Letter: Author captured letter writer’s feelings toward Clinton scandal

Tuesday, Sept. 1, 1998 | 9:56 a.m.

"At first sight it is curious that our own offences should seem to us so much less heinous than the offences of others. I suppose the reason is that we know all the circumstances that have occasioned them, and so we manage to excuse in ourselves what we cannot excuse in others. We turn our attention away from our own defects, and when we are forced by untoward events to consider them, find it easy to condone them.

"For all I know we are right to do this: They are part of us and we must accept the good and the bad in ourselves together. But when we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.

"To take a trivial instance; how scornful we are when we catch someone out telling a lie; but who can say that he had never told not one, but a hundred?"

My feelings echo Maugham's words regarding Clinton, and then some. Those among you who are without sin, cast the first stone. In other words, enough already, leave Clinton alone to finish the job you elected him to do.

Ruth B. Cunningham