Clinton sightings; Tony Blair's thoughts on Rumsfeld and Cheney

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 15, 2002

He still has an eye for the ladies. In perhaps his last speech on the U.S. Senate floor, 99-year-old Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) said: "I love all of you, especially your wives."

* Speaking of active nonagenarians, George F. Kennan, the 98-year-old author of the unsigned 1947 essay in Foreign Affairs that announced the establishment left's postwar foreign policy, was in Washington the week President George W. Bush's breakthrough National Security Strategy of the United States of America was released. Kennan granted an interview to Albert Eisele and used it to attack the new Bush foreign-policy document.

* It was Kennan's misnamed containment policy that kept the Cold War going for nearly 50 years until Ronald Reagan junked it to challenge and defeat the "Evil Empire."

* Simply put, the Kennan policy said to the USSR: "What's yours is yours, what's ours is negotiable."

* The House Committee on Government Reform just held hearings on doping active schoolboys with Ritalin, an amphetamine, at which Rep. John Duncan (R-Texas) read at length from a seminal Kelly O'Meara article in INSIGHT on the ADHD controversy.

* Who is surprised that Bill Clinton continues to be seen around Manhattan with a series of blondes who are not his wife. Daughter Chelsea Clinton is reported to be living with her boyfriend, Ian Klaus, at the London Terrace, a chippie off the old block.

* Answering a Paul M. Rodriguez question at the press conference announcing his savvy new magazine, The American Conservative, two-fisted commentator Patrick Buchanan said he thought the best way to deal with Saddam Hussein would be to send in the U.N. weapons inspectors. Come on Pat, say it ain't so! But when a left-wing reporter took a shot at coeditor Taki Theodoracopulos for a long-admitted cocaine bust, Buchanan countered with a right cross: "You guys should check out my rap sheet from the fifties."

* A poll of Capitol Hill staffers by Washingtonian magazine picked Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) as the "funniest" and "brainiest" of the nation's lawmakers. Apparently, it matters which cohorts you question. In the category of "looks best in a swimsuit" the Senate runner-up was Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and in the House Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) finished third.

* So, maybe Al Gore is hiding out in Tennessee, but everyone has to be somewhere, Idi Amin is hiding in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; "Baby Doc" Duvalier is incognito in Paris; Mengistu Haile Mariam is lurking around downtown Harare, Zimbabwe; Hissine Habie is hiding in Dakar, Senegal; and Gen. Alfredo Stroessner is undercover in steamy Brasilia.

* Alas, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was being tortured in Hanoi when Sen. John Forbes Kerry (D-Mass.) was throwing his own military decorations over the White House fence in solidarity with the McCain torturers. Now Kerry is courting McCain to join him on the 2004 Democratic presidential ticket.

* The lantern-jawed Kerry dumped the mother of his two children and married the super-rich widow of Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.). What does the current wife think of him? Could it be that's why the artful Teresa Heinz kept her first husband's name?

* How far would Vietnam protester Kerry go to court McCain? Try this from the Kerry blurb on a biography of the Arizona senator: "I have had no greater privilege in all my life than finding and then standing on common ground with John McCain, and I look forward to fighting side by side with him on yet another day...."

* Abortion is tooling along in the United States at about 1.4 million a year--over a decade the equivalent of butchering every man, woman and child in Los Angeles.

* Latest estimate of the number of practicing Muslims in the U.S. is 1.6 million; for practicing Jews it is 6 million. Roman Catholics are No. 1 at 62 million, though Protestants still outnumber Catholics. In New York City, there are more than twice as many Muslims as Episcopalians.

* After its editorial quoting Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) as saying she was so ashamed to be seen wearing an American flag pin while on a junket to Europe that she struck her colors, the New York Post has been awash in furious letters.

* You'll be glad to know that America's staunchest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has told intimates that he thinks Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney are "out of control," but that President George W. Bush takes his advice and has everything completely under control.