Mary Schmich (Metro, April 5) writes that “you have to shudder at the thought of a government prosecutor leering at the books you buy.”
Why? If Timothy McVeigh had bought a book on bomb-making before he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, would that not be relevant?
Records of Monica Lewin-sky’s book purchases certainly have more relevance to the issue of whether she and the president had an affair–and then committed perjury and suborned perjury to keep it hidden–than did the search for what videos Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had rented before he allegedly told a dirty joke to Anita Hill.
One of the gifts the president allegedly bought for Lewinsky was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a book of love poems. We also know she sent the president gifts, one of which could have been a book. That gift may have been mentioned by her during the twenty hours or so of secretly taped conversations, which apparently contradict hers and the president’s sworn depositions.
