Scrapbook
Scrapbook Filegate: Much More To Come Despite the apologies and explanations for File-gate-"Inexcusable!" said Leon Panetta-we know that senior officials inside the White House long knew about the...
...John Ashcroft might form a new Steering offshoot to undertake the committee's original mission...
...The whole sorry story broke, you will recall, when congressional investigators discovered a White House form requesting Billy Dale's FBI file, dated seven months after Dale's dismissal...
...Either Livingstone did something wrong, in which case he should be fired, or he was acting on orders from higher up, in which case the White House seems to be trying to buy his silence by keeping him within the family...
...In its own right a thoroughly entertaining and still timely parable, it was also an acknowledged inspiration for George Orwell's 1984...
...It's time for a sequel, a Left-winger's view of America, which would depict the country based on the geography of the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius" awards...
...WE ARE PROUD TO ANNOUNCE...
...Fueling the discontent was the fact that Hutchison was named without an official vote, after her incessant lobbying for the job...
...Is that excusable, Mr...
...That's how Livingstone's boss, White House counsel Jack Quinn, described the harsh punishment being meted out to the man who scoured, or supervised the scouring of, more than 400 FBI files he had no right to look at...
...said Leon Panetta-we know that senior officials inside the White House long knew about the illicit activity and did . . . nothing about it...
...THE READING LIST An attentive reader (whose name we have, alas, misplaced, so we urge him to write in again and tell us who he is) offers the following: It might help better to understand Russia, her fate and future, if we paid more attention to her past, and not just the past seventy years...
...When it was started, the Steering Committee was designed to be a forum for conservatives at a time when the Senate Republican leadership was decidedly moderate...
...The Time of Troubles, by Sergei Platonov (1860-1933), is the classic study...
...WHO'S STEERING THIS THING...
...The form was one of 1,000 pages of documents the White House finally surrendered to the Congress 18 months after being served with a subpoena...
...Even Democratic congressman Tom Lantos says Livingstone should be fired...
...The irony now is that with the Senate leadership dominated by conservatives, Steering will be led by someone without solid right-wing credentials (Hutchison is pro-choice...
...And what about the remaining 2,000 pages for which executive privilege is still being claimed...
...In other words, someone in the White House counsel's office went through all these papers-and claimed executive privilege for the Billy Dale request...
...And what is still being withheld...
...On the MacArthur map, Oberlin would be bigger than Chicago, Santa Monica would dwarf the rest of Los Angeles, and Texas, Florida, and other such flyover places wouldn't exist...
...Yevgeny Zamyatin was one of pre-revolutionary Russia's most talented short story writers and a prewar member of the Bolshevik party...
...So the questions are: Who knew about the files...
...Did this White House lawyer not realize something was amiss...
...And First Things associate editor J. Bottum (the J stands for Joseph, Jody for short, but don't tell him we told you) becomes our fiction critic...
...Conservatives inside and outside the Senate were taken aback by the recent decision of the Senate Republican Steering Committee to name Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas as the replacement for the previous chairman, Larry Craig...
...This year, the activists at MacArthur selected four of the twenty-one winners from the Bay Area of California, five from New York City, two from Durham, N.C., and one each from places like Princeton, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Washington, Philadelphia, and Belmont, Massachusetts...
...MACARTHUR'S AMERICA Remember the Steinberg cartoon, a New Yorker's view of America...
...However, he discerned the totalitarian nature of Bolshevism in power...
...The White House had made a bizarre claim that the documents were covered by "executive privilege" (a privilege usually extended to documents affecting national security)-a claim it continues to make for another 2,000 pages still inside the White House...
...How long can the White House continue to use taxpayer funds to pay Mr...
...With the downfall of Boris Godunov, Russia entered a period of anarchy called the Time of Troubles...
...Who made the claim...
...Furthermore, as the neo-Communists make their increasingly unlikely effort to retake Russia, it is worth remembering as well that at least one visionary of Lenin's time foresaw communism's collapse...
...What else would you call "administrative leave with pay...
...David Gelernter, the polymath poet-painter-computer scientist-Yale professor (whose book 1939 is just out in paperback, and you should read it), will serve as our art critic, though art will not be his only subject...
...Joseph Epstein, the literary critic and American Scholar editor who wrote our recent cover story on arts policy, will contribute a monthly essay beginning in September...
...Consider the last time Russia had a leader named Boris: His surname was Godunov, and the time was the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...
...In 1920-21 he wrote We, the first of the modern anti-utopian novels, which satirized the collectivist future...
...Three new contributing editors join us this week...
...You can't expect the Mac-Arthur search committee to venture more than 25 miles from the nearest lesbian-woman-of-color-voter-registration drive...
...Only in 1613, after a popular revolt led by the butcher Kuzma Minin and Prince Pozharsky, two of the true heroes of Russia's history, was Russia able to expel the Poles and establish a new legitimate order under the Romanov dynasty, in an air of enhanced xenophobia...
...What was the justification for this claim, which delayed exposure of Filegate for at least a year...
...After all, even Boris Yeltsin fired his internal security chief, Aleksandr Korzhakov...
...When...
...Now there's talk that Sen...
...Livingstone to do nothing...
...LIVINGSTONE'S VACATION The White House is so outraged by the misconduct of its personnel security chief, Craig Livingstone, that it is-sending him on a vacation at taxpayer's expense...
...We welcome them aboard, and trust you do too...
Vol. 1 • July 1996 • No. 41
