SCRAPBOOK
Scrapbook THE PRESIDENT'S JOKES Who says Bill Clinton's not a lucky man? The House Judiciary Committee, in its release of supplemental materials from Kenneth Starr's inquiry, publishes any number...
...And then he . . ." and at this point in the transcript, a long joke-length section, no doubt reflecting poorly on the liberal sensitivities of the president, has been deleted with magic marker...
...Blumenthal responded: "I appreciate your statement...
...Yes, Sidney volunteered the names of all those news organizations...
...Thanks to recently released grand-jury testimony, we now know that shortly before Lyons went on Meet the Press, Clinton himself was laying a similar explanation on Blumenthal...
...But a duty is owed to the historical record...
...Yeah, right...
...Far from a seducer of interns, Lyons explained to Tim Russert, Clinton is merely "the Alpha male of the United States of America," a man so sexually appealing to females that "a certain irreducible number of women are going to act batty around him...
...No wonder...
...Clinton as hapless stalkee...
...If you guessed Sidney Blumenthal, you must be a close reader of this magazine...
...MS...
...Linda Tripp tells Monica that President Clinton "and Bruce Lindsey tell raunchy jokes all the time to each other...
...I have no idea...
...Blumenthal warned the president to stay away from Lewinsky, but the big-hearted Clinton protested that the cold shoulder is easier said than given...
...According to Lewinsky, Clinton told her "the Jewish American princess and apple one...
...That would be Margaret Ray, whose career as a professional celebrity stalker came to an abrupt end last week when she kneeled in front of an oncoming train in western Colorado...
...But the president's JAP joke (as in Jewish American Princess) is blacked out by the Judiciary committee...
...We would hope that you will understand the seriousness of our work, and not in any way use it for any purpose other than the purpose that is intended, and that you would really represent us the way that events happened in this room...
...Monica's ethnic humor makes it into the transcript...
...MS...
...That's not a big deal...
...We are very concerned about that fact that during your last visit an inaccurate representation of the events that happened was retold on the steps of the courthouse...
...Where could Lyons possibly have come up with ideas that ludicrous...
...Case in point: Monica and the president swapped off-color jokes...
...It's easy to sympathize with the anger of grand jurors when they saw Blumenthal's dishonest performance after his February questioning...
...News, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Observer, and there may have been a few others...
...But Blumenthal was warming up for his fascism-in-America press conference later that afternoon, and so volunteered this gratuitously loquacious answer: "If reporters called me or I spoke with reporters, I would tell them to call the DNC to get those talking points, and those included news organizations ranging from CNN, CBS, ABC, New York Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, New York Observer, L.A...
...MS...
...This somehow doesn't sound likely to be a very presidential joke, though The Scrapbook must admit it has never been privy to this particular joke and may be mistaken...
...He wasn't "forced to answer questions about conversations" with any of them...
...Did he laugh...
...According to Matthews, Mike McCurry, who was then Kerrey's press secretary, urged his boss to expose Clinton, but Kerrey said, "I'm not gonna rat on a buddy...
...And there's still more on the Lewinsky-Tripp tapes...
...The House Judiciary Committee, in its release of supplemental materials from Kenneth Starr's inquiry, publishes any number of embarrassing confidences of Monica Lewinsky, but it delicately and prudishly "redacts" the equivalent material from the president, citing "privacy...
...TRIPP: You idiot...
...Monica Lewinsky came at me and made a sexual demand on me," Blumenthal says the president told him...
...MS...
...LEWINSKY: Yeah, he laughed...
...I want to help people...
...What wasn't reported at the time was that Clinton told the first dirty joke but only Kerrey got caught...
...The exchange was partially captured on C-SPAN, and Chris Matthews wrote up Kerrey's half of the exchange for the San Francisco Examiner—a crude joke about lesbians and Jerry Brown— damaging Kerrey's chances for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination...
...When he returned on June 25, the foreperson took the unusual step of rebuking him: The work that we are doing here is very serious, and the integrity to our work as representatives of the people of the United States is very important to us...
...But today, I was forced to answer questions about conversations, as part of my job, with the New York Times, CNN, CBS, Time magazine, U.S...
...According to someone who knows them both, Blumenthal's explanation quickly reached Lyons, and then, by the magic of network television, millions of Americans who happened to be watching NBC on Sunday morning...
...Blumenthal also wants to help people, especially shills for the White House like Gene Lyons...
...Why do Jewish men like to watch pornos backwards...
...Monica as stalker...
...THE WAGES OF SID (II) Speaking of Sidney Blumenthal: For all that most working journalists in Washington professed to loathe their former colleague when he went to work for Bill and Hillary, they sure did allow themselves to be manipulated by him last February...
...It's very difficult for me to do that," Clinton explained...
...And Blumenthal poured it on when he emerged from his grand-jury testimony on February 26...
...Clinton, ever slippery, remarked of Kerrey's troubles at the time: "As far as I'm concerned, it was an off-the-record conversation...
...Blumenthal was asked before the grand jury if he had ever distributed White House talking points on Monica Lewinsky to "anyone outside the White House...
...This is the second time that Bill Clinton has had a close encounter with politically dangerous humor...
...Subpoenaed by Kenneth Starr, Blumenthal disingenuously whipped up a frenzy over endangered civil liberties in America—and most of the press uncritically took his word for it...
...I never imagined," he hyperventilated, "that in America I would be hauled before a federal grand jury to answer questions about my conversations with members of the media...
...Or fax to 202-4636656...
...LEWINSKY: So that they can watch the prostitute give back the money...
...Laughter...
...TRIPP: Pornos backwards...
...Let's roll the tape: "MS...
...Times...
...But that's Sid: dishonest to the last drop...
...Monica Lewinsky, for instance—who, Lyons said, had been transformed by the president's sex appeal into "someone rather like the woman who followed David Letterman around...
...The left-wing conspiracy creaks onward...
...The New York Times headlined its story "President's Adviser Ordered to Divulge Contact With Press" and quoted Blumenthal as saying his subpoena represented "an outrageous attempt to silence all reporting that might be skeptical or critical of Ken Starr...
...Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry weighed in that Starr's questioning of Blumenthal was "potentially dangerous...
...THE WAGES OF SID (I) This past February, Gene Lyons, a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the most zombie-like member of the Clinton cult, went on Meet the Press to clear up a few misconceptions about what he called the president's "totally innocent" relationship with Monica Lewinsky...
...Lawyers typically advise their clients to give "yes" or "no" answers under oath...
...Some of them go completely bananas...
...In 1991, Clinton was swapping jokes with his Democratic primary opponent Bob Kerrey...
...Thanks to Blumenthal's agitprop, the White House had one of its few good PR weeks...
...Readers (or Bruce Lindsey) are invited to mail in the one about the apple to Scrapbook, 1150 17th St., NW, Suite 505, Washington, D.C...
...LEWINSKY: I told [the president] this joke my dad just told me...
...or else you know Sid personally...
...Ray's sad death seems as good an excuse as any to take a closer look at Gene Lyons's comments on Meet the Press...
...It was a lie...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 6
