Scrapbook
Scrapbook Boehner v. McDermott SCRAPBOOK fans will remember a Dec. 21, 1996, conference call during which members of the House Republican leadership discussed pending Ethics Committee actions...
...10, 1997—by the New York Times, in a front-page story under the byline of reporter Adam Clymer...
...Then there's this...
...Morris writes that Reagan was "trying hard to look infuriated" throughout his appearance at the Wall, but managed only "a look of mild petulance...
...And that was in dissent...
...Shouldn't the House now take steps to expel him...
...To which, The Scrapbook can only i say: Bring back the professional politicians...
...The Wit and Wisdom ofJesse Ventura The problem with the Reform party, as Paul Gigot archly pointed out last week, is that it's not a political party, it's a Halloween party...
...The saliva gland...
...McDermott knew the transaction was illegal at the time he entered into it...
...Morris v. the Berlin Wall Elsewhere in this issue, Robert D. Novak dismantles Edmund Morris's bizarre "memoir" of Ronald Reagan...
...After all, the congressman has not been sued for anything he said...
...On the law, Sentelle sided with Hogan...
...What speech...
...Morris calls the speech a "rhetorical opportunity missed...
...Douglas Ginsburg found no Supreme Court precedent for the proposition that full First Amendment protections apply to unlawfully obtained information...
...And now another high-level setback: President Clinton, for the second time in as many years, has cited "Tocqueville...
...The military-industrial complex...
...Maybe...
...And its source...
...Why is that...
...How so...
...A sample: On God: "Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers...
...In fact, the crowd, by all accounts, numbered more than 10,000...
...Randolph asked, mockingly...
...And now, finally, as a result of that litigation, McDermott would appear to be in trouble...
...The Martins pled guilty to felony violation of the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act and paid a fine...
...In fact, shortly before he began his remarks, the president was informed that East German police had forcibly dispersed a group of spectators on the Wall's Communist side...
...A lone jogger who saw a few dead monarchs in Central Park...
...he has been sued for delivering an illegal recording to a reporter...
...The Wit and Wisdom of Al Gore "For the environmentalists here, the first word I learned to spell was green—G-R-E-E-N...
...McDer-mott's behavior in turning over the tapes doubtless conveyed a message, expressing something about him," Randolph dryly noted...
...Two weeks ago, however, the Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C., Circuit rather brutally overruled Hogan and reinstated Boehner's suit...
...Clymer had obtained a tape recording of the conversation from the Ethics Committee's then ranking Democrat, Rep...
...Butterflies Are Expendable Winner of The Scrapbook's prize for boneheaded environmental feeble-mindedness is the story in the New York Times metro section of Sept...
...Clinton v. Tocqueville For four long years now, Professor John J. Pitney Jr...
...The First Amendment is not a license to break the law...
...And the butterflies...
...Circuit has as much as announced that Rep...
...McDermott did not in fact lawfully obtain the tape," Ginsburg wrote separately in concurrence...
...And did so with particularly choice words for Jim McDermott...
...Is that because we're not good, but we're evil...
...Judge Ray Randolph, writing the majority opinion, refused even to accept the possibility that McDermott's "speech" rights were at issue in the first place...
...But the message is not a flattering one: "In receiving the tape, McDermott took part in an illegal transaction...
...As was the fact that Reagan was incensed by it...
...Is it because we're not smart, but we're stupid...
...In other words, according to Morris, Ronald Reagan should have cited, at the Berlin Wall, an over-anthologized poem about the virtue of walls...
...Now, the spraying is successfully wiping out mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus, which has killed 43 people in New York state...
...Ba-da-boom!] On who killed JFK: "I believe we did...
...They will remember this phone call because a full account and partial transcript of it was published a few weeks later—on Jan...
...The news has been uniformly bad...
...27 (brought to our attention by alert reader Jonathan Balsam), headlined "Malathion Spraying May Affect Monarch Butterflies...
...Reagan "could have read Robert Frost's poem on the subject, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' to simple and shattering effect...
...But The Scrapbook's friend, Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, has a footnote to add: Morris's ludicrous mistreatment of Reagan's celebrated "Berlin Wall" speech (which Robinson drafted...
...But McDermott's criminal expo-sure—his disclosure of the recording to Clymer was on its face another felony— remained unresolved, the subject of a typically slow-footed and partisan-tinged Justice Department investigation...
...of Claremont-McKenna College has provided The Scrapbook with dispatches from the front lines of the war against "fake Tocqueville"—the most widely circulating falsely attributed quotation in all America...
...Let's go to the videotape, this from last week's White House prayer breakfast—the one at which Clinton announced that he's still undergoing faith-based "counseling" for...
...Jim McDermott of Washington state...
...The D.C...
...Who had himself obtained the tape from a Florida couple, John and Alice Martin...
...And Gore wonders why his campaign's floundering...
...21, 1996, conference call during which members of the House Republican leadership discussed pending Ethics Committee actions concerning then speaker Newt Gingrich...
...the damn thing refuses to die...
...You know which gland...
...John Boehner of Ohio, then chairman of the House Republican Conference...
...Here's the story's thesis: "While this year's butterfly migration started off with near-record numbers [perhaps a hundred million], no one can know if it would have been larger without the spraying...
...And that was before the self-immolating Playboy interview by Jesse Ventura, governor of Minnesota and the party's leading elected official...
...Who had made the tape by illegally intercepting, on a police scanner, the cell-phone transmission of Rep...
...But his two colleagues on the circuit court were not so generous...
...district judge Thomas Hogan had initially dismissed Boehner's lawsuit, arguing that the privacy law was unconstitutional as applied to McDer-mott: that McDermott had a First Amendment right to deliver an illegal tape recording to the New York Times...
...Schoolchildren in science fairs do better than this...
...On obesity: "I love fat people...
...Al Gore on the campaign trail, as reported by ; the New York Times's Katharine Q. Seelye...
...Jim McDermott is a felon...
...Here was Judge David Sentelle: "Knowing of these felonies, a Member of the Congress of the United States, the elected representative of his people, the sworn servant of the law, dealt with the felons, received from them their feloniously obtained communications, and converted it to his own use...
...On the afterlife: "I would like to come back as a 38 double-D bra...
...Dutch calls the audience for this speech "too small . . . to make for genuine drama...
...The incident was reported at the time...
...U.S...
...Every fat person says it's not their fault, that they have gland trouble...
...So in 1998, Boehner sued McDer-mott for civil damages, as the privacy law allows...
...you know, his "problem": "Now, if you go back to what de Tocqueville said [actually it was some anonymous twentieth century speech-writer], that 'America is great because America is good,' and then you realize somehow we've managed to make the most of this incredibly complex, modern economy, it seems strange, if the murder rate is still higher here and the accidental death rate is exponentially higher...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 4
