Category: Old Dish

Devastating piece by Kurt Eichenwald and Michael Moss in the New York Times today, detailing exactly how sleazy Clinton was in his final days. It turns out that after he and Madame Rodham pardoned the FALN terrorists for New York votes, there was a sudden crush of slimeballs from all over the country seeking politically opportune pardons. Money was offered; lists were kept secret; the Justice Department’s own staff were completely blindsided by a new, unvetted White House list released just hours before the end of Clinton’s presidency. Many readers have expressed skepticism that this can hurt Senator Clinton in the future, given the craven support she receives from the Democratic Party establishment, whatever her misdemeanors. But the more details come out, the cheesier she looks. One hopeful sign is what just happened to Tony Blair’s right-hand man, Peter Mandelson, in Britain. He was busted a couple of years ago for taking a huge loan to buy a house (and fibbing about it). All was forgiven soon enough, and he came back to be Northern Ireland secretary. But then he goes and makes a call to expedite a passport application for a wealthy Indian businessman, denies it, and gets caught in another whopper. No-one can deny his talents or his connections, but he’s toast now. And a good friend of the Clintons, by the way. Hope springs eternal.

I have a soft spot for Matthew Parris, the political columnist for the Times of London and the Spectator in London. His recent column in the Spectator is a classic: stimulating, and, I think, spot-on. He’s talking about what now distinguishes the right from the left. His context is Britain, but it applies just as well to the U.S.: “The Tory party on the whole is in modern politics to protect and foster success and the successful. Its atavistic and ancient support for the landed and the gentry has been extended in the last century to trade, commerce and industry, too; to the professions, the bourgeoisie, to those on the make as well as those who have already made it. On the whole the forces of Conservatism are on the side of talent, of energy, of ambition, of hard work, of privilege acquired and privilege striven for. These are the red blood cells of the Conservative party; these carry the oxygen, and so many of the new ideas.” But Matthew then goes on to argue that this very support for success needs a balancing point – a liberal and pragmatic conscience that says from time to time, “‘tread carefully,’ ‘never forget the rest’, ‘gently does it’, and ‘so far and no further.'” Similarly, left-wing parties need leaders from time to time to remind their base that attacking the successful can back-fire. So a party of conservatives needs a softy like W from time to time; and a party of excuse-makers and empathizers needs a Blair or a Clinton to remind them of the need to keep the middle-classes and the aspirational types on board. It’s all a balancing act. My own two cents is that the Republicans and Tories need to tackle head-on the new populist rhetoric of the rich and the poor. They need to talk less about tax cuts for the rich and more about tax-cuts for the successful. It’s a subtle rhetorical shift, but an important one. One of Gore-Greenberg’s legacies is the re-stigmatization of success – whether it be white or Asian college students with high SATs, pioneering pharmaceutical companies, or Bill Gates. One of the tasks of the next decade is to banish this encroaching stigmatization of success – and to reward achievement more effectively. I say: drop the top rate from 39 to 33 percent. And make no apologies for it.

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From someone who works relatively near the guy at Georgetown, who just emailed me: “The office is pretty hysterically liberal, but Paul Offner seems to be one of the more balanced liberals among the faculty and staff at the institute. I can’t imagine him running around the office making up stories or spreading unfounded rumors to stop a cabinet appointment (unlike some other people there who will be talking conspiracy theories about the Bush administration for the rest of their lives).” This is just to establish the fact that a) Offner is not some lefty ideologue with an ax to grind; b) everyone who knows him believes him. There’s no way to settle this, but there’s no harm in adding data.

The Washington Post does a good job at establishing the evidence for Sullivan’s Theory, which is that Democrats can’t vote right. But the salient question is not: did more Dems try to vote for Gore than Reps for Bush in Florida? The question is: how many of those attempted votes would ever have been counted in a real recount? Over-votes are, overwhelmingly, spoiled ballots. Discerning ‘intent’ when two holes have been punched seems to me to be a metaphysical impossibility. I fear we’re going to have settlement in this one about as soon as we know for certain whether Offner or Ashcroft is lying.

The American Prospect’s Joshua Micah Marshall, a rising star on the intellectual Left, emails to say he doesn’t find the use of presidential pardons as political pay-back/fund-raising tool to be beyond the pale. Just dumb – not disgusting. Dumb, presumably, because the Clintons didn’t get away with it! And this is the face of the idealistic Left these days. I emailed Josh to ask him what exactly would evoke disgust in him. He said, cryptically, “something disgusting.” Welfare reform? Prayer in schools? A tax cut?

Mickey Kaus, never one to shill for paleo-libs or Democratic hacks, backs my personal view of Paul Offner’s credibility: He says on Kausfiles.com, “Who is Paul Offner, the man who accuses John Ashcroft of asking about “sexual preference” in a job interview? It so happens that the editor of kausfiles knows Offner, having worked with him on welfare reform and various pieces he wrote for The New Republic in the 1990s. He’s smart, allergic to liberal b.s., public-interested, and, in my experience, totally honest. If he says Ashcroft asked that question, it’s safe to say Ashcroft asked that question.” So who you gonna believe? Your saintly correspondent, the unimpeachable Kaus, or the RNC? All right, don’t answer that one. It’s too depressing.

Sorry to bring him up again, but something interesting is definitely going on in Washington. For the first time, Clinton disgust is now universal. I have yet to meet a single Democrat who isn’t sickened to his stomach by the excrescence of Clinton’s pardons, and by the puerile vandalism of the White House in the last hours of the old regime. Maybe they finally, finally get what some of us have been banging on about for years. Two thoughts: this will hurt Hillary. The Hassidic pardons will haunt her. Marc Rich will be her Marley’s Ghost. The sheer stench of Clinton’s final hours has already dented her career hopes. And the liberal wing of the party, Hillary’s, has come to the conclusion that Clinton cost Gore the election. (They still can’t bring themselves to accept that Gore’s own lurch to the left did the most damage.) Put those two together and she’s toast. I know that’s a premature judgment, but I can’t even imagine many people going over to her place for dinner at this point. When the Washington Post is running editorials headlined, “Count The Spoons,” you know we’ve reached a watershed. God, I’m happy.

How did Colin Powell’s son get to be FCC Commisssioner? Check out “Daddy Dearest” opposite for the answer.

Odd piece by Kathryn Jean Lopez (who she? – ed.) in the current National Review Online. She starts by asking why anyone should even care what James Hormel thinks of the Ashcroft nomination, and then proceeds to unpack the background of why Ashcroft and Helms opposed the Hormel nomination on the ‘totality of [Hormel’s] record.’ It turns out that John “Bob-Jones” Ashcroft opposed Hormel because he thought Hormel was anti-Catholic! Ashcroft’s evidence for this is that Hormel once commented on a gay pride parade and merely laughed at a group of drag queens called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. These drag queens are mildly offensive, I’ll grant you. I’m on record criticizing them myself. But they’re drag queens, for goodness’ sake! Excess, hyperbole, and stupidity are part of the genre. Calling Hormel “vehemently anti-Catholic” (in NRO’s words) merely because he laughed at some silly drag queens is downright grasping at straws. (And it’s a little odd that a man like Ashcroft, who has an honorary degree from a college that calls the Catholic Church the “whore of Babylon,” should be casting stones in that particular direction in the first place.) The second accusation is that Hormel “donated a book” to a new gay and lesbian library in San Francisco that was a coloring book of female genitalia. This one is really hilarious. The idea that mega-bucks Spam mogul Hormel was singling out a vaginal coloring book as his one gift to a library as some sort of statement is absurd. The man bankrolled the entire library. Like most big libraries, this one is jammed full of material, most of it worthwhile and serious. But like most big libraries, especially one which is devoted to gay and lesbian topics, this library has its share of lewd material. So? Can we be grown-ups here? In the hoo-ha that was raised about the library a couple of years ago, it was revealed that every single questionable book in that library was also to be found in the Library of Congress. If Hormel can be held responsible for every single book bought with his millions, then John Ashcroft can be held responsible for the Penthouse collection lovingly stored at the Library of Congress. Lets face it: Ashcroft nixed Hormel because he was gay. My one question for the Kathryn Jean Lopez’s of the world is: why don’t they defend that on its merits?