From the WSJ again, Best of the Web from Fri Jan 26, 2001:
Gary Aldrich Was Right...Daley Disappointments...Former Teamsters President Indicted....Gays in the Military....What Jack Quinn Knows...and Football
Friday, January 26, 2001 1:36 p.m. EST
opinionjournal.com
Gary Aldrich Was Right
Everyone knows by now about the missing W's on White House computer keyboards, but the truly destructive "pranks" of departing Clinton staffers, first noted here Wednesday, are only now making it into the papers. The Washington Times reports:
Bush administration officials said they are "cataloging" incidents that could constitute crimes, including the theft of china and silverware from the presidential Boeing 747 that took President Clinton and his party to New York after the inauguration of George W. Bush as president.
Before Clinton workers left the White House, someone cut telephone lines, overturned desks, littered offices with trash and scribbled lewd graffiti on office walls, say those with firsthand knowledge of the vandalism.
The Washington Post adds that "a high-ranking Bush campaign official accused some Clinton staffers of taking White House paintings and trying to have them shipped to themselves" and that "a Clinton official confirmed that glassware was missing from the jet that flew Clinton and his staff out of Washington on inauguration day, but said the glass had shattered accidentally."
But the Post also claims that "a little tomfoolery is typical in transitions between presidents." The Los Angeles Times goes even further in playing down the story, carrying a report with the subheadline: "Rumors abound about pranks or malicious mischief Clinton staffers left in their wake, such as graffiti and unflattering pictures of Bush. Renovation work is to blame for some of the chaos" [emphasis ours].
The Drudge Report, which broke the Monica Lewinsky story back in 1998, was well ahead of the papers again: It posted a detailed report on the damage Wednesday evening and a follow-up last night, which noted that "President Bush told senior advisers on Thursday that he would not be inclined to order any prosecution." Bush's impulse is probably the right one: He has a country to run and an agenda to further, and prosecuting vandals from a defunct administration would be a distraction. Still, it would be deeply satisfying to see someone teach the miscreants a lesson.
The whole episode reminds us of Gary Aldrich, the much-maligned former FBI agent whose 1996 book, "Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House," was in large part an aesthetic critique of the Clinton White House's "Animal House" atmosphere. One anecdote from the book has particular resonance today:
Melba was our office's GSA cleaning lady. She was almost always cheerful, but for the past several weeks she'd seemed sad or depressed.
"Melba, I don't mean to pry, but is there something wrong, something I can help you with?"
Melba thought for a moment, and a worried look crossed her face before she blurted, "Mr. Aldrich, sir, no harm intended, but these new people are terrible! Every day we go into their offices and clean up after them, and the very next day it's as if we had never been there before. They're messy people, Mr. Aldrich. These people are sloppy. Some are real slobs, sir! They throw garbage on the floor, or they throw cups of coffee and miss the waste can and it splashes all over the wall. And they don't clean it up!
"It's as if they don't care, Mr. Aldrich, and I hate to say this, and you must never repeat this as long as I'm here, but sir, President Bush's people were much neater and much nicer to us. And that's the God's honest truth, sir." . . .
It wasn't long before Melba told me she was taking early retirement. She didn't want to go, but she couldn't bear to stay; watching the White House deteriorate was just too hard.
Daley Disappointments
Chicago's Mayor Richard M. Daley--a Democrat whose brother, Bill, was Clinton's commerce secretary and Al Gore's campaign chairman--unloads to the Chicago Sun-Times. Daley complaint: Clinton's belated acknowledgment, in a deal with independent counsel Robert Ray, that he lied under oath in the Monica Lewinsky matter. "In Esquire magazine, he came out right before the election and said the Republicans owe him an apology. Then, the Friday before he leaves, he said, 'I'm sorry, I did it,' " Daley says. mayor also tells the Sun-Times Clinton was wrong to hog the spotlight on Inauguration Day:
In the past, they shook hands, the [former] president went to a helicopter, and that was it. This was different. He had a rally at the airport, a rally in New York and a rally at his home. It was really different, really unusual. . . . That's his style. He wanted two or three more parties. You have to respect the office. That is the key. That's President Bush's day. It isn't Clinton's day or Al Gore's day.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer also comments on Clinton's extended goodbye:
Most egregious was his extended extemporaneous wallow at Andrews Air Force Base as he departed Washington. It ranks as one of the most extraordinary acts of need and narcissism ever recorded in American politics. For one last time, he just had to have the ruffles and flourishes, the review of the honor guard, the glare of the klieg lights, the well of applause.
After two full terms, he seems never to have fathomed that with the office come certain basic requirements of decency and democratic decorum. Such as: This was not his day. He'd had eight years of his days. This was someone else's day. Yet he couldn't help but try to step all over it. . . . In a talk of a thousand words, he used "I" or "me" 56 times. (Try that at home. It's not easy.)
Former Teamsters President Indicted
A federal grand jury charges Ron Carey with perjury and making false statements to federal officials investigating the results of a union election. A Wall Street Journal editorial Wednesday had urged prosecutors to pursue Teamster corruption aggressively: "The Teamster affair is about the future, about the little-noticed spread of union corruption and about political crime." The editorial named Carey as one of several figures implicated by testimony in an earlier trial stemming from the effort to funnel Teamsters union funds into Carey's 1996 effort to win re-election as president of the union.
The 'Gays in the Military' Cliché
Remember "gays in the military"? Eight years ago, a new president decided that the country's most immediate priority was getting active homosexuals onto active duty. It was the first truly bizarre moment of a truly bizarre eight years. But a consensus seems to have developed in the media that a "gays-in-the-military debacle" is normal for a new president. In a hilarious dispatch from Washington, National Review's John Miller and Ramesh Ponnuru, chart the press's quest to find Bush's gays-in-the-military misstep.
The most popular candidate was Bush's executive order on Monday, reversing the Clinton administration's policy of sending federal funds to groups that perform and lobby for abortions overseas. Our Peggy Noonan notes the obvious difference:
Mr. Bush's decision has been compared to Mr. Clinton's attempt to rescind the ban on active and public homosexuals in the military. But the rescinding of that ban, apart from all issues of rightness or wrongness, practicality or helpfulness, did not have half the country behind it, or a quarter of the country behind it. Nor did it have the American military behind it. It had organized homosexual-rights groups that had funded and supported Mr. Clinton in the just-ended election behind it.
If you ask the American people if they want to spend money to promote abortion overseas, the majority would say: Um, no, we don't.
Undercounting the Overvotes
A squabble has broken out over the Miami Herald's plans for its own re-re-recount of some of the Florida ballots. It started when Kausfiles.com's Mickey Kaus criticized the Herald's plan to re-re-recount "undervotes"--ballots with no counted vote for president--and not "overvotes"--ballots disqualified in the official count because there was more than one vote marked for president. The Miami Herald's executive editor, Martin Baron, wrote a letter defending his newspaper's plans. Now Kaus has replied to that letter with another column, calling the Herald "foolish" and asserting, "It got itself locked into what turned out to be an inferior recount plan, and refused (for whatever reason) to recognize its mistake." Someone better convene a moot court to sort this all out.
'What Jack Quinn Knows'
Appearing on Fox News Channel's "The Edge With Paula Zahn," erstwhile Clinton aide Dick Morris offers his explanation of the ex-president's decision to pardon fugitive financier Marc Rich: "It doesn't have much to do with Denise Rich's hundred visits to the White House. It has to do with one thing and one thing only, what Jack Quinn knows." Quinn, Rich's lawyer, is a former White House counsel. "Jack Quinn knows everything. And when Bill Clinton talks to you, he keeps an encyclopedic file in his mind of what you know. . . .When you know a lot and you come to Bill Clinton and you ask for a favor, you get it. . . . He knows all of the documents on travel office, all of the documents on Foster, all of the documents on Whitewater, all of the documents on every one of the Clinton scandals that predates 1996."
Quinn himself weighs in to defend his client in a Washington Post op-ed piece. Rich, Quinn says, "no longer faces a seriously flawed criminal indictment but remains liable for potential civil sanctions." The New York Post reports that amid the furor over this and other pardons, Sen. Hillary Clinton is canceling public appearances at which she might be asked about the issue. FoxNews.com reports that Rep. Dan Burton, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, is demanding documents related to the pardon. "Congress has an obligation to find out if this pardon was appropriate," Burton said.
Football Envy
"The game of soccer has been nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for promoting understanding among nations," the Associated Press reports. Huh? Soccer is a game? We thought it was just an adjective, used before words like riot and hooligan.
In his nomination letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the Peace Prize, Swedish lawmaker Lars Gustafsson wrote that "soccer has and will continue to play an important role in the global arena, when it comes to creating understanding between people."
We have a better idea: Why not give football the Nobel Prize? Now there's a sport that brings the world together. The AP reports some 800 million people world-wide are expected to tune in to watch toe meet leather as the New York Giants and Baltimore Ravens clash in Sunday's Super Bowl XXXV. The National Football League's Web site has a list of countries where last year's Super Bowl was televised; it covers almost all the world, including Cuba, Libya, Iran and Iraq.
So universal is football that some even try to appropriate the name. We hear that in a few European countries, it's common to refer to soccer as "football." Now that's just sad. |
