PUBLIC NUISANCES
Tyrrell, R . Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC NUISANCES R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. The Original Groper WASHINGTON S THE EDITOR OF THE MAGAZINE that broke the Troopergate stories, I have endured a decade of lectures from journalism's...
...He had suffered the inspiration that Novak's "two senior administration officials" were actually one official, the unsuspecting Rove...
...There was one years back that Vice President Dan Quayle had a girlfriend, a girlfriend in common with half the Republicans on Capitol Hill...
...Do you recall when a particularly coarse ex-wrestler ran for high office in Minnesota as an Independent...
...Most such stories lack substance and usually die after a terrific media pothering...
...How will its editors R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...Now Rove has been a brilliant political strategist for three decades, but the plot that Wilson attributes to Rove is so fanciful I cannot imagine it ever even being adopted for a prime-time television melodrama...
...Plame roused indignation from an unlikely source, the left-wing Nation, an otherwise anti-CIA publication that had never minded this sort of outing in the past...
...The only matter that troubles me about the episode is that the CIAwould employ a man as left-wing as Wilson to go to Niger unless they planned to leave him there...
...Soon Ms...
...It had a source willing to be identified...
...Can you imagine if my troopers had remained anonymous...
...No sooner did he win the governorship than Jesse Ventura was being boomed in the press as a presidential contender...
...He is abandoned by friends...
...These Black Cat News Stories can do a lot of damage...
...By the way, Wilson is a writer as well as a diplomat...
...That was the end of Sununu...
...When they had a story involving rape charges against Bill Clinton they buried the story in the back of the paper...
...And he was even angrier than the Nation...
...Her name is Juanita Broaddrick, and unlike Schwarzenegger Clinton has neither apologized nor admitted...
...These Black Cat News Stories caused little damage in career terms but they did tarnish reputations hitherto unsullied...
...So after all these lectures about the privacy of sexual acts, why have I not heard journalism's ethicists admonishing the Los Angeles Times...
...In March a very critical essay of the Bush foreign policy appeared under his name in the extreme left-wing Nation...
...Certainly the paper treated it as politics...
...During a reception in the White House Rose Garden, an overhead bird evacuates on his new tie...
...Precisely what the term "operative" meant remains a mystery However, two days later Novak's identification of Ms...
...Nonetheless, I have for a decade been lectured to by the high priests of journalism about my deplorable ethics...
...Needless to say, the joke did not catch on...
...Yet when the anonymous sources accused Schwarzenegger of groping he was instantaneously referred to as the Groper, as in "Win One for the Groper...
...In the last days of Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign for the governorship of California, the Times began reporting on his 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2003 frisky sex life based on the stories of women whose recollections go back to the 1970s and who have remained for the most part anonymous...
...Whatever choice is made, I advise that the President get a master of the occult over to Rove's White House office immediately, and before another day of CNN broadcasts alarm the nation...
...But who would take seriously a story of sexual excess coming from sources that remained anonymous...
...All the troopers' stories were verified by documentation or by other witnesses' accounts...
...You think I am kidding...
...The administration of Bush II has already suffered the Enron Black Cat News Story and the Sixteen Words Black Cat News Story...
...He should have declared himself an Independent...
...Of course the rape charge against Clinton was different from most of the groping charges against Schwarzenegger...
...plead...
...It is all very romantic...
...and she is bringing her new boyfriend, the one with the ponytail who wears sandals...
...When Willey went public with the story I began calling her assailant the Groper, as in "Win One for the Groper...
...Revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent is a crime...
...Simply claim that groping is not sex...
...The press is almost as sympathetic to Independents as it is to Democrats...
...Schwarzenegger ran as a Republican, and the press disdains Republicans...
...The story supposedly hexing him is that in a July14 column Novak wrote that "senior administrative officials" told him that Wilson had been recommended to serve on a CIA mission to Niger to investigate uranium transfers to Iraqi agents, by his wife, Valerie Plame, whom Novak identified as a CIA "operative...
...A Black Cat News Story is a bizarre phenomenon known only to national news reporting, usually in Washington...
...The Original Groper WASHINGTON S THE EDITOR OF THE MAGAZINE that broke the Troopergate stories, I have endured a decade of lectures from journalism's bulging choir of ethicists...
...The fact that unethical and occasionally illegal behavior is employed in pursuit of sex does not change the essential privacy of the sexual acts and all the moonlit nights that might accompany those acts...
...More importantly, it is increasingly apparent that while the President was attending to the cuties, his government was failing to attend to national security...
...Clinton is a Democrat, and the press sympathizes with Democrats...
...and, of a sudden, that public figure's luck turns sour...
...By this reasoning, a good way for a corrupt politician to cover up his corruption would be for him to become a sex maniac while taking the government to the cleaners...
...There was the Black Cat News Story about White House chief of staff John Sununu using government transportation to pursue his stamp collection...
...Wilson believes that his criticism of the Bush administration motivated Rove to expose his wife...
...Many journalists remained in doubt that the virginal president would commit such a rude act...
...Yet sometimes the story really sends its victim into oblivion...
...Unfortunately he has returned...
...Groping is politics...
...My suggestion is that they rely on Clintonesque reasoning...
...This suggests to me the one dreadful mistake Schwarzenegger made in his campaign...
...On his way to a photo-op with Kofi Annan the zipper on his pants breaks...
...Apparently the editors of the Los Angeles Times trust such sources, and they expect their readers to trust such sources...
...The White House denies that Rove was Novak's source, and for his part Wilson seems to have backed off a bit on his accusation, saying he has no evidence Rove was involved...
...Moreover, the Boy President's ithyphallic behavior continued in the White House as was made luridly clear with the 1998 national debut of Monica Lewinsky...
...Sex, I am told, is a private matter...
...Feline Politics WASHINGTON WHITE HOUSE SPECIAL ADVISOR KARL ROVE iS in need of an exorcist...
...If sex is involved, all morally-superior journalists shy away from reporting it...
...They could claim that they feared retribution, and as a matter of fact at least three of them were punished by state authorities...
...Thus my guess is that if the White House hangs in there this story too will die...
...Thanks to columnist Robert Novak, a former American diplomat who goes by the swank name of Joseph C. Wilson IV, and the extreme left-wing Nation magazine, Rove is being victimized by another of Washington's Black Cat News Story...
...There was another one that President George Bush I had a girlfriend...
...And apparently under certain circumstance even rape is politics...
...Surely they had good reason to remain anonymous...
...NOVEMBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63...
...In the Troopergate stories, The American Spectator had Arkansas state troopers attesting to Boy Clinton's philandering and to more serious matters, to wit: his misuse of government employees, misuse of government offices and vehicles, and even his misuse of government credit cards...
...Plame's husband jumped in...
...The phone rings, and it is Arianna Huffington announcing that she will be his weekend houseguest...
...It is an ominous, catastrophic story that, like a black cat, leaps across a public figure's path...
...Perhaps a witch doctor will suffice...
...When the Los Angeles Times got its groping story the editors ran it on the front page...
...According to the Times' mostly anonymous sources, Schwarzenegger groped women usually on movie sets much as Bill Clinton groped Kathleen Willey in the White House...
...Wilson announced that he would like "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs...
...Is Rove headed for retirement and a weekend with Arianna...
...Rove is too much the pro to have been involved in such a thing...
...I shall be interested in the Times' response if the ethicists do raise questions about the newspaper's reliance on anonymous sources...
...Anyone listening to CNN or reading the liberal press knows that something diabolical has happened to Rove...
...There is an obvious double standard at work here, and so I can imagine the Times getting a pass from the ethicists...
Vol. 36 • November 2003 • No. 6
