10.10.03 @ 6:13PM
The art of losing it.
Nobody won this week, unless you take into account the last
living being named in this column. That's the official word. Have
the instant historians been hasty?
All agree Gray Davis lost. Though now they say that was to be
expected. He's always been a loser. He's never groped nor ever been
groped. He shouldn't have been where he was in the first place,
though with his physique it was easy to slip through the cracks.
Good riddance to someone who made libs and Dems look bad. Not even
Barbara Boxer tried to date him. The city of Richmond better watch
out: a few remaining loyalists are expected to call for a statue of
our last Confederately named public servant to be put up among the
lost causes on Monument Row.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is an even bigger loser. His movie career
is kaput. Instead of gropable costars on rowdy movie sets he'll be
spending his next years in the company of John Burton, Cruz
Bustamante, Jim Brulte, and Gerry Parsky. His TV show will be
called "Ost Wing." In his spare time he'll be a Scoutmaster. He'll
often appear at Sacramento Rotary Club luncheons. He'll probably go
into the winery bed and breakfast business. Eventually he'll be
asked (though not by Sacramento Kings' fans) to pardon Kobe
Bryant?
That could be of interest to another epic loser, the
prototypical groper Bill Clinton who until the last week of Recall
2003 thought he was home free. But that was before the
conservatively biased mainstream press that made his presidency so
problematic decided to drop its big one on Arnold, probing into the
actor's personal indecencies going back to at least 1975. If Arnold
was fair game, Bill was dead meat. Juanita Broaddrick is back in
his life and is destined to remain so until for the first time in
his life he does the manly thing and faces matters squarely.
That's some Democratic Party if its top figure goes into hiding
in the final days of a critical election. Can you imagine how bad
Gray Davis had to feel on election night to know he'd been
abandoned by his key ally and would-be savior and then realize that
the only national Democrat in his corner was Jesse Jackson, who
normally appears uninvited only at funerals?
Notice no one is blaming Ms. Hillary for staying away from Gray.
Her motives were more complicated. Going one on one with Maria
Shriver wouldn't have been as easy as exchanging a kissing with
Mrs. Arafat. Public displays of genuine affection do not come
easily to the Republican-raised New York senatress, who has yet to
stroke her husband the way Ms. Shriver does hers.
But there was another upsetting problem in Ms. Hillary's life.
Her good friends and supporters in the Beijing government were
releasing the Chinese edition of her fabulous book, Living
History, in bowdlerized form, so that innocent Oriental ears
would not catch wind of Ms. Hillary's salty language, her
description of lamp throwing as a liberating activity, or the
profuse thanks she includes in her noteworthy acknowledgments to
Johnny Chung, Charlie Trie and their controllers in the Chinese
military and intelligence services. As a defender of free (so to
speak) speech, Ms. Hillary found consolation in the Beijing
authorities' decision to allow her remarks about The American
Spectator as a "right-wing propaganda publication" to remain
intact in the Chinese edition (though if re-translated to English
probably would include "running dog extremist vermin" somewhere in
the phrase).
Not all news is fit to print. The Washington Post
earlier this week adoringly
profiled the sexiest woman no one's ever seen. That would be
CIA agent Valerie Plame, the purported wife of Ambassador Joseph
Wilson who's made it his life's mission to destroy the religious
right, neoconservatives, and Karl Rove, not necessarily in that
order. It's all fine and good to see the Post's reporters,
Richard Leiby and Dana Priest, restore spying as an honorable and
exciting profession. But why their sudden secrecy and suppression
of evidence? At one point they write: "When [Plame and Wilson] met,
in 1997, Wilson held a security clearance as political adviser to
the general in charge of the U.S. Armed Forces European Command."
Who might that general have been? Wesley Clark? They never tell us.
How come? Is this protected information too? Is Wilson still
working for Clark?
The conspiracy thickens, at least until our most winning loser
makes the scene. Where others sat he stood up and testified to his
largeness of soul, a trait inherited from his French forebear
Pascal. "There are two ways to have lower prescription drug costs,"
he said yesterday in debate. "One is, you could hire Rush
Limbaugh's housekeeper." The other is you can honor him as our
Enemy of the Week. We've always liked John Kerry. Every time he
attempts a soundbite it stands up and bites him back.
topics:
Bill Clinton, Business, Military
