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?
