THURSDAY JANUARY 22ND 1998 - NEW YORK -- White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry entered what could be described as a cage of ghoulish animals in a feeding frenzy yesterday as he began his daily press briefing.The subject of the journalistic lust? -- the fresh-killed meat of two young women, Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky and, of course, the President of the United States.
The issue? Did Bill Clinton have consenting sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, and then lie about it under oath in the Paula Jones deposition this past Saturday?
The sub-issue? Did Bill Clinton ask Lewinsky directly, or through his friend and top Black American lobbyist, Vernon Jordan, to lie under oath about the alleged affair as well?
The frenzy? If the affair happened, and if the President lied, he might be guilty of suborning perjury, a crime which could lead to eventual impeachment proceedings, thusfar backed only by congressional psychopaths like Bob Barr or Georgia and a handful of ultra-right-wing fanatics in the House.
Sam Donaldson, still smarting over his demotion to pounding a White House beat, fanned the flames of pseudo-outrage asking McCurry over and over again why the President didn't "flatly" deny these allegations -- although he had, and did again later in the day to Jim Lehrer - who himself is another seemingly wholly owned subsidiary of Archer Daniels Midland Company.
Donaldson, who can best be described as a half-wit replacement for David Brinkley -- another ADM owned television "journalist" according to Mareen Dowd -- was visibly self-congratulating as he intoned the name of Matt Drudge - a WEB writer who does nothing much more than digest the news he reads in the wee hours of the morning and then takes credit for it as his own.
Drudge and his "Drudge Report," is an example of the "new hate journalism," that appeals to the lazier-than-ever press corp who often rely on him to parse the news, even though his interpretations are wanting at best. Recently Drudge was sued by White House spinmeister Sid Blumenthal for publishing the only story Drudge has rightly claimed was his exclusively -- a whopping lie that Blumenthal had cheated on his wife.
Since that suit was filed, Drudge, with the help of millionaire ultra-kook and right wing fascist publisher Richard Scaife of Pittsburgh has engaged in a non-stop counter attack on Blumenthal's boss, Bill Clinton. Scaife now reportedly pays some or all of Drudge's mounting legal bills. Scaife also "arranged" for special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's appointment to a high academic post at California's Pepperdine playschool university nestled in the hills directly over the Pacific at Malibu, and gleefully supports such ghoulish 'authors' as Chris Ruddy who feeds the nutcase public with stories and books based on his theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton ordered their best friend, Vince Foster, murdered. One of Ruddy and Scaife's biggest supporters is megamoron Dan Burton, the man Newt Gingrich has charged with "getting the President" and given an unlimited treasury of your tax money to pay for it.
Sam Donaldson, supposedly a scion of virtuous reportage for ABC television, is only one symbol of the ever-increasing trend among American journalists to distort facts and push stories which they know will drive the more moronic os us to our televisions to feast on just another carcass of some inside-the-Beltway victim. It doesn't matter who they hurt, or what careers they destroy. Anything for a story. Anything for the two extra ratings points which might allow them to abut Walter Cronkite's rolling estate at Cape Cod next summer.
But Donaldson's no Cronkite.
To get some insight on how Donaldson, supposedly a seasoned reporter, feels in the presence of power, read this transcript of Donaldson questioning Paula Jones' ultra-Christian-right-wing attorney Donovan Campbell on how he felt deposing the President.
Donaldson never asked him a tough question -- for instance why Campbell, well known gay-basher and sponsor of homophobic legislation in Texas was now representing a woman like Jones who was clearly dialing for dollars in her case against the President.
But here's what he was interested in toward the end of the interview:
SAM DONALDSON Let me ask you a personal question about your feelings. You're the only attorney that I know of who has questioned a president of the United States, and he's a defendant in a case. How did you feel about that? Were you nervous?
DONOVAN CAMPBELL Well, in terms of our own personal emotions, no, I would say we were not overly nervous. It's similar to questioning the President of any large corporation in a sexual harassment-type case.
SAM DONALDSON Well, not really, Mr Campbell.
DONOVAN CAMPBELL You asked my personal feelings, not yours.
SAM DONALDSON Well, that's a good answer, but I think most people would say that to be in the presence of the President, period, makes a lot of people a little nervous. And to have to question him on such very undignified matters must be difficult.
DONOVAN CAMPBELL As I say, not too much more difficult than any other major defendant.
SAM DONALDSON All right. Thank you very much, Donovan Campbell. Thanks for being our guest today.
Donaldson here tells Campbell indirectly that he gets nervous when questioning the President. Yet Donaldson led the pack of famished press corps hyenas in accusing Bill Clinton of being a liar. Donaldson is a chameleon, or some might say, "a schizophrenic."
Yet ABC puts this fellow up front in the White House press room as its master representative. Donaldson's voice quavered almost in a combination of fear and rage as he attempted to get McCurry to somehow finger the President -- his boss -- for not denying the Lewinsky affair -- in exactly the words that Donaldson thought would be most appropriate.
Days before, Donaldson was citing Matt Drudge, and McCurry's stalwart refusal to take him or Drudge seriously. Donaldson actually shouted at the press secretary then, so unnerved is he by power. McCurry wasn't having any of it. He refused to discuss Drudge, who he and most thinking people see as a punk who worked in a what could be described as a sleazy gift shop before launching his web site a little over a year ago -- a site devoted to cannibalizing other hard working journalist's work, and lately now devoted to the wishes of neo-nazis like Dick Scaife and Scaife's personal protege Chris Ruddy.
The idiot press corp followed Donaldson's lead almost in unison yesterday . Only wise old birds like Mary McGrory asked good questions. Bob Novak also rose above the fray later in the day.
McCurry was besieged.
Throughout the day one could witness what appeared to be a conspiracy of terror seemingly worked out in the netherworld of corporate network television. The plot, which of course could not have been planned by the five networks and their junior cable stations, was outlined something like this:
A. The President is a liar.
B. He most likely had sex with Lewinsky and unnamed dozens of others.
C. The President probably committed perjury at the Paula Jones deposition.
D. The President probably asked Lewinsky to lie under oath -- a federal and state crime.
E. The President used his friends to pressure Lewinsky to lie under oath and also used them to bribe her with a good job outside of the federal government.
All of a sudden it was Kenneth Starr who had credibility and the President who had none. All of a sudden it was Newsweek that had replaced the bible and Lewinsky who had transmuted into the Virgin Mary.
This was the "message" and it was delivered well, in unison and with precision across the airwaves. There was not one clear head on television or radio last night, and as we reviewed the videotapes this morning it became more and more clear that the press would play a tremndous role in crucifying the President.
Even NBC's Tim Russert, normally to be counted on for some modicum of balance, was fanning the flames of the impeachment fire all night both on NBC and silly cable sister station MSNBC, where he appeared over and over in his classic shirtsleeve attire, ala Cronkite, squeezing more charcoal lighter on the coals of discontent.
It was a pitiful example of the state of the mainstream media today. A group of under and overeducated jackals who have no dedication to the truth and nothing much more in mind than building yet another lavish vacation home at which they would arrive in their personal helicopter each August day.
Like trendsetter David Brinkley, they yearn for the opportunity to sell out to the highest bidder, for the luxury of corporate-supplied lush condos on the beaches of Bal Harbour Florida.
The price? -- Well not much really. Only the dignity of the Presidency, the humiliation of his family, the destruction -- the absolute psychological murder -- of young Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, Gennifer Flowers, Dick Morris, Hank Cisneros, Chelsea Clinton, Mrs. Vince Foster and her children, and dozens of other innocents and not-so-innocents who made the mistake of trying to serve their country enmired in murk.
Sure, the President is no innocent. He's a politician, and in the dirty world of Washington you have to be tougher than nails. You have to have the testosterone of a rhesus monkey simply to deal with the filthy, and they are, many of them, filthy as sin, congressmen who accept bribes -- called campaign contributions -- for no other reason then to make someone rich.
As President, you have to sit quietly and be respectful to thieving bankers and corporate raiders, Wall Street downsizers, and crazed Hollywood freaks who supply you with the money you need if only to be heard at election time. As President you know the ugliest secrets and live like a King in a country that supposedly frowns on royalty. As President, you are lonely in a crowded ballroom.
In short, from the day you take office you begin to sink in a cesspool of maneuvering, conniving and unwhisperable greed.
Almost all presidents, from FDR to Bill Clinton have sought or have been reported to seek solace from the gloom in the beds and smooth arms of younger women. Roosevelt, flaunting his lifelong mistress in front of Eleanor, Jack Kennedy and his brothers doing the same. LBJ with a bevy of beauties including his biographer now a television pundit herself. Even George Bush is rumored to have had a "more mature" woman stashed away for his carnal pleasure. The only Presidents in recent memory not tarnished by sexual scandal were Carter and Nixon. Carter, the bogus Mr. Rogers of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, must have been too busy open doors for BCCI into America for sexual dalliance, and Nixon -- well who will ever figure him out?
Now we find Russert, Brokaw, Rather and even erudite Hamptons playanchor Peter Jennings, running a kind of Inquisition, a road show of biblical remonstrance where the President is portrayed as an anti-Christ child molester and Ms. Lewinsky, no vestal virgin by her own taped admission, is hawked as a pathetic "little girl."
Ms. Lewinsky and her kind -- you know, the Paula Jones / Susan Carpenter McMillan kind -- that litter the offices and sidewalks of official Washington like so much gold digging flesh -- are power hungry. This writer lived in and among them for more than a dozen years. I know them. I've lain with them. Yes, nameless, faceless, "little girls" who come from Little Rock and Sioux Falls, New York and Los Angeles. All of them seeking to be near power -- the super-magnet that draws all too many of us into the clutches of the near-satanic life that can be Washington.
These girls and the men that use them and are used by them, make up a great part of Washington's invisible but ever-present society. Not prostitutes, yet the closest thing to them. Not drug addicts, their heroin is the stories they can recount to their friends about this and that senator's sexual proclivities, this and that souvenir of a one or a hundred night stand with a powerful congressional chairman.
You might have seen them on the barstools of Washington's posh River Club bar in Georgetown, or at tables in the private club of one of Georgetown's poshest hotels. You might spy them in the outer offices of Capitol Hill, or the inner offices of "K" Street lobbyists. They might be dining on the patio of Restaurant Nora with a judge - in the back out of sight of press cameras.
They're girls between the age of 20 and 26 -- still fresh from school and eager to play. They slip their phone numbers and hotel keys into the watchpockets of the powerful. Their eyes say, "Want to play?," and their bodies beckon with all the allure of Cleopatra as they brush past your pants leg on their way to the mail room.
One such girl might have been Monica Lewinsky, an attractive 21 year old 'mover' who must have had some connection to the power nexus to get her White House internship and later her more permanent job in the first place. She sat only yards from the President. She delivered his mail. She flirted. He may have flirted back as is his general style with women - - 20 years old or 80 years old. That's just Bill Clinton. He's a Southern charmer. I've seen him make the majority of ladies swoon at Pamela Harriman's soirees in Georgetown or her MIddleburg Farm. I've seen more than a dozen women virtually throw themselves at him in other social and even formal situations. I've had married women of status tell me they'd perform any act he wished in a wink.
He has that cursed magic called sexual charisma. And some hate him for it.
And one day, in a moment of weakness, a moment we've all had many times ourselves, maybe Monica or any other girl by any other name was in just the right dress with just the right makeup and just the right pheromone level to tweak his sexual curiosity. Maybe he was upset or pressured. Maybe he and Hillary had just fought. Whatever. It happens, to the best of us men and women both.
It would be so easy wouldn't it? So seemingly innocent as one's sensibility is overcome by biology?
My point? Whether the President had an adulterous affair or not, he owes nothing to the people of this country except the job he was electedto do. He does that well. He owes no matrimonial fidelity to anyone save his wife Hillary who, if all these stories are true, has decided to accept him for whatever his human frailty and to love him despite it.
Who are Russert, Jennings, Donaldson, Brokaw and Rather to pillory this man, who has aged a hundred years in five under the pressure of running a country which is devouring the world like a avaricial pac man, while simultaneously containing an attack from the greediest of greedy Republicans who would delight in blowing his brains out on national television?
Who are these Congressmen Gingrich and Barr, Hyde and Burton -- sick men, power crazed, hungry for the love and the money of their constituents who now talk of impeachment so casually? -- Eager to destroy any soul who gets in their way? Who are these architects of democratic Armageddon who prey on the weak and the strong's weaknesses?
My friend the Reverend Bob Schuller might say they are the devil incarnate feeding on the bile of the earth.
I might agree.
I do agree.
So to all you "new journalists" take heed and care. We know most of you personally and many of your own adoring and adulterous girlfriends and boyfriends.
Think twice before preaching the Gospel of Christ in the Church of Satan.
And to all you holier-than-thou Congressmen and women, think thrice before you cast stones at any President who slaves in the drudgery of power -- consumed by the evil around him that you so well fertilize with your hatred.
We know you too.
We know your private horrors and your schedule of trysts. We know your fetishes and your secreted bank accounts. We know you and your loving and sometimes not-so-loving families. We know your constituents and your political enemies.
We know where to "find" you and we know how to defeat you.
After all, we too, are "journalists" of the 21st Century.
© 1998, 1997, American Politics Journal Publications Inc.