Love & Passion Quote by Paul Begala

Begala’s line is a contortion performed in public, and it’s designed to look effortless. He opens with a concession that seems honest enough: yes, Clinton was “deceptive,” and yes, most people would be about their sex lives. That’s not just empathy; it’s normalization. By shifting the moral center from perjury (a civic sin) to sexual privacy (a personal instinct), Begala invites the audience to treat the whole scandal as voyeurism dressed up as law.

Then comes the pivot: “but, in fact, he did not lie.” The phrase “in fact” is a rhetorical crowbar, meant to pry the discussion away from what the public felt they witnessed and toward a narrower, lawyerly definition of truth. The subtext is: don’t trust your gut; trust the parsing. It’s the classic political defense mechanism of the era Clinton helped perfect, where truth becomes a technical product assembled from definitions, not a moral posture.

The intent is twofold. First, protect Clinton by splitting character from culpability: deceptive, sure, but not criminal. Second, delegitimize the prosecution’s moral energy by implying that any normal person, cornered about sex, would behave similarly. In the context of the late-1990s impeachment fight, that’s strategic triage: concede enough to sound reasonable, then insist the only charge that matters doesn’t stick.

It works because it mirrors how audiences actually process scandal: they’ll forgive the behavior they recognize, especially if you give them a legal off-ramp.