Scrapbook
Scrapbook Scandal Season The Department of Justice attorneys who work in the public integrity section of the criminal division sure are busy. In the past few months they've indicted Rep. Randy...
...If we were Sean Penn, there's all sorts of things we'd rather blame Bush for than being unable to stop smoking...
...That Roger Keith Coleman's many self-deluded supporters are "disappointed" he died a guilty man—that they'd rather Virginia had executed a genuinely innocent person...
...writing pretentious semiliterate open letters to the makers of satirical puppet movies, claiming they "will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation, and death of innocent people throughout the world...
...If the report is true, it is serious...
...Pope John Paul II asked then-Virginia governor Doug Wilder to spare Coleman's life...
...But death penalty foes all over the world were "stunned and disappointed," according to the Washington Post...
...He had a prior conviction for attempted rape...
...The day after Pfeffer's plea, the Times ran an Ap story on Jefferson, headlined "Congressman Implicated in Case...
...Think global warming's gotten worse...
...At a Cindy Sheehan rally in Sacramento last Saturday, he suggested Bush was so nefarious that "it makes it very difficult to quit smoking under this administration...
...Still, the man became a cause celebre...
...Need a swig of the blood of innocent Iraqi children...
...This is abominable, if it's true...
...The N^'w York Times fingered someone else as the "real killer...
...making the movie I Am Sam...
...tying our wife to a chair...
...Ask George W. Bush, he stores it by the barrel—the oil barrel...
...The duhama [common people] are on the karasi [seats...
...Rhymes with Daffy Libya's Muammar Qaddafi delivered himself of some important insights on Libyan TV on January 5, translated courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute: * On defense spending: "In our current circumstances, we don't need to buy tanks, airplanes, missiles, or other huge things like this...
...You haven't heard of the ongoing bribery investigation into Jefferson...
...On the Arab origins of democracy: "The word 'democracy' means duhama-karasi...
...Here's a short list: beating up cameramen...
...Which is kind of creepy, the more you think about it...
...Well, neither had THE SCRAPBOOK, until we turned to page A5 of last Thursday's Washington Post, which spared 470 words amid an ocean of verbiage on the other scandals to report that the previous day Jefferson's former legislative director, Brett pfeffer, had pleaded guilty to "conspiracy to commit bribery of a public official and aiding and abetting the bribery of a public official in 2004 and 2005...
...In exchange for the tip, Jefferson "demanded" that he get a "5 to 7 percent stake in one of two new companies," and that "two relatives be put on the businesses' payrolls...
...Below the fold...
...But if the people do not take the seats, that's not democracy...
...But there's still about three years left to blame Bush for the rest...
...Randy "Duke" Cunningham on bribery charges, indicted former federal procurement director David Safavian on perjury and obstruction of justice, subpoenaed Republican congressman Bob Ney of Ohio, and netted guilty pleas from former Tom DeLay spokesman Michael Scanlon, Republican businessman Adam Kidan, and, of course, former Republican superlob-byist Jack Abramoff, not to mention pursuing its ongoing investigation into Louisiana Democratic congressman William Jefferson...
...It's creepy, for one thing, that the anti-capital-punishment movement chose Coleman as its leading martyr in the first place...
...Perhaps needless to say, it ran on page A18...
...On the supposed injection of 400 Libyan Children with AIDS by Bulgarian nurses: "We asked the nurses: Who gave you this virus...
...He was on the cover of T-ime ("a story as twisted as the thin bands of highway that corduroy the mountainous tip of southwestern Virginia, a remote pocket of mining country where the river runs black with coal dust in the spring...
...The New York Times was not about to be outdone by the Post in its coverage of a scandal that subverts, rather than reinforces, the idea of a uniquely Republican "culture of corruption" in Washington...
...If every Libyan is booby-trapped, every car is booby-trapped, every house is booby-trapped, and every road is booby-trapped—the enemy will not be able to survive...
...But none of that worked, and Coleman went to the chair...
...Of course it has...
...Coleman failed a lie detector test his own lawyers requested...
...Back home in Grundy, nobody seemed much surprised by this news...
...As part of his plea, pfeffer testified that years after he left his job with Jefferson, his old boss gave him a heads-up on some investment opportunities in Africa...
...When the common people take the seats—that's democracy...
...While many will view this statement as typical Hollywood idiocy, The Scrapbook isn't troubled by what Penn said, but rather, encouraged by what he didn't say...
...Amnesty International adopted him...
...In this day and age, a country allows its intelligence to conduct an experiment on the children of another nation, by means of medical delegation...
...On his newfound pro-Americanism: "Right now, I have nothing against America, except for the fact that it opposes the Palestinian people and is destroying Iraq...
...The crime in question was unbelievably savage: Wanda McCoy's murderer cut her throat with such force that her head was almost severed, and then he raped her, most likely after she was dead...
...The report was a whopping 285 words...
...Kids forget to do their homework...
...And so forth...
...Initial blood, hair, and DNA testing narrowed down the list of suspects to 0.2 percent of the population—including him...
...The Evil Bush Does E'ver since George W. Bush was elected president, there is no crime, either real or imagined, for which Hollywood celebrities have not blamed him...
...It's a wonder they have any brain function left at all, now that George W. Bush pumps arsenic into our drinking water...
...What's that, you say...
...Apart from this, America and I agree on everything...
...George W. Bush left the top off his aerosol Aqua Net...
...The Guilty Martyr Late last week—more than a decade after Roger Keith Coleman was electrocuted for the 1981 rape and murder of his sister-in-law, a 19-year-old Grundy, Virginia, woman named Wanda McCoy—a fresh DNA analysis of semen recovered from the victim's body proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Coleman really was the killer...
...Jefferson, the Post reports, is the "co-chairman of the congressional Africa Trade and Investment Caucus and the caucuses on Brazil and Nigeria...
...That Penn stopped at blaming Bush for his Marlboro habit shows signs of emotional maturity...
...These countries' intelligence gave the virus to the nurses...
...Alas, it wasn't to be, as Boston College law school professor Phyllis Goldfarb ruefully told the Post: "The opportunity to bring new people into the abolitionist movement has been lost...
...The creepiest part of it all...
...But the "Take the Cake" award goes to Sean Penn...
...And the evidence against Coleman was always overwhelming...
...The countries that defend these nurses should be blamed for being behind this plan...
...An FBI raid of one of Jefferson's homes last August uncovered $90,000 cash hidden in a freezer...
...Demo-karasi is an Arabic word...
...They'd believed —and very much wanted—him to be innocent...
...going headline hunting in the Katrina aftermath with a leaky boat and a personal photographer...
...writing pretentious semiliterate dispatches from Iran with sentences like "I travel better where English is not spoken...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 18
