December goes poof taking the entire year of 2012 with
it. Good riddance! Now our gaunt, humorless, Teleprompter-reading
president threatens to make Senator Jean-François Kerry secretary
of state, replacing Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who observed much
of the month with a concussion. Just as the American people came to
believe that the roguery of the 1960s kids had about played itself
out, President Barack Obama—himself a product of 1960s incivism—is
apparently about to invite the fantastico from Massachusetts to
take over the State Department and—who knows—perhaps renew his
negotiations with the North Vietnamese that he let lapse back in
1970 or bargain with his erstwhile friend President Bashar
al-Assad, whom he once termed a generous man. Senator Kerry visited
with Mr. Assad five times before the Syrian strongman slaughtered
60,000 of his countrymen.
• As for Mrs. Clinton, who took a fall in her home allegedly
owing to the dehydration she suffered from a roaring case of the
green-apple-quick-step contracted abroad but almost certainly made
more violent by that glass of Maker’s Mark she is known to use as a
“coping mechanism,” she will retire. She boasts of a record 401
days abroad and 81 full days aloft as secretary of state, though
she has signed no major treaties, no minor treaties, and not even a
thank-you note to a foreign dignitary. Actually, her stint as
secretary of state is only made memorable by worsening relations
with Russia, Beijing, and most of the Middle East, punctuated by
the Benghazi shambles. There, according to two authoritative
reports, she and our president were thrown into confusion by the
terrorist assassination of our diplomats. She promises to appear
before Congress to explain Benghazi once her Bechuana tummy
subsides. In the meantime, the Episodic Apologists, who have
covered her in the press for roughly 20 years, are again booming
her for the presidency. They never learn. Mr. James Carville, a
longtime Clinton aide, traduced her critics as “inhumane,” adding,
“What kind of human being is going to think like that with
everything going on with concussions, head injuries? The fact the
woman was dehydrated from the fact that she’d been overseas so
much….” Possibly he too has taken the Maker’s Mark cure.
• The 1960s kids were active on other fronts in December too.
Former Massachusetts Democratic congressman Mr. Barney Frank
appeared in his rumpled raiment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to
announce his availability to take Senator Kerry’s place in the
Senate. Then the 2007 Nobel Prize laureate for global warming, Mr.
al-Gore, inked a $500 million deal with oil-rich Qatar for his
Current TV network from which the environmental maniac will reap
$70 million in a deal he hastened to sign before December 31. Thus
he will not have to pay post-fiscal cliff taxes.
• Finally, Democratic congressman Mr. Hank Johnson called for
repeal of the First Amendment, saying “we need a constitutional
amendment that would allow the legislature to control the so-called
free speech rights of corporations.…They control the media. They
control the messages that you get….And these folks…are setting up a
scenario where they’re privatizing every aspect of our lives as we
know it.” Congressman Johnson apparently wants our private lives to
be public property.
• Yet at least one 1960s kid is gone from public life. Mr.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn has reached a “settlement in principle” with
the charwoman he favored with a “violent and sadistic attack” in
Manhattan’s Sofitel Hotel. He will be missed by readers of this
column. Though he is rumored to be marketing a line of edible
woman’s lingerie, so do not be surprised if he is back in the news.
His lingerie could run afoul of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s dietary
laws.
• On December 14 a demented video games player and organic food
nut left his basement lair, stole his mother’s guns, and went to
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where he shot
dead 20 schoolchildren and six adults. Then he turned the gun on
himself. Earlier he had shot his mother. Mayor Bloomberg and
President Barack Obama called for gun control. The National Rifle
Association—in a country where 280 million guns are at large—called
for armed police to be stationed in schools. Precisely who in this
controversy is fla-fla?
• Mr. Novak Djokovic, the Serbian tennis champion, announced
plans to corner the world market in donkey cheese, and in Sweden a
37-year-old woman has been charged with “violating the peace of the
dead” after she allegedly had sex with a skeleton out of wedlock.
“I have never heard of a case like this,” said prosecutor Kristina
Ehrenborg-Staffas of the Gothenburg district court, “and neither
have my colleagues, so I dare say that this kind of case is quite
unusual.” More unusual still, the 37-year-old seductress was not
asked whether a condom was used!
• And while on the subject of spirited women, consider the case
of three-time Olympic runner Ms. Suzy Favor Hamilton—yes, Favor.
The happily married 44-year-old mother of a 7-year-old daughter has
been kicking up her heels this past year as a $600-an-hour comfort
woman. At least she was kicking up her heels until she revealed her
true identity to a sports-crazed client. He blabbed. Now the
nine-time NCAA champion will probably lose her various
endorsements, including a lucrative contract with Nike. Though her
contract as a motivational speaker might become even more
lucrative, and her successful real estate brokerage in Madison,
Wisconsin, is bound to become even more successful if she conducts
it privately. Unfortunately, the Big Ten will have to make an
adjustment. The University of Wisconsin graduate served as the
eponym for the conference’s Suzy Favor Athlete of the Year Award.
It all depends on what the Big Ten means by “Favor.”
• The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) continues to make
heavy weather of it. In December another BBC star was revealed as a
child molester. He is 82-year-old Mr. Stuart Hall, who is
remembered by viewers as the incomparable star of the 1970s and
1980s hit It’s a Knockout. Now he has been arrested for
seducing girls as young as 9 years old, and joins a long line of
BBC celebs such as Mr. Jimmy Savile (deceased), Mr. Gary Glitter,
Mr. Freddie Starr, and former BBC Radio 1 producer Mr. Ted Beston
as mentors to youth.
• And there is more. British nudists are accusing the BBC of
“falsifying history.” Allegedly the BBC put clothes on actors
appearing in Mr. Andrew Marr’s archeological masterpiece,
History of the World. Tribesmen from Africa, ancient
Egypt, and Australia actually should have appeared buck naked, very
much like modern-day British nudists. Though the original tribesmen
parted company with today’s nudists by carrying sharp sticks, stone
axes, and adorning their bodies with their enemies’ bodily parts,
including the hideosity of shrunken heads. Mr. Malcolm Boura, a
spokesman for the Research and Liaison Office of the British
Naturists’ organization, perhaps the most venerable body of British
nudists, complained to Parliament that, “It is astonishing that the
BBC, that once proud bastion of journalistic integrity, should
sacrifice its reputation for commercial reasons.” He was fully
dressed.
• So too was Mr. Piers Morgan, the expatriate British journalist
whose CNN television show is watched by literally hundreds, at
times, thousands. He is threatening to leave America forever
because of Americans’ enduring enthusiasm for the Second Amendment.
The Newtown atrocity reminded him of the time his two-year-old went
missing at a cricket match in a field surrounded by a “small
running creek.” The boy turned up unharmed, though presumably Mr.
Morgan remains adamant against running creeks. Yet returning to
Britain could be tricky for Mr. Morgan. He has been implicated in
that country’s press hacking scandal.
• In the last hours of the month the Republic avoided jumping
off the fiscal cliff by raising taxes on the super rich, and in
Chicago, Illinois, Mr. Nicholas Wieme, a stand-up comic of great
gifts, attempted to amuse his girlfriend by appearing to jump down
a smokestack atop the Intercontinental Hotel. Unfortunately he did,
falling 22 feet to his death. Mr. Wieme was just monkeying around,
but what was Speaker of the House John Boehner doing?
