SCRAPBOOK
Scrapbook WILL CONGRESS LET WES CLARK FADE AWAY? One of the signal failures of the Republican Congress has been its neglect of oversight responsibilities and opportunities. God knows, the Clinton...
...John McCain correctly identifies as a terrible precedent that "will influence other senior officers to place political considerations before military necessities and deprive future presidents of the counsel they need to best protect our security...
...Please mail your resume to: Business Manager, The Weekly Standard, 1150 17th St., NW, Suite 505, Washington, D.C...
...The magazine was cleared, and one could say all's well that ends well...
...Or fax to 202-293-4901...
...None in this case though...
...The special counsel questioned the publisher, editor, managing editor, and some writers...
...It gets better...
...Clymer asserts, with no evidence, that "the nation's health is still vastly better" thanks to Kennedy, and that he "made elections cleaner with the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974...
...He examined the magazine's financial records...
...FREEDOM OF THE PRESS WE LIKE The American Spectator, the conservative monthly, has now been cleared of the spurious charge that it participated in a scheme to pay off an anti-Clinton witness, David Hale, in the Whitewater case...
...Ray LaHood chimed in that Forbes's old staff hadn't needed any prompting to abandon Forbes, he spluttered, "Oh that's baloney" and then went even further: "Many of [my old staff] called my office and called me in tears...
...And the ranking Republican says, "Never mind...
...So here you have the commander who just won a war being dumped by the Clinton administration because he wanted to fight it in the right way and gave honest and candid advice to his superiors about how to do this...
...Could the mainstream media really be so biased and petty as to let ideology and distaste govern its response...
...2 Weekly Standard) appeared on CNN's Crossfire last week claiming that his old staff hadn't quit en masse because he suddenly became a Democrat...
...Apparently that stuffy old-school thinking has gone by the boards...
...TWELVE ANGRY EX-STAFFERS The temperamental ex-Republican congressman and sometime Soup Nazi Michael Forbes (see "A New Democrat" by Tucker Carlson in the Aug...
...The issue, one would think, is not who remembers her name, but what Kennedy did...
...At no time did anyone in Republican House Leadership ever, repeat ever, threaten or bully the former staff either individually or collectively to leave employment in his office...
...Joseph Ralston...
...John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, immediately hastened to assure one and all that he would cause no problem in the confirmation process for Clark's successor, Gen...
...Here you have what Sen...
...A dozen former staffers issued a statement shortly after Forbes made his remarks, calling his allegations "an unequivocal lie...
...As for the sobbing mother who called Forbes for advice...
...Last week's edition of Time featured a profile of Ted Kennedy written by Adam Clymer, the Times's veteran Capitol Hill reporter...
...It's one thing to come after Mike Forbes, but to come after my staff and bully them and require them to quit . . . was really unconscionable...
...Instead, "Republican bullies attacked my staff and pressured them to leave...
...When fellow guest Rep...
...House International Relations chairman Ben Gilman promises to battle the administration on this front, too...
...According to the Forbes dozen, she neither cried, nor called, nor is a registered Democrat...
...What comes to mind is the simple explanation: Blumenthal is liberal, the Spectator conservative (and aggressively anti-Clinton...
...But imagine if some other news organization had to reveal its inner workings to prosecutors because of some flimsy charge...
...Nonetheless, Clymer laments that Kennedy's "failures outside the Senate have drawn more public attention than his successes inside it...
...Why the double standard...
...And she didn't know what to do...
...Just the opposite...
...I have a single mom with two kids who just bought a house—who happens to be a registered Democrat—and she got calls over the weekend and she was in tears...
...Normally, the national press, media critics, and various journalistic groups— the Society of Professional Journalists, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press—rush indignant to the defense of journalists when they are even tangential-ly scrutinized by prosecutors...
...Republican House Leadership, specifically Congressman Tom Davis and his staff at the National Republican Congressional Committee, Republican National Chairman Jim Nicholson, Republican Congressman John Sweeney and Brookhaven Republican Town Chairman John Bivona as well as dozens of other Republican officials have been more than generous with their support of us...
...In fact, quite the opposite is true...
...Clymer begins with a startling bit of moral equivalence, noting that Kennedy's senatorial achievements are responsible for "changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne...
...Clymer closes by proclaiming Kennedy not just "the leading Senator of his time" but also "one of the greats in the history of this singular institution...
...A notable exception to this general congressional passivity has been Jesse Helms's Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which steps up to the plate this week with a hearing on the administration's disgraceful recent performance, in giving the back of its hand to democratic Taiwan...
...Contrast this with the yowls from the press when White House aide Sidney Blumenthal claimed he'd been questioned before a Starr grand jury about his contacts with reporters...
...But when a special counsel, appointed by Kenneth Starr, targeted the Spectator and its now-defunct Arkansas Project, which funded probes of Bill Clinton, there wasn't a peep of protest from the establishment media...
...Kennedy's vile dema-goguery on that occasion goes unremarked...
...The profile, an excerpt from Cly-mer's forthcoming biography of Kennedy, is breathtaking in its adulation of the Massachusetts senator...
...Here you have an opportunity for Congress to probe fundamental problems in the Clinton administration's management of national security...
...It was unbelievable...
...20036...
...God knows, the Clinton administration does enough appalling or at least embarrassing things to keep the congressional committees busy, but most of them seem remarkably uninterested in performing what is actually an important public service, as well as one with considerable potential for political mileage...
...SOCIAL CLYMER The Scrapbook doesn't pretend to understand newsroom politics at the New York Times but dimly recalls a tradition at the paper of record of pretending that its reporters, as a matter of policy, should stay above the fray—should not appear as partisan hacks on television, not cheerlead for their favorite Democratic politicians, and above all not make such a partisan spectacle of themselves as to confirm Reed Irvine's deepest suspicions of liberal bias...
...Clymer also praises Kennedy for having blocked Robert Bork's Supreme Court confirmation...
...Perhaps it's time for a new chairman...
...But there is no sign of congressional initiative with respect to the other recent administration foreign policy disgrace, the firing of Gen...
...Outrage...
...Kennedy should just hire Clymer and make an honest staff assistant out of him...
...Duties include answering phones, greeting visitors, sorting mail, and handling back-issue requests...
...Which raises a question: Where was the outrage...
...Wesley Clark as NATO commander...
...Blumen-thal, it turned out, was lying, but the Spectator really was frisked by investigators...
...HELP WANTED The Weekly Standard has an entry-level opening for a staff assistant/receptionist...
...You betcha...
Vol. 4 • August 1999 • No. 44
