Scrapbook
Scrapbook The Maine Event As dirty tricks go, the leak to a Maine TV reporter of George W. Bush's 1976 arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol is a mixed bag. The Scrapbook has to award...
...Liberals for Vouchers November 2000 has been a good month for the school voucher movement—whatever the fate of the ballot initiatives in Michigan and California...
...If Bush is guilty of a "crime of moral turpitude," Connolly, we think, may have committed a crime against humanity by composing this bit of political free verse: "All of 'em / put to death by drugs / Government drugs / that do in fact kill...
...1, the Washington Post editorialized in favor of vouchers...
...But the editorials tell a different story...
...He could tell the knife had been used in a stabbing, since "I defended a guy once who filleted someone...
...Here was the idiosyncrati-cally liberal reaction to Reagan's famous speech at the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando in 1983: "According to Ronald Reagan, history is reaching a climax...
...Charles Tuttle, for instance, requested fried eggs, sausage patties, five pieces of white toast, and four Dr...
...They choose private schools or settle in better school districts...
...And Connolly told CNN that though he tried to fax the information to the Gore campaign, "the line was busy...
...If there is to be a President Bush, may his next tormentor come out of the woodwork armed with spellcheck...
...As he presses his case that Bush is an intellectual lightweight, Connolly accuses him of being "padandict" (pedantic, we think) and wonders how to "devine the future...
...So a special Daily Standard covering the outcome of the election will be posted on our website on Wednesday, Nov...
...Favorite...
...Then, the question will be: How did he get away with it...
...Amen...
...He portrayed his country as embattled, set upon by enemies from without and within, fighting for nothing less than its reason for being...
...He was lying then or he is lying now...
...He is obsessed with Bush's executions record and lists the last meals of many of the condemned...
...This issue of The Weekly Standard was printed the Friday before Election Day...
...But as we go to press on Friday, no such link has been proved...
...World-class dirty tricks involve what the late Mayor Daley of Chicago called "insinuendo...
...And here is an idiosyncratic editorial reaction to a 1984 Reagan speech: "Ronald Reagan is making fools of the American people...
...Next week's issue will contain a full analysis of the results...
...Americans will begin rubbing their eyes in rueful wonder at the aftermath of his eight-year national fiesta...
...It has nothing to do with Bush's behavior, but it's fun and God knows there's a rich vein of material...
...But we know some of you won't want to wait that long...
...will find it difficult to resist going after Connolly...
...The campaign has elicited a new round of pro-voucher pronouncements from prominent liberals...
...If The Scrap-book were Bates College, it would revoke the diploma...
...We can draw no other conclusion from the President's speech last week on nuclear weapons and the state of Soviet-American relations...
...Gore spokesman Chris Lehane, who grew up in Kenne-bunkport, Maine, where the arrest took place, says his camp had absolutely nothing to do with it...
...The next day, lefty Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt gave vouchers a thumbs-up...
...What did come as a surprise for those who read the endorsement with care was the line about President Reagan: "Ronald Reagan was my favorite Republican president of this century, and at the idiosyncratically liberal New Republic we admired his vigorous anti-communism...
...The editor-in-chief of the New Republic is also the press corps's Gore-booster-inchief...
...Peppers...
...Connolly's contention "I have not had direct contact myself" with the Gore campaign sounds like weasel wording...
...As a friend points out, the French have a name for this: maquis d'après-guerre...
...More troubling still is that though Connolly professes to be Bates College's 1979 valedictorian, rudimentary spelling seems to elude him...
...A delegate to both the 1996 and 2000 Democratic conventions, he showed up for the former costumed as Bob Dole...
...In short, Connolly turns out to be a bit of a publicity jockey...
...8. Visit weeklystandard.com early and often...
...Peretz wishes to remember the 1980s differently...
...The Scrapbook has to award it 10 points for timing: It's the first November Surprise...
...Then they argue that enterprising students left behind shouldn't be allowed similarly to escape, because it would be unfair to the rest...
...We don't doubt that Mr...
...The enemy without is Communism, which the President described as 'the focus of evil in the modern world...
...Not only has the solo practitioner represented hundreds of drunk drivers (irony alert), he's also championed a client who hurled racial slurs and bricks at a Portland woman and her 8-month-old biracial baby and another who tied his girlfriend's four-year-old daughter to a bed, beat her, sexually abused her, then cooked her to death in an oven...
...Admired...
...Extra...
...And during that same Chicago convention, he tried to interest local police in a bloody knife he found at a vacant lot during a clean-up effort, suggesting to them that it could be O.J...
...Extra...
...And in doing so, it offered this bracing repudiation of anti-voucher hypocrisy: "Inner-city school reform has been going on for just about as long as inner-city school failure...
...the speech left friends and foes around the world with the impression that the President of the United States was contemplating holy war...
...Still, if a link to the Gore campaign can be established, the D-Dubya-I story, as the New York Post headlined it, will enter the tricksters' pantheon...
...Let's see...
...During an unsuccessful 1998 bid for governor on the Democratic ticket, Connolly taunted Angus King, saying the incumbent had probably never received a grateful kiss from a heroin-addict client...
...If The Scrap-book were a Court TV producer, it would have him signed to a contract already...
...Most notably, on Nov...
...Even with Maine's addict community in his corner, Connolly garnered only 12 percent of the vote...
...Tom Connolly, a Portland lawyer and Democratic convention delegate, gave a reporter the arrest record...
...Connolly contends that he publicized Bush's arrest because many would consider it "a crime of moral turpi-tude"—moral turpitude being something Connolly is quite familiar with from his criminal defense practice...
...The speech must be compared with his other important orations in office, specifically the 'Star Wars' speech and the 'empire of evil' speech, both of them delivered last spring...
...If you doubt that Connolly had it in for Bush, you should visit his website, wienerboy.org...
...On the other hand, the information itself is true...
...Yuck...
...He worries about Bush's character, since "with Clinton we knew about Paula Jones way in advance" (actually, we knew about Gen-nifer Flowers way in advance, but it's easy to confuse Clinton conquests and attempted conquests, on account of the sheer number...
...In this painfully unfunny political satire site (which Connolly constructed earlier this year), he wittily asserts that the "W" in George Bush stands "for Wiener...
...Simpson's...
...Most voucher opponents wouldn't, and don't, tolerate such conditions for their children...
...And there was this highly idiosyncratic October 1986 New Republic editorial: "When Reagan retires...
...Very Idiosyncratic It was no surprise to find Martin Peretz making the case for "Gore, a Fiscal Conservative," in the pages of the Wall Street Journal last week...
...Well, it's true that The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes and our contributing editor Charles Krauthammer penned some Reagan-admiring pieces for that magazine in the 1980s...
...But even if it isn't, Republicans, mindful of their WWCD bracelets (What Would Clinton Do...
...Hunt concluded, "With persistently failing schools—the target of Michigan's [Proposal] 1—some radical remedies have to be tried or we relegate these kids to a vicious circle from which few escape...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 9
