Scrapbook
Scrapbook Another Phony Anti-Bush Slander BuzzFlash.com, a sort of Drudge Report for the left, has joined forces with former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal to spin the line that the Clinton...
...Any time we took a proposal to higher authority, with one or two exceptions, it was approved...
...While the show's message of healing between gays and straights breaks down into several layers of irony, we can't help noticing how literally Queer Eye has fulfilled the vision sketched out by Skinner in his "Notes on the Hairless Man...
...The bomber who so coldbloodedly murdered the children riding his bus, by the way, was himself the father of a 4-year-old boy and 18month-old girl...
...Meantime, be sure to visit weeklystan-dard.com for Bill Whalen's excellent reports on the California governor's race, and much else besides...
...What's Wrong with This Headline...
...Reuters, August 15 See You in Two Weeks Like the Swedish military, we're kicking back—and not publishing next week...
...They would have been a hell of a lot less capable of recruiting people...
...CLARKE: I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists sending them out around the world would have been destroyed...
...FRONTLINE: Without intelligence operatives on the ground in these organizations, how in the end does one stop something like this...
...Their whole "Come to Afghanistan where you'll be safe and you'll be trained"—well, that wouldn't have worked if every time they got a camp together, it was blown up by the United States...
...Still, it seems to be some kind of coming-out party for the hairless man to make an appearance on America's most-talked-about cable show of the summer, the male-makeover hit Queer Eye for the Straight Guy...
...Given the strident criticism of President Bush's conduct of the war on terrorism by senior Clinton administration officials, The Scrapbook wonders where, say, Madeleine Albright or Al Gore came down on the recommendation to take out the camps following the Cole bombing...
...FRONTLINE: But didn't you push for military action after the [al Qaeda bombing of the USS] Cole...
...Our Eye for the Hairless Guy Four years ago in these pages, David Skinner presciently noted the fashion of chest-shaving among post-adolescent Hollywood heartthrobs...
...In one, we learn that Clinton NSC adviser Sandy Berger "told them that Osama bin Laden was 'an existential threat' and told them he wanted 'to underscore how important this issue is.'" In another transition briefing, according to Blumenthal, "Richard Clarke, head of coun-terterrorism in the NSC, the single most knowledgeable expert in government, gave a complete tutorial on the subject...
...Under the banner "Bush Ignored the Terrorist Threat," BuzzFlash readers can enjoy excerpts from Blumen-thal's recent book The Clinton Wars, in which he recounts transition meetings between Clinton and Bush national security officials...
...Surely the truce, such as it was, ended with Hamas's mass murder of Israeli and American civilians...
...Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure...
...On one recent episode, a bearish crew member had his back stripped professionally before getting his chest "manscaped" by the show's gay groomer, using a standard barbershop-type clipper...
...At this point, Hamas announced that it was ending its so-called truce with Israel—a laughable bit of propaganda that nonetheless made its way straight into this Associated Press headline later on Thursday: "Hamas Abandons Truce After Israeli Strike...
...Nary a male lead torso under the age of 40 seemed to be sporting even a single strand of hair...
...Israel kept its powder dry for the following 24 hours, testing whether Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas would move against the Hamas terrorists, who had immediately claimed responsibility for the bus bombing...
...CLARKE: Yes, that's one of the exceptions...
...if you look back on it now and you had one wish, you could have had one thing done, what would it have been...
...Being a terrorist organization, Hamas would obviously think this way...
...That's the one thing that we recommended that didn't hap-pen—the one thing in retrospect i wish had happened...
...When Abbas punted, Israel launched a retaliatory missile strike on Thursday, killing Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas official in the Gaza strip, and his bodyguards...
...It paints a rather less flattering picture of Blu-menthal's heroes: FRONTLINE: Some also say that due to the Lewinsky scandal, more action perhaps was never undertaken...
...A major network has picked up the cable show and its audience numbers are growing at an incredible rate...
...So many, many trained and indoctrinated al Qaeda terrorists, which now we have to hunt down country by country, many of them would not be trained and would not be indoctrinated, because there wouldn't have been a safe place to do it if we had destroyed the camps earlier...
...We were never refused...
...CLARKE: Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary...
...Last Tuesday, August 19, a suicide bomber named Raed Abdul Hamid Misk, a member of Hamas who lectured on Islamic law at a Palestinian university, boarded a bus in Jerusalem wearing the latest in Hamas haute couture—11 pounds of explosives larded with nails and shrapnel...
...In your eyes...
...The effete affectation had gone populist as well, with a boom in hair-removal services and, according to the shaving industry, sharply increasing sales of razors used to mow the high grass just below the neck...
...But what was AP thinking...
...But we'll be back after Labor Day...
...The so-called "hairless man" made appearances elsewhere, too, in professional tennis, for example, with the onetime Schick razor spokesman Andre Agassi showing off his newly de-carpeted chest at various tournaments...
...Scrapbook Another Phony Anti-Bush Slander BuzzFlash.com, a sort of Drudge Report for the left, has joined forces with former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal to spin the line that the Clinton administration was heroically tough on terrorism but that the Bush administration, despite being "fully briefed by Clinton staffers about the imminent threat posed by terrorism," fell asleep at the switch until 9/11...
...So let's get this straight: Hamas's idea of a "truce" is that it should be allowed to blow up any number of children whenever it feels like it, with impunity...
...CLARKE: The interagency group on which I sat and John O'Neill sat—we never asked for a particular action to be authorized and were refused...
...THE SCRAPBOOK agrees with Blumenthal that Clarke is an expert, which is why we want to share excerpts of a March 20, 2002, interview Clarke gave to PBS's Frontline on the events leading up to 9/11...
...Five of the victims were Americans...
...Many commentators have complained that this or that aspect of Queer Eye demeans gays or straights, but surely the overall message—as the hairless man foreshadowed—is just how accommodating of homosexuality and gay campiness mainstream culture has become...
...Don't say we didn't warn you...
...And just what was the other "exception" cited by Clarke...
...Ideal for Fighting Those 9 to 5 Wars "STOCKHOLM - Sweden's armed forces will operate only during office hours for the rest of the year to cut costs, military headquarters said on Friday...
...Misk's bomb killed 20 people, including children and infants...
...FRONTLINE: How important is that exception...
Vol. 8 • September 2003 • No. 48
