Presswatch: It's Not About Senex
Corry, John
PRESSWATCH by John Corry It's Not About Senex Which didn't stop another preemptive strike on Starr. N ewsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch is always fun to read. Its little red arrows tell you...
...so was the one next to "Bumpers," and as the kicky little explanation said: "Finally, a politician the CW can truly admire...
...No decent person wanted that, of course, and since 54 March 1999 The American Spectator the Times had thoughtfully run the story on a Sunday, its awful possibility dominated that morning's talk shows...
...We are in a therapeutic age, and it shows...
...Meanwhile the Post also gave us Claire Douglas, a Jungian analyst...
...B ut the debate had been sparked by the Times itself, and then conducted all over television...
...Apparently Ken Starr was a senex, too...
...Dafoe did not much seem to approve...
...Clinton and his "legal eagles" had made the "House managers look like Rugrats...
...Surely the Times had to know...
...On the other hand, the so-called debate had made Starr look pretty bad...
...You and your team do look like you want to win too badly...
...The issue of who leaked news of Mr...
...Perhaps this has to with our44 Political commentary and psychoanalysis go hand in hand in the therapeutic age...
...Political commentary and psychoanalysis go hand in hand in the therapeutic age, and the puer-senex split is sure to be mentioned some day in CW...
...CW seemed pleased, and you might even think it was gloating...
...Thus the lead story the Times ran under the headline "Starr is Weighing/Whether to Indict/Sitting President...
...Democrats said they were distressed...
...Therefore attention should be paid to the "substance of Mr...
...After all, it has been known to plant stuff...
...It was talking about its own story...
...So if that were true, what was the point of the story...
...She said Clinton had also diminished respect for the presidency...
...They were the dried up old men of any age whose greatest sexual arousal, or maybe their only sexual arousal, came from the outrage they felt over the puer's sexuality...
...Naturally, he's retired...
...Robertson's notions about Clinton's winning the public relations battle and his turning the Oval Office into a playpen were hardly contradictory, and the Times was only looking for another way to stick it to the Republican right...
...Starr's indictment research," it said stiffly, "was a phony one...
...Indeed the New York Times had reported that even Pat Robertson knew it...
...Starr apparently agreed with the two constitutional scholars in his office who had said a sitting president could be indicted...
...1Y era...
...Was the Times launching a pre-emptive strike, and warning Starr off...
...But a couple of decades later, Clinton is pleasured by a crouching intern while he talks on the phone about Bosnia, and in a new book, J. Philip Wogaman, one of his spiritual advisers, condemns the Starr Report...
...This suggested that Starr was getting • ready to extend what Dale Bumpers had called in the speech CW so admired "our national nightmare...
...the Republicans had lost, and everyone knew it...
...The message was that the Senate had to end the trial as soon as possible...
...The same day the Times was warning its readers about Starr, the Washington Post was trying to figure out Clinton...
...The vindictive Starr was out of control, and so on...
...While commenting on Clinton's State of the Union on his "700 Club," Robertson had said, with his customary folksy chagrin, "From a public relations standpoint, he's won...
...Had Starr's office planted the story, or hadn't it...
...The Times said that was in "striking contrast" to what Robertson was saying now, although obviously it was not...
...Clinton, she wrote, represented the puer —"the eternal youth who charms and inspires...
...Could the White House have had a hand in this...
...and what was an "apparent effort" supposed to mean, anyway...
...It also recalled what Robertson told the Christian Coalition last September...
...They might as well dismiss this impeachment hearing and get on with something else, because it's over as far as I'm concerned...
...The little red arrow next to his name was up...
...It was hard to tell, and two days later the murk grew even deeper...
...Ordinarily the Times does not pay much attention to Robertson, other than to occasionally demonize him on its op-ed page, but this time he had said something it wanted to hear...
...You never know what bad thing they might do next...
...Instead he had kept his own counsel, and not told anyone what he might do one way or the other...
...The mostly Republican Senate represented the puer's opposite, the senex...
...But while fun is fun, CW, as it often refers to itself, also serves a serious purpose: It keeps you current on the media ethos...
...Clinton may be a disaster, but the people on the other side are worse...
...Its little red arrows tell you who's up and who's down, and its kicky little sentences tell you why...
...CW pronounced impeachment dead, for example, after Clinton gave the State of the Union...
...It said there had been an "apparent effort" by Starr's office to "spark a debate over criminal prosecution of the President...
...Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, author of The Divorce Culture: Rethinking Our Commitment to Marriage and the Family, wrote in an essay that Clinton was our first Intimate President...
...The Times said in an editorial that Starr "seems determined to write himself into the history books as a narcissistic legal crank," and cited its own story to prove it...
...It knows the enemy when it sees it...
...On balance, though, Ms...
...Give it up, Hank" CW said...
...That wasn't very satisfying, of course, but not an awful lot about the Clinton coverage is...
...Republicans, on the defensive, looked pained...
...In the meantime, the Times has published an op-ed symposium on what the Republicans must do to shake off their "impeachment funk...
...But the Times story, which was attributed to unidentified "associates" of Starr, was not quite what it seemed...
...One of the contributors to the symposium, Helen Fisher, an anthropologist, said they had to stop "exhibiting thinking that is characteristic of the male brain...
...Starr's legal mischief," and not to the Times's "journalistic sources...
...Vulgar language in the Oval Office had upset him...
...Meanwhile CW's only down arrow was next to "Hyde...
...It also said JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent and regular Press-watch columnist...
...He had exposed himself, and confessed his sins, and "done more than any modern president to break down the sense of psychological distance between his office and the American people...
...But, as the Tirnes also reported, he had never said, or even hinted, that he would ever seek an indictment...
...Glad tidings there, the Times thought, and splashed the story all over page one...
...Fornearly nine months," Robertson said then, "we have been mocked, demeaned, belittled, and lied to," and added that the office once occupied "by Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln" had become "the playpen for the sexual freedom of the poster child of the 1960's...
...Whatever the answer, the Times seemed to realize it was on shaky ground here, and it decided to brazen it out...
...That was more like it, of course...
...The American Spectator • March 1999 55...
...After reading the transcripts of the Nixon White House tapes, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., the editor in chief of the Hearst papers, and a good Republican as well, wrote that he had never come across anything before as "ruthless, deplorable and ethically indefensible as the talk on those White House tapes...
Vol. 32 • March 1999 • No. 3
