Scrapbook
Scrapbook George W., Speaking Truth To Power Even in Washington, this city of strivers, fame often arrives unbidden, and so it descended early last week on Adam Clymer, a long-serving and...
...Remember Vice President Scrooge...
...And she further claimed that it was an actionable tort—many actionable torts, in fact—for Isikoff, after he discovered her truthlessness, to have withdrawn from Steele his alleged promise that her name would stay a secret...
...How might that be possible, one wonders...
...In our Nexis search, only four of the 162 stories we turned up mentioned the Gores' embarrassing 1997 tax returns, which showed a total of $353 in giving from an income of almost $200,000...
...One "news analysis" credited a Bush TV ad with "zero accuracy...
...Here's the lede of another story from April: "Texas has had one of the nation's worst public health records for decades...
...Apparently, Unz's opponents thought Proposition 227 would actually make things worse...
...For nigh unto 30 years, millions of California's immigrant schoolchildren had been granted the "helping gift" of all-day bilingual education...
...For no sooner was Bush's insight shown on TV than Internet websites and other news sources began filling with evidence that Bush was right, big time...
...Which result isn't surprising, of course...
...The real curiosity is this: Steele's ludicrous litigation, all along publicly applauded by the president's defenders, lasted more than two full years...
...A handful of California educators have warmly welcomed this success, honorably congratulated Unz, and freely acknowledged the error of their past objections...
...Ron Unz deserves a Nobel Prize...
...Don't Knock Unz In 1998, Silicon Valley businessman Ron Unz wrote California's Proposition 227 and almost single-handedly planned and financed the campaign that got it passed...
...If the state's Spanish-speaking students were no longer taught in their native tongue, the president warned, they would be condemned to "intellectual purgatory" for the rest of their lives...
...But since George W. Bush became governor in 1995, he has not made health a priority, his aides acknowledge...
...More than a quarter of its residents have no health insurance [etc...
...In other words, according to Steele: One has a legally enforceable right to deliver anonymous misinformation to a journalist...
...In a coolly brutal 25-page opinion, U.S...
...Unz's winning initiative effectively abolished the state's bilingual education programs in favor of a cold-turkey "English immersion" curriculum...
...THE SCRAPBOOK considers it an appalling invasion of privacy, not to mention an invitation to the worst sort of Tartuffery, that we require our political leaders to disclose their charitable giving in their tax forms...
...Steele's logic was truly bizarre...
...Consequently, appallingly few of them ever learned to speak Eng-lish—or do math or science or much of anything else...
...Her lies to Newsweek were "the epitome of bad faith...
...Like the Gores, the Cheneys will no doubt ratchet up their giving next year to achieve a respectable overall percentage...
...Taking the stage at a political rally with his running mate, Bush spotted Clymer in the crowd—he is usually hard to miss—and leaned over to Dick Cheney...
...Alice in Wonderland stuff, this was...
...In his book Clymer skates as it were over the signal event of Kennedy's life—you may remember Chappaquiddick, something about a car and a pond and a girl—to deliver such stunningly ignorant and ahistorical verdicts as this: Kennedy "deserves recognition not just as the leading senator of his time but also as one of the greats in the history of this singular institution, wise in its workings, especially its demand that a senator be more than partisan to accomplish much...
...To summarize: Steele contended that Isikoff had done something terribly wrong to her by explaining in print and on television how she'd lied to him about Clinton groping-victim Kathleen Willey...
...But will this actually be charity, or the result of a very public shakedown...
...Naturally enough, California's public school bureaucracy, the national education "community," and the Clinton administration were horri-fied—and went immediately to war in court...
...Last Wednesday, Steele's nuisance suit against Isikoff was summarily dismissed...
...But from Bill Clinton: silence...
...She's not a wealthy woman...
...That lovely little "his aides acknowledge" is, in our opinion, what lifts most Clymer stories from the level of typical Times agitprop to the work of a genuine—major-league, if you will—asshole: It is a disdainful, almost mocking nod toward the conventions of objectivity, and a Clymer trademark...
...He has rescued these kids...
...For the sake of all the Spanish-speaking kids outside California, let's hope the political class quickly catches up...
...Investor's Business Daily, for example, reported that at a recent meeting of the American Political Science Association, Cly-mer referred to the House Republican class of 1994 as "those turkeys who got elected in the '94 Gingrich sweep...
...Thanks to the plain speaking of George W. Bush, Clymer is now known to the world—or to that portion of the world that follows politics—as an asshole...
...The people are now well ahead of their leaders on this subject...
...Spanish-speaking students' English language scores, for example, are up more than 50 percent at a number of different grade levels...
...Phil Crane, who is being treated for alcoholism: "I've heard that Crane has finally dried out...
...Yes, Steele freely admitted the lies in question...
...The numbers are staggeringly good, across the board...
...Isikoff's Vindication In the summer of 1998, Julie Hiatt Steele—remember her?—filed a federal punitive damages claim against Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter justly honored for his Lewinsky scandal scoops...
...Bush, who has at times equated compassionate conservatism with coddling his state's bilingual-ed establishment, has of late been prudently silent on the subject...
...Last month, two years after legal challenges were finally dismissed and Unz's law went into effect, the first comprehensive standardized test results were released...
...And let us not forget Clymer's magnum opus, an unintentionally amusing biography of Ted Kennedy which, at 600-plus unreadable pages, is almost as oversized as the senator himself...
...There's Adam Clymer," said Bush, unaware that he could be heard through an open microphone, "a major-league asshole from the New York Times...
...Scrapbook George W., Speaking Truth To Power Even in Washington, this city of strivers, fame often arrives unbidden, and so it descended early last week on Adam Clymer, a long-serving and otherwise not particularly notable reporter in the capital bureau of the New York Times...
...Whatever harm had befallen her, the judge concluded, Steele had caused herself...
...Answer: It mightn't...
...But she claimed her falsehoods had been delivered "off the record" (which Isikoff convincingly denied...
...How this particular cat was let out of the bag is by now a well-known story...
...Cheney was doing more than fulfilling the vice president's traditional role as yes man to the boss...
...And from Al Gore...
...Who paid for her lawyers...
...district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly threw out all 11 charges Steele had brought—as legally groundless...
...But how pleasant to think that he has finally, thanks to Governor Bush, achieved the fame he deserves...
...For starters, as the Media Research Center and others pointed out, Clymer is the author of several recent particularly tendentious Times stories about the Bush campaign...
...Too bad it hasn't seemed to touch the work of Clymer...
...More than partisan": What a charming ambition...
...And still reporters wonder why politicians call them names...
...Of course, he sometimes forgoes even the patina of objectivity...
...But given that we do, last week's anti-Cheney frenzy in the press was amazingly onesided...
...To which Cheney replied, "Yeah, he is, big time...
...The meticulously crafted campaign platform he's now running on explicitly denounces English-only education policies and promises permanent support for bilingual education...
...Which is exactly where they already were, as it happens...
...He also offered this sweet aside about Rep...
Vol. 6 • September 2000 • No. 1
