagination. -- Amy Dadichandji Laly Seattle I am offended by Charles Taylor's insistence that I be offended by "Life Is Beautiful." His claim that Roberto Benigni is trying to "give a heartwarming, life-affirming cast to an event that exists outside of human meaning" is a discussion stopper of almost totalitarian proportions. (We have Claude Lanzmann and Ken Starr for these kinds of absolutes.) As it happens, the Holocaust has been approached from virtually every angle in literature and film, and the admonition that this one has gone too far rings exceedingly hollow, especially when all the superior examples he cites (save "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis") are blindsided by directorial insensitivities more grave, if a bit subtler, than anything in Benigni's movie. Furthermore, I'm disturbed by Taylor's tendency to lambaste directors not for the failure of their own designs but because those designs failed to conform to the much better intentions in his own head. In his rant about "Beloved," a film I liked little more than he did, he sets forth premises that are so far off from the intentions of Oprah Winfrey and Jonathan Demme (and Toni Morrison) as to defeat his own arguments. For "Pleasantville," he consistently confuses the real 1950s with the collective-consciousness version Gary Ross is lampooning. And "Beautiful," we learn, is beyond the pale because Benigni "lacks a coherent persona" as a clown and that his film -- a fable by any definition -- must be condemned because he "isn't even trying for straightforward realism." Somebody here, I fear, is too caught up in content to allow these varied, and variably successful, filmmakers their own damn terms of enterprise. How about acknowledging what's actually been written, shot, edited and put on the screen, and then tackling it accordingly? In cinema, that's called building a story arc, as opposed to spilling your guts in the very first reel. -- Ken Eisner Vancouver, B.C. Bravo to Charles Taylor for cutting all the crap about "Life Is Beautiful," which doesn't leave much to love about the film. This elsewhere overly praised use of the Holocaust as wallpaper for an Italian Lassie-style film unfortunately has an early American ancestor -- the sitcom "Hogan's Heroes," which made being an American POW of the Germans in World War II equally as campy a backdrop for cheap yucks. Plenty of American POWs, especially Jewish POWs, starved or died of other causes at the hands of Nazi Stalag guards and administrators, but that fact was dispensed with by studio writers to avoid damping the cutesy motif they were striving for. -- Ted Gruen
	CORRECTION: In the story "Blame It on Rio," we erroneously reported that the online music format MP3 was both "free and open." While the format is indeed open and freely available, it is not exactly free of cost: Those companies that helped develop the MP3 standard also hold many of its patents, and some, such as Fraunhofer Multimedia, have begun to demand that software developers who work with MP3 pay them a license fee (such as $25 per encoder distributed). As a result, MP3 encoders will increasingly be charged for, and small royalties may be charged for each MP3 song sold. The error has been corrected. SALON | Nov. 5, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| MOTHER RAGE: THEORY AND PRACTICE BY ANNE LAMOTT

If you would like to submit a letter to the editor for publication, please e-mail us at salon@salonmagazine.com. Letters sent by fax or "snail mail" are less likely to be accepted. Do not send attachments. Please include your full name and a phone number where you can be reached during business hours, so we can confirm your identity. This information will not be used for any reason other than verification and will not appear on the site. Letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness. Brief letters are more likely to be published. Place the name of the article you are responding to in the subject heading of your e-mail. If you do not wish your letter to be published, please say so in the subject line. For more information on Salon's letters policy, click here.