"There are things forgotten by chance, and there are things forgotten on purpose. But then there are things that aren’t really forgotten as much as they are deliberately ignored..."

"... usually because the memory has come to necessitate an elephantine level of discomfiting rationalization. America’s involvement with the 1996 Russian democratic election falls into this third category. Boris Yeltsin, the boozehound incumbent, overcame mass unpopularity to win reelection as Russian president, significantly due to assistance from clandestine United States operatives and the support of Bill Clinton. When the news of this subversion first surfaced, it was hailed as a masterstroke of U.S. statecraft. The July 15 cover of Time magazine pulled no punches: 'Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win.' Decades later, the concept of interfering with another country’s election (and particularly an election in Russia) has adopted a more sinister overtone, and there’s a revisionist temptation to claim the role America played in the affair was exaggerated. But it did happen, and it’s almost inconceivable to imagine Yeltsin winning reelection had it not..."

Writes Chuck Klosterman on page 307 of "The Nineties." 

Speaking of Bill Clinton, here's a fascinating quote from Bill Clinton:

I am a living paradox—deeply religious yet not as convinced of my exact beliefs as I ought to be; wanting responsibility yet shirking it; loving the truth but often times giving way to falsity. . . . I detest selfishness, but see it in the mirror every day. . . . I view those, some of whom are very dear to me, who have never learned how to live. I desire and struggle to be different from them, but often am almost an exact likeness. . . . I, in my attempts to be honest, will not be the hypocrite I hate, and will own up to their ominous presence in this boy, endeavoring in such earnest to be a man. 

That's quoted in the book "The Nineties." Clinton wrote that for a high school English class — and quotes it himself in his autobiography. By the way, what does "their" refer to, in "their ominous presence" — "attempts to be honest"? — those other people who "never learned how to live"? Something in the ellipsis that Klosterman awkwardly created?

ADDED: Google books served up the passage from Clinton's book "My Life":

ADDED: He did not "go beyond petting with girls" — that's the argument he used years later for saying he hadn't lied when he said he "did not have sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky.