Scrapbook

...7 Weekly Standard...

...Celebrations of lesbian rape are apparently another matter...

...The latest of which, oddly enough, has just been picked up and published by the Washington Monthly, an otherwise reasonably mainstream magazine printed on actual paper...

...Aside from his storied career as a novelist, Powell was a member of the London eating club known as "The Reactionaries," whose members included Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis...

...You remember: George Bush was supposed to have flown secretly to Paris by supersonic jet right in the middle of the 1980 campaign for a quick meeting to seal this corrupt bargain, and . . . And, well, the whole story was revealed to be laughably phony, and Parry then all but dropped from view...

...Either that, The Scrapbook would helpfully add, or reporters are simply trying to tell the truth, and Al Gore really is a résumé-polishing braggart...

...19, 1996, issue of The Weekly Standard ("Anthony Powell, Anti-Communist...

...But that was the one that started it all...

...But it turns out he has kept himself busy enough—as master of an Internet-based "investigative" outfit called Con-sortiumnews, where he has continued to spin out ludicrous conspiracy theories...

...Scrapbook Al Gore's New Defender When last the world heard from Robert Parry, the formerly half-respectable journalist (Newsweek, Frontline) was trumpeting his discovery of the "October Surprise," an alleged mega-conspiracy by which Republican greybeards bribed the Iranian mullahs to delay release of their U.S...

...I looked around the country for other sites like that...

...And much of A Dance to the Music of Time is spent, in Beichman's words, "skewering those of his countrymen who indulged in the most destructive passion of our time: the passion for Communist ideology and the Soviet Union...

...For it is Parry's latest brainstorm that Vice President Al Gore's reputation as a résumé-polishing braggart is the product of a self-conscious smear campaign by the establishment media...

...He complained he was being censored, which led to his getting fired and the article being killed...

...THE SCRAPBOOK has obtained the unpublished piece, which was certainly impolitic, since it provided verbatim quotes from the play, including the part in which an adult woman gets a 13-year-old girl drunk and has her way with her...

...But try as he tortuously does, Parry cannot explain away the unexpurgated text of the vice president's remarks last November to a group of high school students in New Hampshire...

...Parry wants to prove that the press has "exaggerated Al Gore's exaggerations" through "fabrication of damaging quotes and misrepresentation of his meanings...

...Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote on the subject in the Feb...

...In fact, it's so over the top that just hours after Lott proclaimed his affection for the movie, Irving was awarded the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and, in his acceptance speech, thanked both Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League...

...Because, Parry writes in the Monthly's April issue, "savaging Gore protects them from the 'liberal' label that can so damage a reporter's career...

...I enjoyed that tremendously...

...Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee—that was the one that you didn't hear of...

...Why the Monthly would embarrass itself by association with a fringe character like Parry is a mystery known only to its editors...

...They thought the columnist's repeated attacks on the Women's Center (which sponsored the show last year) "hurt the newspaper's credibility...

...The meeting was closed to the press and the public, in apparent violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which was last violated when Hillary Clinton was planning her makeover of the health care system...

...Rave Reviews Only, Please When Robert Swope, a senior at Georgetown University, submitted his regular column to the school newspaper last week criticizing the campus production of The Vagina Monologues, the editors of the Hoya were swift in rejecting it...

...Asked by Tim Russert, "Who's going to win the Oscars...

...But The Cider House Rules, adapted by John Irving from his novel of the same name, is an unabashed amicus brief for abortion, and not the middle-of-the-road "safe, legal, and rare" type either...

...Alerted in the late 1970s to a toxic waste dump in Toone, Tennessee, Gore told his adolescent audience, "I called for a congressional investigation and hearing...

...But the results are vastly entertaining for connoisseurs of the peculiar psychological process by which engagé, left-leaning scribblers have transformed themselves into apologists for anything and anyone associated with the Clinton White House...

...For more on The Vagina Monologues, see David Brooks's "Our Bodies, Our Surgeons," in the Feb...

...The New York Times devoted generous space to his obituary as well as a photo of the author at his home but, as Arnold Beichman points out, failed to mention his political views—namely his staunch anticommu-nism...

...Best movie...

...Georgetown was last in the news when the leaders of the Jesuit institution were resisting a student movement to restore crucifixes to the classroom...

...Powell, Beichman rightly noted, "does not deserve to have his passion for freedom and his enduring opposition to totalitarianism ignored...

...Lott replied, "Well, I saw The Cider House Rules...

...Memo to Lott staff: Make sure the boss doesn't recommend MTV's Undressed for an Emmy...

...embassy captives until after Ronald Reagan could defeat Jimmy Carter in November 1980...

...Guess it all depends on what the meaning of the word "found" is...

...I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal...

...Which is what Parry's supposedly exculpatory analysis of Gore's "claim that he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump," the centerpiece of his article, actually suggests...

...Trent Lott, Cider Fan Trent Lott surprised a lot of people last week on Meet the Press with his Oscar pick...

...Anthony Powell, 1905-2000 The English novelist Anthony Powell (pronounced "pole"), best known for his 12-volume masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, died last Tuesday at 94...

...Either that, or reporters are "venting residual anger over President Clinton's survival of the Monica Lewinsky scandal...

...It was great...

...Why would ordinary reporters enlist in such a campaign...

...Swope finds it incongruous that the nation's oldest Catholic university is staging a play in which audiences cheer a lesbian seduction...

...And for some reason, says a bemused Swope, administrators still pretend to be baffled when conservative students complain that the school is losing its Catholic identity...

...Now movies are entertainment, and it's juvenile to impart political meaning to every niggling little film...

...Gore was not claiming to have discovered and first publicized Love Canal, sayeth Robert Parry...

...Swope says that since October, he has written only twice on women's issues, which may have been two times too many...

...A HUD consultant told Berlau that the meeting represented "the restoration of the [HUD-China] relationship in the areas of housing and urban development after a 10-year hiatus...

...housing industry types were glad-handing Chinese government officials around HUD's table...

...When it's all over, the grateful girl says, "I'll never need to rely on a man...

...With its distaste for openness, it's no wonder the Clinton administration is so close to Beijing...

...He makes the obvious point that if a man "had gotten her liquored-up and then had sex with her, rational people . . . would consider that rape...

...The China Syndrome Further evidence that the Clinton administration's propitiation of China is creating a more Beijing-like Washington rather than the other way round: Reporter John Berlau of Investor's Business Daily tried unsuccessfully to attend a meeting last week at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in which U.S...