SCRAPBOOK
Scrapbook JOHN KERRY’S NICOTINE FIT “We are going to give a new definition to hypocrisy in the U.S. Senate today,” Sen. John Kerry portentously announced during debate last week over the tobacco...
...Gerald Solomon and Henry Hyde issued angry denunciations of the pilots’ treatment, with Hyde demanding that Secretary of Defense Cohen “actively intervene” to “do justice to the victims of this embarrassing and avoidable debacle...
...Pixley, as Tucker Carlson reported in a WEEKLY STANDARD cover story in January, is a District of Columbia woman who smothered her infant daughter to death several years ago because the baby “wouldn’t stop crying...
...Days after the story appeared, the one-time Boys from Syracuse took their fight to the east steps of the Capitol, where, after a press conference, 15 former unit pilots returned over 150 medals and awards that included seven Distinguished Flying Crosses for perilous sorties flown during the Gulf War...
...What will likely never come is a clean admission from Guard leaders that their behavior was unconscionable...
...Scowcroft batted an impressive .750, with 21 of the 28 former big shots signing on...
...John Kerry portentously announced during debate last week over the tobacco bill...
...After a disastrous year-long training stint in the F-16 (in which Parker got lost during flights, forgot to aim her missiles, and nearly killed herself), she withdrew from the program, but complained to New York Guard brass that she’d been treated unfairly...
...THE FRIENDS OF BRENT SCOWCROFT As promised on this page last week, an update on Brent Scowcroft’s invitation to 28 worthies to join him, Presidents Bush, Carter, and Ford, Henry Kissinger, and Lawrence Eagleburger in signing a treacly “Open Letter to the U.S...
...After the protest, a Fenimore spokesman told the Air Force Times, “Any news reporter who takes the time to study the findings of the various investigations will surely conclude the disciplinary actions were justified...
...Kerry objected to the idea that raising the price of cigarettes should be called a tax...
...Ever since J. Bottum’s Casual “You Can’t Eat Alger Hiss” appeared in our June 1 issue, with its account of his toddler daughter’s destruction of his Greek lexicon, dictionaries of ancient Greek have come pouring in from concerned and generous readers—one from a sociology professor who taught himself Homeric Greek, another from a retired writer who insists that all educated people are fluent in Greek and Latin, still another from a classicist’s widow who is sure her husband would want our Books & Arts editor to have it...
...Cowardly New York Guard leaders (under the stewardship of George Pataki’s adjutant general, John Fenimore) saw to it that 12 pilots were fired, transferred, or assigned to career-killing jobs below their ranks...
...After a fruitless three years of the pilots’ protests going unheard, their fight has now been joined...
...Jacquelyn Parker, the Pentagon pin-up girl for combat gender integration who helped destroy the careers of several distinguished Air Force pilots from the 174th Air National Guard Fighter Wing, once known as the “Boys from Syracuse...
...That intervention may come with or without Cohen’s compliance...
...I tried to understand the drama that the—your life had been very bad,” the judge explained to Pixley after the sentencing...
...Last week, though, the Pentagon assured Congress that it would release its findings no later than July 9 (THE SCRAPBOOK is predicting a July 4 press release...
...And also both of the men whose names were misspelled in Scowcroft’s original invitation, Lloyd Bentsen and Caspar Weinberger...
...If the tax is “purely voluntary,” to use the senator’s eloquent phrase, then that must mean that buying and smoking cigarettes is purely voluntary...
...BACON BITS It was on March 13 that the Pentagon’s public-affairs office released information from Linda Tripp’s confidential security file, in violation of the federal Privacy Act...
...Sadly, one fears this won’t be the last time Latrena Pixley’s name makes the newspaper...
...Roscoe Bartlett have attached an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill that calls for the Defense Department’s inspector general to examine the case, then to report the findings to the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Committee on National Security...
...If this is a tax, this is the one tax in America that nobody has to pay—nobody— unless you buy a pack of cigarettes...
...Only days after, the department announced an internal investigation...
...Hypocrisy, thy name is Kerry...
...Hmm...
...It wasn’t an original idea...
...THE SCRAPBOOK tips its hat to the Magnificent Seven for their principles, but wonders whether Scowcroft might raise his batting average in the future by investing in a spell-checker...
...And if this is the case, then smokers are responsible for their own habits and are neither in the grip of an addiction nor under the spell of advertising campaigns, billion-dollar or otherwise...
...Who resisted his entreaties...
...Henry Fowler, Melvin Laird, Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle, and Donald Rumsfeld...
...A couple of years ago, Mitchell did the same thing, ordering Pixley to report to Hannah House...
...And so the Massachusetts Democrat did...
...We did, and we don’t...
...You had gone through the kind of crisis that would cause a person to do things, and your mind gets warped, and you get depressed, you get down, you get oppressed and you do things...
...Follow the reasoning...
...Congress” aimed at overawing congressional critics of President Clinton’s Tiananmen Square summit...
...The question then will be whether President Clinton or defense secretary Bill Cohen will hold anyone—such as Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon— accountable...
...Coincidence...
...A KILLER AND HER BOY Earlier this month, a Superior Court judge in Washington, D.C., named George Mitchell ruled that convicted murderer Latrena Pixley “is not a threat to her son’s physical or emotional well-being” and so is fit to take custody of the boy, a 2-year-old named Cornelious who is currently living in Maryland with a woman he calls “Mommy...
...Reps...
...Only problem was, Pixley never showed up, and the judge was forced to send her back to jail...
...Solomon and Rep...
...The letter appeared as a full-page ad, paid for by the “United States-China Education Foundation,” in last Wednesday’s New York Times and Washington Post...
...To use the word ‘tax,’” he intoned, “is to use the word that has been the centerpiece of a billion-dollar advertising campaign...
...The events of the illegal leak took a few hours, but the investigation has now taken more than three months...
...With thanks to all, we have to insist that it stop: What with all these lexicons lying around, THE SCRAPBOOK is starting to feel guilty that its classical education began and ended with pig Latin...
...If so, you’ll be able to make sense of Judge Mitchell’s latest idea—to send Pixley and her son to Hannah House, a supervised group home in Washington...
...THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE In our May 18 issue, Matt Labash reported the story of Maj...
...At the time, Judge Mitchell sentenced Pixley to probation for the second-degree murder...
...This is a tax that is purely voluntary...
...THE SCRAPBOOK happens to believe this is true, but the tobacco bill the senator was defending had no room in it for the concepts of individual responsibility and voluntary action...
Vol. 3 • June 1998 • No. 41
