Chris Gelken has nearly 20 years experience as a photographer, writer, news editor and broadcaster.

For the past 11 years Chris has been based in Asia where he now works for Hong Kong's leading AM radio news station, Metro Plus.

Chris also contributes freelance material on a wide variety of topics to newspapers, magazines and radio networks internationally.

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September 10, 1998 -- HONG KONG -- Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct. So said Thomas Jefferson. Help me out here, but how does breaching the unwritten rule of keeping domestic politics within the shoreline of continental U.S.A. when a President is overseas actually help the Democrats in their quest to win over public opinion ahead of the November elections? I should think that the word 'whoops' may be going through the mind of many Democrat candidates about now. Deservedly so.

Watching the POTUS stumble through an awkward reply to an inappropriate question while standing next to the Prime Minister of Ireland - well, it was a shameful example of a rottenness that has been the hallmark of politics and politicians ever since the first man ever cast a longing eye on offices. Frankly, it doesn't say much for journalists either. With bigger events and issues to concern the two leaders, why were we again forced to witness a man squirming in front of cameras beaming the sorry event to an international audience? If we look at things in terms of winners and losers, I can't think of a single winner, anyone who benefited from the question or the reply. Losers? Well, off-hand I can think of several.

That one pathetic soundbite managed to find its way into every end of the day wrap on Clinton's visit to Ireland and completely eclipsed anything else his visit may have - or indeed could have achieved. By the time Clinton returned to Washington most people had actually forgotten he'd also been to Russia. Not that Moscow had been one of Clinton's better foreign summits. Two wounded Presidents trying to make the best of what was essentially nothing worth holding the front page for.

But such is the media and political obsession with the Monica Lewinsky affair. Media because it makes such good tabloid copy; politics because it gives self-righteous and smug politicians the opportunity to climb such high moral mountains and tell us all how outraged they are. Do they really think for a second that we will be impressed with their chest beating declarations of purity? If I were an American I would be insulted by their arrogant attitude that assumes the voting public was lobotomised at birth. Politicians around the World sing from the same songsheet, sweet lyrics to seduce the masses. Until they are convicted or completely discredited - as many, many eventually are.

I'm reminded of another of my favourite political quotations. Mark Twain once remarked; "There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." I am sure the U.S. military hands out medals for long service and good conduct - in the British Army we used to describe them as awards for years of undetected crime. For most of us who accept that we are slightly less than perfect - the scientific term is 'human' - there are things that if one were of that persuasion one might confess to a priest, but would be mortified to see broadcast on CNN. And rightly so. There are criminal acts that deserve to be thrust into the public domain and there are things that are between an individual, his family and his personal God.

Watching chat-shows and reading a multitude editorials that expand endlessly on the idea that Clinton's "immoral behaviour with an innocent girl half his age" has sent the wrong sort of message to the youth of America and that it has had a profoundly negative moral effect on them leaves me gagging in disbelief. In a country that has been reduced to putting metal detectors on school gates to prevent students from taking automatic weapons into class there are still those who believe that consentual sex between two unmarried adults will corrupt the morals of America's youth beyond redemption. I'll qualify that, those who have a secret or personal agenda and want us to believe that consentual sex etc etc.

Reacting to the coverage of the Monica Lewinsky affair in the columns of APJ and elsewhere a reader from Canada recently emailed me and asked; "Are you Americans nuts?" I often thank whatever Gods may be out there that I am neither. Well, one is a matter of opinion, the other is a blessing of birth.

Chris Gelken