Category: Old Dish

“I have had occasion frequently to reflect on the Jones case. In this consent order, I acknowledge having knowingly violated Judge Wright’s discovery orders in my deposition in that case. I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and that certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false.” Do you have a clue what that means? He did not fully accomplish his goal of “walking a fine line between acting legally and testifying falsely?” Huh? How is it possible to be somewhere in between legal and perjurious? And how can you honestly describe that fine line except as an attempt to lie under oath and get away with it? His final non-apology is as phony as all the rest. That said, I’m glad it’s over. I’m going to go out tonight and get hammered.

A friend points out a shrewd analogy for those claiming that W doesn’t have the right to be president the way others have because he lost the popular vote. Say we play a game of tennis and you win 6-4, 0-6, 6-4. I actually won 14 games to your 12. But would I ever claim that you didn’t rightly win the match? Even if there were a few close line-calls along the way? Of course not. Gore and Bush both knew the rules going in. They played by them. One lost. The winner gets inaugurated tomorrow. Game, set and match.

Well, it took a news cycle for the paranoid spin on the Jackson scandal. (Silver lining: Jackson may well avoid calling W “illegitimate” for a while). A reader sends in the following report from Reuters last night: “The Rev. Al Sharpton, a New York civil rights leader, was questioned why the story came out just as Jackson was challenging the outcome of the presidential election and President-elect Bush’s nomination of former Sen. John Ashcroft to be his attorney general. “The timing of this is very suspect,” Sharpton said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” “I really don’t think at this point, where we’re seeing a president being inaugurated who we feel lost the election, that we can afford to lose his voice.”

Thank God we have a Drug Czar. A friend points out a truly wonderful government-sponsored website , courtesy of General Barry McCaffrey (24 more hours!) which details the latest street lingo for various kinds of drugs. The report also includes all sorts of recipes for powerful drug combos, a helpful consumer’s guide to “Costs and Quantities,” of various illegal substances, but it draws the line at obscenity. You will all be amazed to hear that heroin is sometimes known on the street as “sh*t.” Among other nuggets, the party drug “G” is also known as “goop,” “easy lay,” “scoop,” “soap,” and “Georgia Home Boy.” Wanna get a drug combo that’s a “Combination of PCP and marijuana, sprinkled with cocaine and smoked; marijuana, PCP, and crack combined and smoked; with a sprinkle of LSD?” Be sure to ask for a “squirrel.” Gee, thanks. Mr. McCaffrey. I’ll remember next time. Wanna track down a “female who trades sex for crack?” Ask your brother on the corner for a “strawberry.” Ever wonder what a “toucher” is? That’s a “User of crack who wants affection before, during, or after smoking crack.” Awww. A “tweaker,” on the other hand, is a “Crack user looking for drugs on the floor after a police raid.” And I thought he’d lost his contact lens. A “ringer” is a “Good hit of crack; hear bells.” Let freedom ring! For some weird reason, a cocktail of cocktail of heroin, LSD and PCP is known as an LBJ. I could go on. The site is a) an amazing menu for innovative drug-use; b) a testament to how our language is being recreated as we speak in crack houses and street-corners across the country; c) worthy of an NEA grant. But, then, who needs the NEA when we’ve got a Drug Czar?

A typically smarmy piece by Andrew Ferguson in the current Slate about the alleged “failing upward” of Mary Matalin. Ferguson cannot believe that anyone would fall in love with someone whose politics is diametrically opposite. Mercifully, I don’t know anything about the romantic life of Andrew Ferguson but his aspersions on the Matalin-Carville hook-up are truly cheap. I see no reason to believe that either Carville or Matalin are insincere in their politics or their love. In my occasional interactions with them, Mary seems about as smart and as kind a person one can find in this city and James seems like a crackpot – but a sincere one. Both are acquired tastes and have done their fair share of political hustling – but their genuineness I don’t doubt. As to their love, why should it be odd that opposites attract? Personally, I have only been attracted to people who disagree with me. There’s nothing less erotic than a yes-man, or less exciting than the cooing echoes of a fellow political hack. The alarming thing about so many politicos in this city is precisely their desire to find love consonant with their politics, a trait Ferguson seems to admire. It’s amazing how many neo-cons marry each other; and how many professional liberal power-couples there are. Maybe being gay has saved me from this. It takes you out of the professional dating game and throws you into a more diverse subculture where you can meet literally anyone. (Let’s think. Of my last few serious emotional attachments, all have been liberals, none journalists, most of them have denied to their friends that they’re seeing me, and the friction has made all the difference.) My suggestion to Ferguson is to open up a little. And before he writes any more snide attacks on people allegedly failing upward, he might ask why he’s writing about them, and not the other way round.

Just in case you weren’t aware, I’m described today by Salon as a “conservative” and by National Review Online as a “neoliberal.” Guess there’s a reason for everyone to pick a bone with me. The latter adds that I seem to be wearing “the same plaid shirt [I was wearing] throughout the Clinton era.” Actually, they’re different shirts that look alike and can all go into the same wash-cycle and not be ironed. So I’m a conservative, neo-liberal slob, ok? Sue me.

I was mentioning to some liberal friends the other day that the Palm Beach Post had counted the 10,000 “uncounted votes” in Miami-Dade and given Bush a bigger lead. No-one was fazed. The under-votes are yesterday’s news, they countered. We’re now into over-votes, after Lake County found several hundred Gore votes previously discounted because of extra write-ins that spoiled the ballots. Oh, never mind, then. But do you remember the hue and cry over the uncounted under-votes in Miami-Dade as well as I do? Do you remember that this was the essence of the Gore campaign’s argument at the time? We know now that if Gore had had his way, and if he had gotten the recounts he wanted in his own hand-picked counties, Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach, he would still have lost. That ‘mob’ in Dade County actually cost Bush votes! If that news had emerged in November, it would have dealt a crushing blow to Gore’s attempt to over-turn his opponent’s victory. The response to this news by Goreites? Any hand-wringing or second thoughts or even – God forbid – retraction of their now constant claims that Gore obviously won? Fat chance. Their response to this devastating piece of news is still: Ignore it (try find the news of the Palm Beach Post anywhere prominent in the New York Times or the Washington Post) and change the subject. What’s relevant now is a state-wide full recount of under-votes, over-votes, dimples and whatever conducted by left-liberal media organizations. All that matters to these people is that they get to rig the counting to get the result they want – even if they have to include spoiled ballots, dimples and constantly changing parameters. If the full rigged recount even then doesn’t show a Gore victory, don’t expect any front page news. But if Gore gets as much as one write-in, watch the banner headlines fly. The shamelessness continues.

A couple of small improvements on the site. Thanks to a new content management system, there’s now an archive of dishes, retrievable at the bottom of the current dish. Think of it as the lowest shelf in the fridge – mouldy but tasty. The dish will continue to be served al dente on a daily and nightly basis. I’ll also be able to include links in the text as well, so you can see what on earth I’m going on about. The other aspect is that you’ll be able to see exactly when I post items. The post-times you’ve been reading so far have had as much relationship to the truth as the average Clinton press conference. So in keeping with the new era, the fibs are over. Yes, I am up at 3 am. And no, I don’t have a life.

It’s a given among a certain coterie of Washington journalists that, whatever else you do, you must never criticize Charlie Peters, editor-in-chief and founder of the Washington Monthly. (Another rule of thumb among these types, most of whom are Monthly alums, is that you must never criticize another Monthly alum. A prize to anyone who can cite a criticism by one Monthly alum of another, which isn’t wrapped in an encomium. They make the Freemasons seem open.) That said, I found Charlie Peters’ recent comments on gay scoutmasters to be odd. Peters’ position is that gays and straights should be allowed to be scoutmasters, but only after screening for pedophiliac tendencies. He frames this in equal opportunity terms, and is careful not to accuse gays as such of being pedophiles or tolerant of pedophilia. He’s not Bill Kristol. But then he goes on: “I have to acknowledge that I have known a number of open gays whom I wouldn’t have wanted anywhere near my 12-year-old son. The same, of course, is true, of a number of my heterosexual friends, if I had had a daughter, which I didn’t.” To put this bluntly, I think he’s fibbing. I don’t think it would ever have occurred to him to have restricted his imaginary 12-year-old daughter from access to any of his grown-up straight friends. Can one really be friends with people you think might abuse your child if left alone with her? Similarly, I think the same is true of his openly gay friends. (By the way, who are his openly gay friends who he thinks might have molested his 12-year-old son? I’m sure they’d be interested to hear their names.) All this is simply to say that certain habits of thought – the automatic association of homosexuality with child-abuse – are deeply ingrained even among alleged liberals, however hard they try to dance around it. And I point this out simply because no-one else in Washington will.

I’m not going to get up on a high horse about Jesse Jackson’s personal woes. ‘Let he who is without sin …’ But I can’t help wondering just how long it will take before he or a supporter describes the National Enquirer as the modern equivalent of Bull Connor, and the expose as racially motivated. A day, maybe? A news cycle?