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Everything about “Monica in Black and White,” the new HBO documentary that purports to set the record straight, instead soils everyone it touches. Yes, perhaps Monica Lewinsky may come out of this a more sympathetic character than before, because in a way she is a victim, and you feel her pain. But it is hard not to share the views of the soft-spoken black man in the live audience who toward the end of the show said, “I find the whole set-up fairly dishonest. I find it disingenuous that this is the most appropriate way for you to earn a living, approaching HBO to broadcast essentially a spin story about your life…This is self-serving, self-supporting drivel.”

Lewinsky approached HBO to do this show, and was reportedly paid $150,000 on the premise that she was now free from her immunity agreement and finally going to tell all. We’ve had the book, Monica’s Story, the Barbara Walters interview, the Larry King interview, and now this. So what news was there to tell the world. Nothing, according to The Washington Post, except for a description of “Clinton’s first crude come-on.”

The Post wasn’t very sympathetic in its appraisal of Monica or the show. “All right, then,” they write mockingly, “for the last time, Lewinsky thinks she was a victim. She thinks she was treated shabbily by the media, by Clinton, by Tripp, by Starr and even by some schmo in Oregon with whom she had a five year affair…In the meantime we get a vanity project: Lewinsky’s self-described naivete. Lewinsky’s finger pointing. Lewinsky’s self pity.” USA Today wasn’t much kinder. “Once again,” they write, “she allows herself to come off as someone who thinks fame is a worthy end in and of itself, and who seems to have no grasp of her responsibility for her own shoddy behavior.”

The film was produced by two men whose last documentary was something called “101 Rent Boys,” about the lives of young male prostitutes in Los Angeles. They were compatible with Lewinsky, because they made the chief villains out to be Ken Starr and Linda Tripp, while Lewinsky and Bill Clinton were treated more kindly. Linda Tripp’s crime apparently is that she betrayed her good friend, Monica. But what about Clinton’s betrayal of his cabinet, his wife and daughter? No problem.

And worse still is the treatment of the rest of Clinton’s scandals. For at the heart of this documentary, the point seems to be that Bill Clinton really shouldn’t have been impeached. Early on the narrator says, “Starr has been investigating the Clintons since 1994. It’s been expanded from Whitewater to include firings in the White House Travel Office, Vincent Foster’s suicide, misuse of FBI files, and whether Webb Hubbell received hush money, but so far, nothing against the Clintons.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. In each of those stories lies a Clinton scandal that we have documented for you in the past. Foster’s death was no suicide. And had Starr focused on these and other, more egregious scandals constituting abuse of power, obstruction of justice and other criminal activity, Clinton would likely have been removed from office.

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