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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Reporting On Philandering, The IOKIYAR Way 

...somewhere tonight, Bill Clinton is just shaking his shaggy silvery mane in amazement. He simply has to be wallowing in envy of the super-slick miracle coating that has somehow draped itself around Rudy Giuliani with regard to marital infidelity, seemingly providing a degree of insulation that Bubba never could acquire in the deflection of 'The Main Question'...

A decade ago, as the Clinton/Lewinski saga unfolded, any whackjob with a hankering for a few minutes of fame could become the focal point of Breaking News on cable TV news by claiming that she had spent some moment of passion with Bill Clinton. Despite the sorts of frenzied efforts to verify these stories that could drive Michael Isikoff into a fatigued stupor, nothing beyond the main story ever panned out. But that didn't keep the SCLM from talking about all the allegations all day long with a passionate gravity that reflected all the seriousness that newshounds felt needed to be applied if ever the hottest actors of the day were to ever be cast as them in the eventual "All The President's Men, Ver. 2.0" movie that must surely be coming...

Oh, My, but how things have changed. All the news today about Rudy wasn't about his extra-marital affair, but instead was about the fact that he and his people - denials to the contrary - charged tens of thousands of dollars of security and other official time incurred during his dalliances with Judith Nathan outside of the norms of marital fidelity to all sorts of minor city budgets that clearly had nothing to do with a Mayor's sexual activities with people to whom he was not married. The story isn't that he actually had the affair; it's all about an apparent misappropriation of funds to provide for his 24-hour security that covered the activities incumbent to that affair...

We are officially all the way in Bizarro World now. The Clintons went on "60 Minutes" to fight allegations of marital infidelity, and that subject became a theme of the public aspect of their marriage that still lingers to this day, buttressed as it was by the whole Monicagate/impeachment meme. It is a strange demonstration of the...oh, hell, I don't know...maturation - or maybe innoculation - of the media's understanding of the tastes of the American public that the plain salacious fact of Rudy's randy little affair with the woman who would become his third wife isn't fodder for a constant barrage of breathless reportage, but the sudden revelation of the manner in which he charged off the salaried time of his people during that episode is suddenly Leading News...

And people in news media wonder why progressives have so little respect for the SCLM...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:58 PM 0 comments

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Willard's Willie Horton Problem 

...during the 1988 presidential campaign, one of the most devastating political ads that the Bush I handlers ran against the Democratic nominee was a depiction of a revolving turnstyle-type affair suggesting that former Massachuttes Governor Michael Dukakis had a history of seeing no problem with offering weekend furloughs to conviceted murderers like Willie Horton so they could freely wander the streets to rape and rob other victims. Wasn't true, but it combined with an otherwise hapless campaign (something that today's thirty-something progressives really should have studied before they branded the John Kerry and Al Gore campaigns as "The. Worst. Campaigns. Evah!) to usher in the presidency of the oddest metro elitist upper East Coast Republican candidate in the last hundred years...

Willard Romney is running the risk of facing the same fate himself, and his worried effort to try to shift the blame for his own Willie Horton moment isn't really going to make it all better. Fact is, the prosecutors didn't tell Romney-appointed Superior Court Judge Kathe Tuttman about the intercepted threats directed toward Romney and other state officials. More to the point, they got caught out engaging in the sort of prosecutorial excess that has started to turn the tide against the "law and order" sect all across the nation in their efforts to bring charges during the summer of 2007 for offenses of spitting on and hitting prison guards that happened at least 14 months before his release at the completion of his original sentence...

There's nothing wrong with "law and order". None of us wants to live with the understanding that we need to sleep with a Glock under the pillow and a 12-gauge loaded with deer slugs and double-aught shot leaning against the dresser on the off chance that we may need to address some neighbor's covetness. There is, on the other hand, a faith that must be kept - for better or for worse - with the system. The system that Millard oversaw as governor failed him and people on the far side of the country died because of that failure. His system didn't fail, however, because of his appointement of a state judge who let him down when it mattered. His system failed because of prosecutors to didn't bring all the facts to the table that a judge needed to know in a case where they were bringing charges that should have been presented at least a year before this particular judge was even appointed...

Michael Dukakis didn't personally turn Willie Horton loose on an unsuspecting Massachuttes. Willard Romney didn't turn Daniel Tavares, Jr., loose on an unsuspecting state on the other side of the continent. Willard, however, was the Man In Charge as Governor - just like Dukakis - during a period in Massachutes that nurtured the sort of circumstances from which he is now scrambling to distance himself. You just simply cannot campaign on the strength of your time as governor when there are Difficult Questions to be answered. It's all right there in the "So You Want to Be a Governor" handbook, readily found in the " Seeking National Office" chapter, and Willard probably won't be the first former Governor to discover that all those chatty observations about how governorships are the perfect launching platform for presidential runs were a vicious rumor at the very least...

It may well not be his own personal fault, but Willard has the same questions to answer that a former Massachuttes governor had to face two decades ago: Why are people the victims of crimes because of a program or a person or a circumstance that a Governor tolerated or created? The appointment of this particular judge isn't Willard's problem; the behavior of the state and its failures in the courtroom are. That may not be how the game plays out, but it is the foundation of Willard's Willie Horton Problem...

(Reposted to fix Haloscan obnoxiousness)
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:04 AM 0 comments

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