Melville House Books

“That is so sleazy,” says one resident of the apartment building overlooking Ground Zero where Bernard Kerik and Judith Regan used an apartment set aside for rescue workers as a trysting place. Another says, “What a bastard is all I can say to that.” In a New York Sun story, Julie Satow collects reactions from residents of the Liberty View apartment building in Battery Park City, where, she also observes, many were “left homeless for months for months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.” However, she notes that while some expressed “outrage,” others “seemed unmoved by the irony of the police commissioner’s taking up with a lover in an apartment overlooking the site of the World Trade Center at a time when many of the building’s permanent residents were still struggling without belongings or a home.” Elsewhere, however, the irony was duly noted: On the political blog Eschaton, blogger Atrios has collected quotes on morality from Judith Regan, taken from various television transcripts, and posted them here (scroll down) in an entry entitled “Memories of Judith.” For example, she calls Monica Lewinsky “amoral” and says, “I mean, here’s a woman who clearly knows a lot about sex, but knows nothing about right and wrong.” Elsewhere, she criticizes the “sexual revolution” and says, “the social fabric of this country has become completely unraveled.” She also sneers at people who cheat on their spouses: “Let me tell you something, my father has never cheated on my mother, my brothers have never treated cheated on their wives.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.