Kennedy Clan Still Making Waves; the Life Purpose of Bill Clinton

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 22, 2003

Byline: INSIGHT

Those Kennedys! Amid the continuing potential for a wrongful-death lawsuit by the family of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren, concerning their deaths July 16, 1999, in a $300,000 Piper Saratoga piloted negligently by JFK Jr., comes sensationalist Edward Klein with a ruthless book. In it he claims the wife of the sainted John Jr. was a baby-hating cokehead who taunted her husband with tales of her adultery with an underwear model and otherwise abused him in ways most peculiar. Puh-leeze!

* And do you suppose it was an accident that this latest Kennedy gossip, from a Kennedy biography careerist who once was editor of the New York Times Magazine, was dropped on the very day Andrew Cuomo and Bobby Kennedy's daughter Kerry Kennedy called it quits on their marriage of 13 years with three young daughters? Or that Andrew's lawyer was alleging that Kerry had been bedding one of Andrew's best friends?

* President George W. Bush said recently that Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, who has been indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court, is on the way out. Insiders say the next president of Liberia will be Charles Brumskine, an American-educated Liberian attorney who is a former president of the legislature in this West African nation founded by repatriated former slaves from the United States.

* Remember when a favorite cliche of the pacifist left was, "What if they organized a war and nobody came?" Last week the National Abstinence Clearinghouse held a pro-virginity rally in Las Vegas.

* Recently, across from the White House, the insider spotted a 2003 Lexus parked at the door of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Building bearing the Virginia license plate 666. In the last half of 2002 the nation's largest campaign givers were listed as the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform ($17,380,000) and the Chamber of Commerce of the U.S. ($11,320,000). Do you suppose ... ?

* The former chief of Navy chaplains, Rear Adm. Barry C. Black, is the new Senate chaplain. He is a Seventh-day Adventist with two doctoral degrees and three master's degrees. In droll deadpan, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) announced, "The fact that he is African-American is noteworthy, but it was not determinative."

* So what do you suppose Bill Clinton meant when he told the 23rd annual convention of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition an organization led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who counseled Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal that the primary focus of his entire life has been "to form a more perfect union"? Clinton apparently was having a bad day empathizing with the brothers. He went on to say that he thanks God that the Clintons pay the highest tax rates and he hopes the IRS will audit him every year.

* The New Jersey General Assembly has voted to eliminate the salaried ($10,000) job of poet laureate in the Garden State to get rid of the incumbent, a vulgarian and racist named LeRoi Jones who calls himself Amiri Baraka and is best known for his scabrous play The Toilet.

* If it was a ploy, the revelation by Massachusetts Sen. John Forbes Kerry that the Kerrys really were Kohens from Bohemia has let him down in Florida, where he polls only 8 percent of the Democratic vote against 49 percent for Washington Post/Newsweek uncle Bob Graham, the state's senior senator.

* Spike Lee's lawsuit to prevent the name change of Viacom's TNN cable-TV network to Spike TV has had Washington insiders hooting. What next, no spiking of conservative stories by liberal editors, or spiking of the ball by excited athletes, or golden spike linking the rail lines at Promontory Point, Utah? Even Spike Jones Jr. horned into the act.

* First there was Nova, the Chevy that didn't sell in Latin America because "nova" in Spanish means "It doesn't go." Then there was Silver Mist, a popular American hair spray that bombed in Germany, where "mist" means manure. Now comes a change in name of the planned military force for Iraq, which was to be the New Iraqi Corps. Seems it makes an acronym in Arabic that is a vulgarism for fornication.

* Thousands of ordinary South Carolinians, black and white, turned out in the rain for the funeral of 100-year-old Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), a former segregationist who changed with the times. But, shamefully, only seven senatorial incumbents attended: Sens. Joe Biden (D-Del.), Fritz Hollings (D-S.C), Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), George Allen (R-Va.), and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). Also present were former senators Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Steve Symms (R-Idaho) and Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.). The chairmen of the two committees on which Thurmond served longest, Sens. John Warner (R-Va.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), were respectively on a Middle East junket and campaigning in New Hampshire.

* Attempting to police thoughts and emotions, the FBI says on its Website: "The No 1 priority in the FBI's Civil Rights program is the investigation of hate crimes."

* Liar, liar, ambition on fire. Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, put a "secret hold" on the HEROES Act, which would defer student loans for U.S. soldiers sent into action. Asked about it his staff lied to deny all, as did trial-lawyer Edwards, until exposed by the outraged Washington Times.