Scrapbook
Scrapbook Bob Dole's Powell Problem Would Colin Powell be the ideal vice presidential running mate for Bob Dole? Practically everyone associated with the Dole for President campaign thinks so....
...NW, Washington, D.C...
...Alternative Reading List Taken with the New York Times's misattri-bution of the authorship of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim to the late Kingsley Amis (author of Lucky Jim), reader Lorna Williams came up with a whole cluster of alternative classics: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Evelyn Waugh...
...Thus, choosing Powell would make Dole look even weaker than he already does...
...Cornelius's supposed source was one Ross Fisher, president of a company called Miami Air...
...The Reading List The Bosnian peace deal put us in mind of novels that deal with great powers intervening in smaller countries: Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy...
...Contributions to the Sleepy Obit Writer's Canon should be sent to: Scrapbook, The Weekly Standard, 1150 17th St...
...How Napoleon's invasion of Italy leads the young hothead Fabrizio to plot the French potentate's assassination...
...The Washington Post followed two days later: "Such a concerted [publicity] effort is aimed . . . also at Gen-Xers and other new kids on the block who may not know that Paul McCartney was in a group before Wings...
...The Wings of the Dove, by Larry McMurtry...
...We predict a third-place finish for Murphy, despite his hopes that he might finish a "strong second" thanks to his heavy courtship of the Cosmo delegates...
...He needs at least a second-place showing to get the momentum he needs going into the holidays...
...How high will the 33-year-old Murphy rise...
...Often forgotten in the swirl of marital disappointments, passions, and adulteries is this novel's concern with the question of ethnicity: Most Russians favored their nation's 1875 intervention in the struggle inside the Ottoman empire between persecuted Slavs (thought to be of Russian origin) and the ruling Turks...
...She said, 'Daddy, did you know Paul McCartney was in another group before Wings?'") But most often it is embraced as spontaneous waggery by pedestrian journalists-a Nexis search found more than 80 repetitions of the joke...
...20036...
...The Weekly Standard has learned that Mike Murphy, Lamar Alexander's presidential campaign guru and a master of the art of the political commercial, has been chosen by Cosmopolitan magazine as one of Washington's 10 most eligible bachelors...
...Hard to tell, because he is sure to apply his patented political "spin," issuing forth confident statements that he is "just where I want to be right now, a top-tier bachelor...
...A majority of GOP bachelor-watchers, however, believe that Murphy needs to "make a move" soon if he hopes to find himself on the top of the testosterone heap...
...The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal...
...Back in Washington, Dole's Senate staffers were dropping dark hints about Reed's alleged mistakes...
...Except Dole...
...Of course, Dole first has to win the GOP presidential nomination, and following his somewhat disappointing showing in the Florida straw poll, the knives are out for campaign manager Scott Reed...
...Oooh, Is He Cute...
...Would such a showing disappoint Murphy...
...The Weekly Standard has learned that Dole has two big qualms...
...Dale and his subordinates were fired six days later primarily because of these allegations-even though a study of the travel office by the accounting firm of Peat Marwick found no evidence whatever of kickbacks...
...In fact, George Bush's hand-picked RNC chairman, Rich Bond, was trolling the halls of the Republican Governors Association meeting in New Hampshire last week, intimating he would soon be playing a larger role in the Dole campaign...
...The American media herd just gets more and more cattle-like...
...Truth to tell, Reed-a longtime aide to Jack Kemp and a top-notch political organizer-is running as good a campaign as his candidate permits...
...This week's exhibit: The constant repetition of the same joke about Beatles lead singer Paul McCartney in the wake of the release of some new Beatles material...
...Says one pundit (and former girlfriend), who spoke on condition of anonymity, "Mike's ability to attract dates could be severely hampered by a third-place finish and refusal to spend money...
...In truth, the source was Thomason himself: Official papers reveal that another White House official explicitly named Thomason as the one spreading the kickback story...
...And is making ready to subpoena Thomason himself when Travelgate hearings resume early next year...
...Vanity Fair, by Tom Wolfe...
...One is that asking Powell to join the ticket would be seen as an admission that Dole can't beat Bill Clinton on his own...
...Interviews are being conducted this week to rank the finalists...
...Harry fed a phony story to the White House, and when they found out there was nothing to it, they sat on their hands while the FBI went on a wild goose chase," says one official...
...Thomason wanted some travel office business for himself...
...Tolstoy, through his character Levin, offers a startlingly contemporary attack on the Slavic incursion...
...Wings?What Wings...
...The bureau aggressively pursued Dale because it was desperate to refute allegations that it had been improperly used in the Travelgate mess...
...Indeed, ye olde chestnut has been around a long time, variously ascribed to conversations overheard in university bookstores and Comedy Store shtick ("My daughter told me something that blew my mind," quipped comedian Billy Crystal in 1985...
...Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh...
...A novel about the downside of imperialism: If you're not careful, you might get eaten by an African lord named Seth, even if he was educated at Oxford...
...The Associated Press offered this mock Q&A on November 17: "Name the band Paul McCartney was in before Wings...
...Little wonder, then, that the House committee probing Travelgate has decided to subpoena Thomason's personal papers relating to the whole business...
...The joke presumes that readers of everything from the Anchorage Daily News to AutoWeek have managed to escape the last 25 years of daily retro-Beatles barrages and are instead haunted by the indelible strains of famed Wings tunes, such as "Silly Love Songs," "Somebody's Knockin' at the Door," and "Morse Moose and the Gray Goose...
...Travelgate Is Back (cont'd) The acquittal of former White House travel office chief Billy Dale makes it clearer than ever that the administration's pursuit of the career civil servant was a politically motivated prosecution-a prosecution undertaken because of false and defamatory allegations hurled around both by Clinton cousin (and White House staffer) Catherine Cornelius and by presidential crony Harry Thomason...
...A pro-life Rust Belt governor-John Engler of Michigan or George Voinovich of Ohio-might add more...
...But does Dole realize this...
...A Justice Department official has told congressional investigators that the kickback angle was the impetus for the FBI's investigation into Dale-an investigation leading to an indictment on embezzlement charges laughed out of court by a jury in just over two hours...
...Dole's other qualm is that Powell might not strengthen the ticket...
...On May 13, 1989, Cornelius told the FBI she'd learned from a business associate of Thomason's that Dale routinely demanded kickbacks from companies wanting a piece of the lucrative White House press air-charter business...
...But when Fisher was interviewed by White House investigators a month later, he flatly denied Cornelius's story...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 12
