Shameless Dean, 'Wes' Side Stories, Nickel & Diming Presidents

Insight on the News, Dec 8, 2003

Byline: INSIGHT

When Black Jack Pershing landed with the American Expeditionary Forces to free France in 1917 he is reported to have said, "Lafayette, we are here." A week ago, an American president stunned our British ally in a speech appealing to the highest hopes of Anglo-American idealism. Again a favor was being returned, says a Washington insider. President George W. Bush might well have declared, "Winston, we are here."

* How did Wes Clark ever get to be a general? Politics. Instant four-star general Al Haig is reported even to have put him up for the Legion of Merit for ghosting a speech.

* Clark is getting wackier and wackier. Now he has called the war in Kosovo that he commanded under his fellow Rhodes scholar and Arkansas politician Bill Clinton "technically illegal" because it was not authorized by the United Nations and "there was never a chance that it would be authorized."

* In a new low even for her, liberal didact Margaret Carlson of CNN's The Capital Gang, and Time and GQ magazines, lists God as No. 8 in her GQ piece titled "20 Most Powerful People in Washington ... That You've Never Heard Of."

* In service to political correctness no doubt, George Stephanopoulos proposed Jesus and Mohammed for Time's Man of the Year. To which Time Managing Editor Jim Kelly responded, "Traditionally we don't do dead people, but in this case at least one of them is coming back."

* In the last Congress Democrats called for an average increase in new spending of $417.6 billion - about 13 times more than the average Republican's $32.3 billion. In fact, says the nonpartisan National Taxpayers Union, 32 federal lawmakers sought to raise the federal budget by $1 trillion or more.

* When Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) mooed that the United States spent $3 billion on campaigns for federal office in the 2000 election cycle, insider George Will observed with a chuckle that this is about half as much as is spent annually by Americans on chewing gum.

* So what was "campaign-finance reform" all about? Zillionaire George Soros, who gave $18 million to support campaign-finance reform, just announced gifts of $15 million to defeat President George W. Bush, suggesting that the objective of this phony reform was to increase the political influence of the super-rich. Will someone please ask McCain for comment?

* Ah, here it is at last! Animal-rights activists tell insiders that the reason the Siberian tiger Montecore attacked Roy Horn during a Siegfried & Roy performance in Las Vegas was that as a cub the giant cat was taken too soon from its mother.

* Credit insiders Dick Carlson and Bill Regardie with the report that after a notoriously self-important TV interviewer had annoyed everyone on the set, her first question to a Boston Celtics legend for a special on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of JFK was: "Red Auerbach, where were you when President Kennedy was assassinated?" Red dropped the cigar, stared like a deer in the headlights into the camera and declared: "What? They shot Kennedy? Nobody told me!"

* What's up? There now are at least nine shows on national television promoting gays and gay themes. Even the straight guys behave like gender benders.

* A new Justice Department study puts the sex-offender recidivism rate at 53 percent, with most children molested being younger than age 13.

* Insiders say that, weirded out by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's antismoking policy, the GOP has been considering docking a cruise ship in New York Harbor to house smokers attending and reporting from the Republican National Convention.

* Now comes word that Howard Dean's brother, Charles, was off on an early-seventies trek to find himself, visit a bureaucrat friend and hang out with Peace Corps buddies when Pathet Lao Communists, who apparently believed in the domino theory, arrested and killed him in December 1974. In what insiders call an astonishing act of political exploitation, Dean claims this is what led him to oppose the war in Iraq and even to run for president. In fact, however, the last U.S. troops left Vietnam on March 29,1973, some 21 months earlier. The Democratic-controlled Congress had cut off all U.S. support for those resisting the Pathet Lao long before the Reds killed Dean's brother.

* Likely Democratic presidential nominee Howard Dean not only is tortured, sensitive and profound, assures the Washington Post, but he plays blues on the harmonica. Next year, no doubt, Kierkegaard and the accordion.

* This spring, on the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the first of two new nickels will be issued. Both still will bear the countenance of Thomas Jefferson, who sent the expedition west, on the obverse. But on the reverse, the fall issue will display an image of the keelboat the team used to sail up the Missouri to winter with the Mandan Indians, while the reverse on the spring issue will carry a "peace" design with a tobacco pipe and a tomahawk. Appalled insiders, noting that Jefferson's home, Monticello, will return to the reverse of the nickel in 2006, are lobbying for return of the "buffalo" or "Indian head" nickel of 1913-1938, a magnificent design by American sculptor James Earle Fraser that the sophisticates at the soulless New York Times once condemned as a "travesty on artistic effect."