Dot 1: Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta report in their recent book that Hillary Clinton personallyBizarre.listened to a secretly recorded audiotape of a phone conversation of Clinton critics plotting their next attack. The tape contained discussions of another woman who might surface with allegations about an affair with Bill. Bill's supporters monitored frequencies used by cell phones, and the tape was made during one of those monitoring sessions.Dot 2: Tina Brown's new Diana Chronicles contains this passage, supporting reports that Princess Di was thinking of marrying U.S. tycoon Ted Forstmann as part of a possible presidential ticket:Diana built an escape fantasy around Forstmann for a time. "It's a true story," he told me, "that Diana had the idea that we should get married, that I should run for president and she would be First Lady."Dot 3: Forstmann was in fact seriously mentioned as a Republican opponent for Hillary in the 2000 N.Y. Senate race.
Dot 4: Both Diana (according to Tina Brown) and Forstmann (according to the New York Daily News**) thought they were being bugged.
Dot 5: A British paper reported that Diana and Forstmann and Diana were bugged by some American outfit during the Clinton administration, although the official Lord Stevens inquiry failed to include this allegation despite press predictions that it would.
Hard to think of Di as a Republican... and as an American First Lady. Oh, the glamour that never was!
By the way, I highly recommend "The Diana Chronicles," which I enjoyed as an audiobook download. There's quite a lot of focus on the development of journalism over the Diana years -- so it's not just escapist reading.
Speaking of glamour... do you think Bill Clinton will make a glamorous First Gentleman? Do you think Barack and Michelle would be a more glamorous First Family?
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With respect to your final question, I don't think glamour is the term I would apply to WJC as "the first gentlemen." I would love to see him in that role, however, only to see how the role would be defined! I suspect the Washington Press Corps would spend more time on him than on President Hillary.
How about just a competent president and a functional firstgentleman or firstlady?
I'll skip the glamour for a while...in fact I've kinda had it with the "lookin' presidential" assessments.
300 million plus in our pool and we we have candidates running for office that have cell phone monitoring to catch either dirt or defense? I give up.
Bill would be the most fun -- NASCAR fun -- waiting for the wreck. Would we really have to buy them another set of furniture though?
"Speaking of glamour... do you think Bill Clinton will make a glamorous First Gentleman? Do you think Barack and Michelle would be a more glamorous First Family?"
Alan Keyes has a very beautiful Indian wife (I've met them both in person), more attractive than Fred Thompson's even. Now THEY would make a glamorous first couple, and be a lot lot better for this country to boot.
Plus, in distinction with Obama, Keyes is a "real" African-American.
monitoring her political enemies phone calls, ordering her political enemies FBI files, Hillary is truly Nixon in a pants suit.
Um . . . I'll bite.
What's a "fake" African-American? Like C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man? Oh my god, do you think Obama took a bunch of self-tanning pills?
As for Kaus's "plotted" dots, what happens when you connect them? Are the Wonder Twins' powers activated? I guess anything's possible in this instance.
Heh...people talk about the Clinton and Kennedy cults of personality, imagine what we'd have seen if Princess Diana had a shot at being in the White House. We'd never have let her leave!
I dunno, but given Di's bulemia, dinners at the White House would seem, well, slightly less glamorous for that.
The Princess at a White House Dinner [hosted by the Reagans shown in the background]. They were Republicans, and, at the time of the photo, I believe her bulimia was raging.
Looks pretty glamorous to me.
John Kindley said...
Plus, in distinction with Obama, Keyes is a "real" African-American."
What constitutes a "real" African-American? Some sort of racial purity litmus test?
Also you left out that Keyes is a lunatic...but that isn't much consequence.
Funny how all the iconic "England's Rose" hagiographic journalists omitted she was a vapid little whore who was sleeping around even before Charles went back to his mistress - along with many other personal "traits" of Diana dealing with her "issues" and staff that were hardly admirable..
The final testament to Diana's nature is not her gay coterie of worshippers, it is Harry...the spitting image of his Dad.
just an observation but given that Obama's father is from Africa and his mother from America, I suspect it is Obama who is the REAL African American, and all those other folk such as the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton are, in reality, just Americans-perhaps black Americans but certainly not African Americans. (disclaimer: my comments meant to be tongue-in-cheek).
And my comment insinuating that Obama is not a "real" African-American was also for the most part tongue-in-cheek, riffing on the reluctance of some in what has traditionally been understood in America to be the African-American community to fully embrace Obama as one of their own. And their reluctance is understandable and reasonable. More important to the identity of that community in today's society than mere skin color are the obstacles they've had to overcome and are still trying to overcome as the descendants of slaves. Obama, unlike Keyes, is not the descendant of slaves.
John Kindley: stay tuned because I think this question of "blackness" and "authenticity" as it were is simmering right under the surface and is going to get really ugly as the primary season wears on.
Do you think Barack and Michelle would be a more glamorous First Family?
Michelle Obama has been spotted in fur coats. Some people consider that glamorous. Yuck.
People who are desire glamour in our political leaders instead of leaving that to movie stars probably would've loved "Princess" Diana to marry an American billionaire who'd try and purchase the First Lady position for the upper class prostitute as a wedding gift. But what were those July 4th fireworks about the other day?
And now we have an America where a lot of people think it's just the natural order things that the son of a president is president and the wife of a president is claiming she deserves to be next in line. Why are people accepting this as healthy? So, yes, please, Democrats, go for someone like Obama. I might not agree with a lot of his agenda, but he's a much healthier candidate, and hopefully there's be a healthier candidate on the other side as well and we can (for once in my life) have a presidential election that engages the people.
Hillary should have her husband explain why he was spending so much effort to bug a "Princess" dating her multiple billionaire boyfriends instead of having our intelligence agencies infiltrate al Qaeda. Then she should step aside and let America have candidates who aren't from an aristocrat class that believes the White House is their property.
Why do you say "will" for the Clintons and "would" for the Obamas? I don't like this grammatical acceptance of inevitability, which becomes a grammatical conferral of inevitability. It is often unconscious but in your case, I doubt it.
Amba: I thought about that when I wrote it. I think it's really likely that Hillary will win.
As for Kaus's "plotted" dots, what happens when you connect them?
I guess the connection is that the Clintons had their political enemies under electronic surveillance, and Forstmann was a potential political enemy -- so the "American outfit" that eavesdropped on Forstmann and Diana may have been, in fact, the investigators working for the Clintons.
Its thin, but it is an amusing idea.
Diana could have married Bush, who has sunk us in the desert.
The Faulklands, revisited...
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