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by Tamara Baker

Friday, August 27, 1999 -- ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA -- Once again, there are too many news items hitting at once for me to be so selfish as to cover just one of them in a single column. Many of them don't really rate more than a couple of well-done paragraphs, anyway -- the operative phrase in that sentence being "well done."

So it's back to sweeping up the tidbits...

Topic A, of course, is George W. Bush's tortured, never-ending, ever-changing explanations about just how long he's been drug-free. There's been some minor poll slippage already, and the press has only been addressing this question for two weeks. One immediate casualty: the idea that a GW Shrub administration would be more "moral" than that of the Evil Clinton Beast and His Tainted Successor, Al Gore. Poor Stumbleya: Now he has to run on the issues (snicker). I can't wait to see Gore grind this clown up in a debate.  Hell, Quayle could probably take this fool! To paraphrase Marilyn Quayle's cleverly vicious comment, Shrub really is what everyone thought Danny was back in 1988.

Speaking of Marilyn Quayle, am I the only person who noticed her little jab at Shrub the other day on Chris Matthews' Hardball? Seems she hinted broadly that the Shrub's infamously inebriated "childhood" ended not at 40, but 43 -- and that LSD may have contributed to the inebriation.

There's been a whole covey of articles pertaining to Shrub's "childhood" brewing in the Internet press. Some of the stories have even cracked into Big Media: even the puff pieces designed to flatter Dubya, such as Tucker Carlson's now-famous Talk magazine article, have been showing the world sides of the Shrub that his campaign staff would prefer you not see. The Newsweek article on Shrubya's coke flap took great pains to point out how Governor Doofus can't be left alone for a second without shoving a stick of dynamite into his own mouth: it was when his minders were all out of sight that he started the ball rolling on SnortGate.

Directly related to Topic A is Topic B: The GOP's brutally self-revealing (in more ways than one) response to SnortGate.

Dubya: dashing in a
black shirt.
Dear reader, try to entertain for a moment the idea that George W. Bush never in his life touched cocaine, much less used it on a habitual basis. (It helps if you ignore his alcoholism, and the established fact that "addictive personality types" are likely to abuse more than more drug.)

If anyone in the GOP's upper echelon, both inside the media and out, truly believed that he never touched the stuff, we'd be hearing them trumpet "Of course he's clean! What a ridiculous question!" from the rooftops.

But they're not.

What they ARE doing, instead, is MAKING EXCUSES for his coke use even as they say that there's no proof for it. ("Making excuses": Isn't that what they wrongly accused Hillary of doing for Bill in her own Talk article flap? Yes indeedy -- except this time, they're doing it and it's for  real.)

Over the last few days, conservative morality scolds like William Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Ollie North, Dr. Laura and zillions of others have stepped forward to say that, hey, coke use ain't THAT bad, and besides, It Happened Sooooo Long Ago -- Right?

It looks as the initials "GOP" may really stand for "Guys On Powder": in order to deflect some of the heat from the flammable Shrub, many of these same Republican scolds, and at least one Republican pol, have started yapping about their drug involvements.  Marcia Clark, a Law Enforcement Official, admits on Hardball to doing speed. The Governor of New Mexico talks of his former cocaine habit.

Better yet, self-styled "constitutional lawyer" and Grateful Dead "What a Long Strange Tripp" bootleg taper Ann Coulter spent a good chunk of her air time on the 08/18/99 edition of Rivera Live laughingly boasting about lying to FBI agents who called her up to do background checks on her druggie friends. (Personally, I wonder if Ann herself could pass a drug test. And her calling herself a "constitutional lawyer" is about as truthful and ethical as former coroner Jack Kevorkian calling himself a brain surgeon.)

SnortGate threatens to turn the GOP topsy-turvy, so of course Jim Nicholson's Crack (pardon the pun) Team of Blast-Faxing Obfuscators was at it again, wangling yet another invite to Hardball for famed liar extraordinaire, Gennifer Flowers. Gennie-Poo, when she wasn't bringing up the Clinton Body Count canard (Memo to Gennie-Poo: that was discredited years ago, honey!), was reviving and embroidering on her old lies about Big Bad Bill's own alleged coke use. According to Gennifer, Bill did so much blow it "made his head itch". Excuse me, Ma'am, but itchy scalp ain't a symptom of coke abuse.  This is right up there with her claiming their "affair" started in 1979 in a Little Rock hotel that hadn't even been built until 1982. The White House didn't even bother to dignify her with a real response, other than to do what George W. Bush has so far refused to do: issue a flat-out denial of powder usage.

Speaking of obfuscation: that leads us straight to Topic C: Waco Redux.

The tinfoil-hat right-wing, aided and abetted by ever-so-slightly slanted reports in the New York Times, is claiming now that the FBI's alleged use of exploding tear-gas canisters proves that the federales, not Koresh's followers, started the Waco blaze. This despite a) the fact that the canisters were used several hours before the fires started, and b) the hours and hours of secret tape recordings the FBI made of Koresh and his top lieutenants planning exactly where to put the gas cans and the other accelerants to start said fires.  This "scandal" should not have any sort of legs at all; the only reason that this news is even "news" is because the RNC is desperate to try and distract us all from SnortGate.