"Solidarity Forever, Pal!"
"Solidarity Forever, Pal!" In the Don Imus vs. Al Sharpton celebrity tag-team cage match that obsessed Washington last week, and which ended with the radio jock's firing for racial insensitivity at...
...Article 26, paragraph 3 of the Geneva Convention guarantees captives the right to use tobacco...
...But to be fair, Oliphant's parting remark might have been uttered by any of Imus's famous guests: "Solidarity forever, pal...
...And they deny ever contacting Szmolinsky...
...Which is to say, from our admittedly jaundiced point of view, it was a sort of pundits' version of the Iran-Iraq war...
...Since it is no longer permissible to be offended by the sort of behavior in which Smith specialized—serial promiscuity, nude modeling, marrying old codgers for their money—the onus now falls on innocent bystanders who can't resist a good spectacle...
...Aware of the acute shortage of food in the Hermit Kingdom, Szmolinsky obliged, handing over 12 of his rabbits for 80 euros each...
...As Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post pondered, "How, exactly, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [intended] to parlay the small herd of German Flopsies into hunger relief for its 23 million citizens is unclear...
...But just before Easter, the 68-year-old pensioner was told by North Korean embassy officials that the trip was canceled...
...In a world of armed conflict, carbon emissions, and Sen...
...But good liberal that he is, Imus volunteered to appear with Sharpton and abase himself before this appallingly inappropriate arbiter...
...It seems clear to The Scrapbook, however, that Robert and his fellow lagomorphs were destined to become rabbit stew from the get-go...
...If CBS and MSNBC have now decided to outsource their Standards and Practices decisions to the velour sweat-suited demagogue— well, that too is something we can thank Imus for...
...Our grandparents lapped up every detail of the Loeb-Leopold trial (1924), Tommy Manville (1894-1967) and his 11 wives, and the stabbing of gangster Johnny Stompanato by the daughter of his lover, Lana Turner (1958...
...Poor Britain First reported by Christopher Booker in the April 1 Sunday Telegraph, but apparently not an April Fool's joke, was the reaction by Tony Blair's health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to the televised pictures of the British captives in Iran...
...The DPRK, on the other hand, maintains the rabbits are fine...
...Indeed, Oliphant—no one's idea of a man you'd take with you to a knife fight—had the misfortune, as Lowry put it, "to appear on Imus's show after the 'nappy-headed' comment and before it was clear that Imus was on his way to being expelled from polite company...
...Best rejoinder was from Chris Buck-land in the Sun: "Apart from sounding plain daft, patronising Pat was also being politically incorrect probably for the first time in her life...
...So he made a great show of excusing Imus...
...The demise of Anna Nicole Smith, 39, and its attendant legal complications, have caused an unusual amount of browfurrowing in the community of journalism...
...Or, until Al Sharpton says otherwise—whichever comes first...
...A half-century ago Europeans avidly followed the adulterous romance of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, the Japanese remain transfixed by Michael Jackson, and Eva Peron's corpse is still venerated in Argentina...
...Smith's longtime "lawyer-companion," Howard K. Stern, who had been caring for the baby since birth...
...As National Review's Rich Lowry noted in his syndicated column, the controversy over Imus's calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" was "almost entirely a liberal conflagration...
...A slanderer and a race-baiter who has unrepentantly fomented deadly racial violence in New York on more than one occasion in the past 20 years, Sharpton doesn't have the moral standing of a cockroach to judge someone else's public discourse...
...Which, come to think of it, makes a certain sense...
...Being the sentimental type, we had been rooting for the DNA of Ms...
...Hopping Mad At the very least, we'd like to think Karl Szmolinsky meant well...
...With a few notable exceptions (John McCain, Rudy Giuliani), Imus's favorite interlocutors were a Who's Who of the Washington and New York liberal establishment: Evan Thomas, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Tom Friedman, Frank Rich, Paul Begala, Howard Fineman, Tom Oliphant, Bob Schieffer, Jon Meacham, et al...
...But like Stern, we reluctantly accepted the scientific conclusion that "Los Angeles photographer" Larry Birkhead—and not Stern, or bodyguard Alex Denk, or Prince Frederick von Anhalt, the current husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor, or any other claimants we've failed to mention—is the father...
...That may seem an awful lot for a rabbit, but Szmolinsky's breed, known as "German gray giants," can each weigh up to 22 pounds (including 15 pounds of meat...
...And the Anna Nicole saga was a treasure trove of unimaginable riches: Her estranged mom from smalltown Texas, her burial delayed by legal maneuvers, her weight gains and losses, the Bahamian authorities, her reality TV show, the overdose death of her son in the same hospital where Dannielynn was born, the weepy Florida judge from the Bronx, the growing list of putative fathers—it all would have seemed improbable in fiction...
...The only difference is that in those days public censure about scandal was directed at the protagonists, not the spectators or the middlemen in the press...
...Not that any of this comes as a shock...
...Al Sharpton celebrity tag-team cage match that obsessed Washington last week, and which ended with the radio jock's firing for racial insensitivity at the hands of his risk-averse CBS and MSNBC bosses, The Scrapbook has to confess that it couldn't work up a rooting interest either way...
...He suspects his rabbits, including his prized 23-pound male Robert, may have been the main course served during Kim Jong Il's birthday dinner last February...
...Cable TV, in particular, has been criticized for paying excessive attention to the life and death of the onetime model, Playboy Playmate of the Year, and widow of an 89-year-old billionaire, whose sheer cheesiness and relentless pursuit of publicity were uniquely impressive, even by contemporary standards...
...Dannielynn's DNA The Scrapbook is not ashamed to reveal that our fingernails came out the worse for wear the other morning when the paternity of the late Anna Nicole Smith's infant daughter, Dannie-lynn Hope Marshall Stern, was established in the Bahamas...
...Back in November, the East German rabbit-breeder was approached by North Korean officials who asked if he would be interested in selling some of his rabbits to Pyongyang for breeding purposes...
...y Scrapbook And lest we forget, the public appetite for celebrity catastrophe is nothing new, nor is it exclusively American...
...Szmolinsky now fears the worst, telling the London Times, "I don't think the animals are alive anymore, I think they've been eaten...
...The North Koreans then invited Szmolinsky to visit the rogue state in April to see how his rabbits were faring...
...So long, pal...
...After all, these rabbits are probably given more protein than the average North Korean...
...Our normal instinct would have been to side with a man in Imus's position simply on the grounds that Sharpton led the charge against him...
...Harry Reid, a little tabloid entertainment is therapeutic...
...Said Szmolinsky: "North Korea won't be getting any more rabbits from me, they don't even need to bother asking...
...To which The Scrapboqk replies: Oh, please...
...This sends completely the wrong message to our young people...
...So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Nanny Hewitt...
...We just hope Szmolinsky and his fellow Germans don't fall for any of North Korea's other hare-brained schemes...
...And, of course, the American people have been chastised in uncompromising terms for tuning in to the coverage, and for gawking at the train wreck that was Anna Nicole Smith's life...
...Said Hewitt: "It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking...
Vol. 12 • April 2007 • No. 30
