A Clinton ex-; Passportgate II; alligator shoes; and more.
Lie with the I jons This month, former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen is gracing the pages of Playboy for the second time. Back in 1992, when her nude shoot first appeared, Gracen was asked...
...have experience scanning black-and-white and four-color images...
...One of our more upmarket subscribers—whose husband owns 14 pairs of alligator boots—thought our $650 price tag on President Clinton's alligator boots a sin against verisimilitude: "$650," she wrote, "is cheap, cheap, cheap...
...The NSCF, however, claims it heard the number from an "undisclosed source" at the State Department...
...If 218 House members sign it, campaign-finance reform starts making its way back to the floor for a vote...
...If this were a Clintonian magazine, we would launch into elaborate explanations...
...What she said was: "At no time did any romantic relationship ever exist between the Governor and myself...
...For that kind of money, you could probably talk to Robert Bennett for a whole 68 or 69 minutes...
...The equally reliable Joe Conason, columnist for the New York Observer, asked, "Is it worse to commit perjury about sex with an intern, or about the cause of automobile fuel-tank fires that have killed hundreds of men, women and children...
...Washington, too, apparently...
...But Common Cause says more Republicans— like Brian Bilbray of California, Tom Davis of Virginia, and Amo Houghton of New York—are threatening to join the petition signers...
...after all, until the president let her tag along on state visits, our very own first lady could have been said to be something of an untraveled yokel herself...
...The truth of the matter, according to the State Department's Consular Affairs department, is that 75 percent of congressmen hold either official or diplomatic passports...
...Back in 1992, when her nude shoot first appeared, Gracen was asked whether she'd had an affair with then-governor Clinton...
...If someone doesn't do something fast, the Gop is going to spend this election year either (a) killing campaign-finance reform or (b) passing a bill that hamstrings Republican donors and gives a free ride to Democrat-friendly labor unions...
...The source of the no-passports urban myth is less likely to be found in State Department files than in the self-regard of this newly minted world traveler...
...The truth of her statement thus would appear to hinge on a Clinton-esque distinction between sex and romance...
...Gracen has retained as her lawyer Bruce Cutler, the brass-knuckles attorney best known for defending John Gotti...
...Mere weeks after the Levy-Kantor encounter, Gracen, who had been struggling in the decade since being named Miss America in 1982, had a job on one of the television shows produced by ur-friend of Bill Harry Thomason...
...Former Clinton aide David Gergen credits the statistic to the non-profit National Security Caucus Foundation...
...possess good layout and design skills...
...A Starr Car Slur_ Of all the rotten things that have been said about Ken Starr, none has been more lowdown than that he concealed perjury while representing General Motors in truck-fire cases...
...The Justice Department refused a request for a criminal investigation of the matter, saying that there was no "sufficient basis" for such an investigation...
...The ever-reliable James Carville said on Larry King Live that Starr was guilty of "encouraging perjury . . . when a tank blew up and killed a child...
...Kantor didn't return a call from the Scrapbook, but a colleague of his confirms the meeting took place...
...No Documentation The era of congressional junkets to tropical paradises is largely over, but now there's a new criticism: Congressmen don't travel abroad enough...
...If it is a lie...
...Dishonorable Discharge Afew weeks ago, the House Republican leadership thought they had safely bottled up campaign-finance reform with a bit of procedural sleight-of-hand...
...Send resume and work examples to The Weekly Standard, Personnel Dept., 1150 17th St., NW, Suite 505, Washington, DC 20036...
...Many of the rest hold tourist passports...
...Leave aside whether a history of tourism is the best qualification for judging America's national interest...
...Bootless Cries Several attentive readers have written to point out that our Clinton fashion parody in the April 13 issue could have used a bit of fine-tuning...
...It is plainly too much to ask Carville or Conason to apologize or even merely to tone down the malarkey...
...In a 1997 interview, Hillary Clinton bemoaned that "a very large proportion of the Congress as constituted after the 1994 election"—i.e., a Congress full of Republican rubes—had never held a passport...
...Says who...
...She denied it—a denial she recanted last month, when she admitted to one consensual fling with Clinton in 1983...
...Whatever legal vulnerability Gracen is worried about, she has never expressed any regret about being caught in a lie...
...Supporters of the petition claim they have 200 members on board, almost all Democrats...
...We now know that Gracen's 1992 denial came shortly after a meeting in the San Fernando Valley between her manager Miles Levy and Mickey Kantor—then Clinton's campaign manager, subsequently his U.S...
...More recently, she declared that this "very large proportion" was 30 percent...
...Instead, we are forced to admit we were flat-out wrong...
...Not for this president...
...Cutler won't say who's paying the legal bills...
...But maybe next time, they'll have the decency to leave burnt kids out of it...
...Then on April 4, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times chimed in: "At a time when most members of Congress don't even hold passports, when many senators really did learn their foreign affairs at the International House of pancakes, and when the Republican party has no foreign-policy vision or leadership whatsoever, there is a foreign-policy vacuum in America...
...Sex may not have much to do with the craft of acting," Gracen told a reporter in 1995, "but it does have a lot to do with Hollywood...
...Starr was vindicated last week, not that you'd know it from reading the newspapers or watching television...
...But here it comes again...
...trade representative and secretary of commerce, and now his Sexgate fireman...
...The week before, a circuit judge in South Carolina had denied another effort to have Starr punished for the same fictitious offense...
...In a February speech in Miami, Clinton chum Mickey Kantor (see above, "Lie with the Lions") ratcheted up the shocking figure to 40 percent...
...Massachusetts Democrat Marty Meehan and Connecticut Republican Chris Shays have been collecting signatures on a discharge petition...
...Candidates must be proficient users of QuarkXPress and Photoshop...
...After all, she never denied having sex with Clinton...
...A spelling gaffe was noticed primarily by our Texas subscribers: It's Neiman-Marcus, not Nieman-Marcus...
...Help Wanted_ The Weekly Standard is seeking a full-time assistant art director...
...No calls please...
Vol. 3 • April 1998 • No. 32
