SCRAPBOOK
DO-NO-HARM BOB Whom should Americans "thank for the country's extraordinary eight-year economic boom?" Or, put another way, who "helped create the boom by persuading President Clinton to balance...
...Nine-year-old Karl Bauman, being a purple belt in Tae Kwan Do and a fan of the martial arts, submitted what he thought was a dignified fortune: "You will die with honor...
...The most interesting entry...
...And Paul Blustein of the Washington Post added adjectives like steely and the rest...
...When he got an award as policymaker of the year in 1996, he said it should have gone to the economy itself, which was soaring on its own...
...Take a bow, Bob Rubin...
...Words like "treason" get in the way of such a discussion, because they "make it difficult to draw the distinctions necessary for exploring historical complexities...
...His parents say it's because he's shy...
...no other consultant pulled down as much...
...Mostly he was a man who got out of the way—of the American economy, that is...
...Who is "steely" and "respected" and "market savvy" and blessed with "sureness of purpose...
...But we like to think he's just doing the manly thing...
...As the San Francisco Chronicle's Carolyn Lochhead reported last week, Feinstein in an interview was "strongly supportive, ticking off the number of air sorties run, the percentages of Yugoslavia's oil refining and ammunition production that had been destroyed and the number of clear nights that allied pilots had experienced...
...Bill Bradley's single biggest expense, $53,647, was for fund-raising...
...A typically credulous New York Times editorial actually offhandedly gave the game away when it noted that "more powerful than the statistical data are the perceptions of the women interviewed...
...More data from the Federal Election Commission filings of the presidential candidates, compiled by New Hampshire political consultant Chip Griffin, whose Web site www.griffinsg.com usefully organizes all the numbers: George W. Bush may not have officially announced he's running, but you wouldn't know it from his FEC report...
...They were just incurable romantics who sided with Stalin...
...His parents are appealing the suspension...
...As the economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth pointed out the other day in a piece for Investor's Business Daily, the MIT findings depended both on an arbitrary assumption that all MIT tenured professors are equally "exceptional" and on a fuzzy redefinition of discrimination to mean a "pattern of powerful but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty...
...So what's the truth about Rubin...
...John McCain, hardly one to shape his positions for public opinion, spent a whopping $108,000 on "polling...
...Mike Jensen of NBC News credited Rubin with most of these achievements after the treasury secretary announced his resignation last week...
...NOT ROCKET SCIENCE MIT made headlines earlier this year by claiming to have proved a pattern of discrimination against its female faculty...
...It shows a $220,225 payment to chief aide Karl Rove—recently profiled in these pages—for "consulting fee and expenses...
...Naturally, the press was unable to understand such a passive accomplishment...
...That was before the Clinton policy ran headlong into Feinstein's other favorite cause: kowtowing to the Chinese government...
...For Feinstein, who once compared U.S...
...He meant something positive—to be a hero and die with honor," Karl's mother told the Cleveland Plain Dealer...
...This gives Rove bragging rights...
...There are a number of other revealing figures...
...Dianne Feinstein has been one of the most ardent...
...human rights violations to Beijing's (because Kent State=Tiananmen Square), the unfortunate bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade meant "the mission ought to be brought to an end...
...SEMPER DIFI Among congressional supporters of the NATO bombing and the Clinton administration's Kosovo policy, Sen...
...Both of these sources have demonstrated beyond cavil that large numbers of American Communists spied for Moscow before, during, and after World War II...
...Right...
...At a hearing, Karl declined to explain himself in a sustained manner...
...Bad idea...
...WHO'S MAKING HOW MUCH...
...Caine walked Karl to the principal's office, where he was promptly suspended for "writing a note threatening in nature...
...And who cut interest rates, slashed joblessness, and generated one of the greatest bull markets ever...
...Isserman prefers to say that some American Communists had "a romance of the clandestine...
...And who says we're going to die...
...It can't be a good sign, for example, that Al Gore's biggest expense, $72,634, was for legal advice...
...Lamar Alexander's decision to spend $2,100 on career consulting...
...Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan is one Washingtonian who knows better...
...The media were impressed with the study because it came bearing the prestigious imprimatur of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and because it purported to be "scientific...
...You can't win wars, she said, "by tossing bombs around like popcorn...
...is a history of heroic American Communists during World War II that you might say was rendered obsolete by the Venona intercepts...
...On April 30, Amanda Caine asked each of the students in her third-grade class at McDowell Elementary to write fortune-cookie fortunes, which were then placed in a pile for a random drawing...
...Unduly impressed, it turns out...
...Furchtgott-Roth, co-author of Women's Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America, observes "it is ironic that MIT is now engaged in self-flagellation of its hiring policies, because, unlike most top research universities . . . it has been open to women for most of its history...
...This is a bit inconvenient for revisionist historians like Isserman, whose best known work, "Which Side Were You On...
...Or, put another way, who "helped create the boom by persuading President Clinton to balance the budget...
...Isserman admits that "facts are stubborn things," and that, yes, his previous work was somewhat akin to staging Hamlet without the prince, but no matter...
...so it was probably inevitable that Karl would be misunderstood...
...In its view, Washington runs the economy...
...But language like this is increasingly anachronistic, in Hudson as elsewhere (What's all this about honor...
...And by the way, it was Dick Morris, the political adviser, who pressured Clinton to move to a balanced budget, not Rubin...
...SUSPENDED WITH HONOR In Hudson, Ohio, they'll be having no more of this nonsense about "honor," thank you very much...
...Dan Quayle, meanwhile, has shelled out $56,275 for "Internet services" . . . you can supply your own witticism...
...Oh, and he wants you to know, that there's an upside to the story: "Of the approximately 50,000 party members in those years, 49,700 were not involved in spying...
...Historians," he intones, "need to ask other kinds of questions, the kinds that would not necessarily be of interest to prosecuting attorneys...
...THE ROMANCE OF TREASON For a minor masterpiece of evasion, check out Maurice Isserman's recent review in the New York Times Book Review of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's new book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America...
...Klehr and Haynes have spent much of the decade doing yeoman work, mining the archives of the American Communist party and the decrypted Soviet telegraph traffic from the 1940s known as "Venona...
...When a classmate drew the fortune from the pile, she burst into tears...
...Feinstein's support for any Clinton administration policy is apparently conditioned on its never coming into conflict with China's desires...
...So give Rubin credit for keeping Washington's and Clinton's hands off the economy, but no more...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 34
