MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO
My apologies for not filing for the last two days. I have been in Los Angeles. I appeared on Politically Incorrect [Link defunct], the remarkably politically correct late-night show. John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate, Wallace, and most recently Ronin, was a stunning intellectual disappointment. But he looked good, which in Hollywood is all that really matters.
The Saturday New York Times had an interesting item about the most self-important chain letter in recent memory. Co-written by Jack Lang, the former French Minister of Culture and the author William Styron, the letter attacks Kenneth Starr and defends the President of the United States. Mr. Starr, according to our French tutors is a “fanatical prosecutor with unlimited power” who is engaging in “inquisitorial harassment” of the President. Mr. Styron soberly comments that the letter “reflects the horror that’s pervasive in Europe.” Horror? European capacity for horror has certainly gotten a shot in the arm since the last time I opened a history book. My sense is that most Europeans who don’t get invited to sign letters drafted by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and former Socialist Ministers of Culture, are in fact un-horrified. At best they are titillated. At most they are bored. Why should they care?
While I am unperturbed by the idea that the cheese-eating surrender monkeys don’t like the way we do things — they’ve gotten so little right for so long — when prominent Americans get on board we should take pause. Members of the Hollywood cognoscenti are playing monkey see, monkey do. Vanessa Redgrave is raising money for the letter to be printed in newspapers throughout the United States and, I kid you not, the “world.” My guess is that the average newspaper-reading Pakistani has about as much understanding of what’s going on in the U.S. as does Mr. Lang or Ms. Redgrave.
OVERLOOKED?
Buried in an Associated Press report this afternoon about the Jones-Clinton settlement talks is a reference to a Jane Doe 5, who reportedly told the Office of Independent Counsel on April 8, 1998, that she filed a false affidavit in the Paula Jones case.
NOTICED
Tomorrow I will be back in my beer-can strewn, newspaper-sotted, media center of an apartment in Washington. I will do my best to get up to speed on the media backlog I accumulated while I was in Los Angeles. It seems whenever I leave town, Clinton has a good day. Fear not, even a dead cat bounces twice.
DOJ ON LYING ABOUT SEX
Dear VRWC Member,
As mentioned twice last week in the Washington Times editorials, the Justice Department (DOJ) takes lying under oath very seriously, even when the lying was about having sex. . . .except of course when the President is involved. Click on the website below to read the Justice Department’s own press release on this issue now that DOJ has been embarrassed into reposting it.