Try to imagine how Patrick Kennedy felt. He couldn’t unfasten his safety belt. Next thing you know he’d earned himself a return trip to Mayo, which his constituents back in Rhode Island think is named after a sandwich condiment. Saddest was the comment by fellow House member Jim Moran, no stranger himself to public displays of intoxicated passion. “I think he wants more than anything to earn his father’s respect,” Big Jim told the Washington Post, evidently unaware that much as dad would like to help his primary loyalties are to his Massachusetts constituents and not to escapees from that state.
Democratic diva Valerie “Eternal” Plame has better hair than her husband, we can now see, perhaps because his yellow streaks appear elsewhere on his body. No matter. Mrs. Wilson was self-outed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the other Saturday, setting in motion a wild week that culminated with the announcement that she had sold her story for a modest $2.5 million to a Random House imprint. “We are all astonished by the richness of her storytelling,” said the editor assigned to her book, a rather odd comment which left open the possibility her memoir will appear either in the fiction category or else as a loose-lipped nonfiction product that puts all the rest of the CIA’s leakers to shame.
More reassuring was a little noticed report that at said Correspondents Dinner Mrs. Plame Wilson was observed chatting with Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, giving rise to informed speculation that all along Mrs. P-W has worked for MI6. Her book may thus have the scoop on who was behind the deaths of Princess Diana and her Egyptian escort. Not to mention who outed T.E. Lawrence, costing Ambassador Wilson a great many Mideast clients.
Faster than you could say Don Rumsfeld, opposition gathered to the expected nomination of Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden to replace Porter Goss as director of central intelligence. Hayden clearly hasn’t gone through the appropriate vetting process. To qualify, he would first have to retire, second, appear on This Week With Georgie Boy, and third, demand Rumsfeld’s resignation. Somewhere along the way he would also have to appear on 60 Minutes to plug the new book that had been written for him.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has gone to the mattresses against the Bush administration. (We suspect she’s chosen the Serta Sleeper brand.) At this rate, the entire White House is likely to tender its resignation before November 7, 2006, rather than face the wrath of mobs Ms. Pelosi so formidably represents. It’s a precedent we heartily endorse. Rather than worry about removing anyone by resorting to impeachment or lawsuits or show trials, give them a chance to do the right and tender thing: quit. Thus, we have several choice candidates for resignation in mind, the targets whittled down during the Rumsfeld resignation wars.
For starters — and all of these characters have been chosen at random — Bill Clinton. It’s high time he retroactively resign now for failing to do so before he got himself impeached. It would have been peachy to have had Al Gore as our unelected president and our nation spared the Florida 2000 ordeal and ever hotter summers and Gore-directed documentaries. We think John Kerry should resign — he really never has explained why he chose to celebrate Christmas in Cambodia, a country that does not even observe the holiday. We feel Senator Hillary Clinton should resign, simply for marrying the wrong guy who’s now abusing her further by trying to use her to get back into the White House. We think Barry Bonds should resign, and Kobe Bryant, even though they’re not in the same league. Finally, we know as well as anyone that Sen. Ted Kennedy should resign for not bringing up his boy right, not to mention the boy himself for taking driving lessons from a dad like that.
There’s another consideration: Can the Kennedy name ever recover once a carpetbagging representative of its younger generation has been marked for life as an Enemy of the Week?
