Now that I have added being fiftysomething to my list of dubious achievements, I am discovering a previously unnoticed tendency towards pondering. I certainly don’t remember this activity from my 20′s or, for that matter, the succeeding years. When I look back -an essential part of the ponder-it all seems to be a blur of Read More
The Hunting of the President: The 10-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton , by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. St. Martin’s Press, 413 pages, $25.95.
“You boys have to remember, I don’t give a fuck who the governor of Arkansas is,” Lee Atwater said back in 1989, echoing the sentiments of a nation. Read More
I haven’t done a lot of pronouncing upon political issues in this column (although I want to point out, in case anyone’s forgotten, I wrote a column attacking Republican Party pandering over the loathsome Confederate flag during the South Carolina primary four years ago [March 18, 1996]).
In part, I try to avoid pontificating Read More
Aside from at least three books by President Clinton’s former lovers, none of the many volumes on the Clinton scandals has been written by women, and that fact alone makes Gail Sheehy’s new book, Hillary’s Choice (Random House, 416 pages, $24), welcome. The writer spent quality time with Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1992, on assignment Read More
A famous man once said, “The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.” Such repetitive looniness is what makes characters like Elmer Fudd, Wile E. Coyote and Yosemite Sam so funny as they scramble around the cartoon landscape, stumbling quite predictably into the Read More
The Rudy-Hillary Senate race looks so certain there may already be sandwiches named for them at the Stage Deli. (Rudy’s comes with a sauce of Robitussin and Kaopectate. Hillary’s is white bread, no meat.) But don’t order just yet.
New York has a multiparty system, and Mayor Giuliani will lack the auxiliary lines that successful Read More
How refreshing and how rare, to see the completion of justice twice in a single day. A duly appointed judge now has inflicted an appropriate penalty on the President for his recklessness and his lying under oath. And a duly impaneled jury has meted out a deserved humiliation to the independent counsel for his bullying Read More
Over the next 18 months, the myth of the “liberal” press will be tested yet again, this time in coverage of the Republican establishment’s attempted coronation of Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. Editors and producers at major news organizations eventually must confront the fact that Mr. Bush’s life did not begin with his first Read More
New Yorkers may take a justifiable pride in knowing that throughout
American history their state legislature is second to none in the
corruption department. (Brains is another matter.) When it comes to
venality, the Empire State has no reason to hang its head when places like
Louisiana, California, Illinois and Arkansas are mentioned. Matched dollar Read More
These are difficult times at The American Spectator , rough-riding journal of the rabid right. The conservative monthly and its parent foundation are anticipating the scrutiny of Federal authorities because of their role in the so-called “Arkansas Project”–the four-year, $2.4 million effort to undermine President Bill Clinton funded by Pittsburgh heir Richard Mellon Scaife. Allegations Read More
