Ferreting Out the News
Remember how, during last month’s gala celebrations at the opening of Bill Clinton’s presidential library on the banks of the Arkansas River, Clinton’s White House successor, George W. Bush, was overheard musing aloud about a submarine-borne nuclear missile strike on Little Rock?
Yeah, The Scrapbook missed that story, too. As did every last one of the 1,000-plus professional journalists–The Weekly Standard’s own Matt Labash included–who were on site to cover the event from start to finish. Go figure.
Go figure, more to the point, how come it took an altogether unprofessional journalist to break the news of President Bush’s scandalous remark. For that matter, ask yourself why it is that the altogether unprofessional journalist in question–Sidney Blumenthal, “Washington bureau chief of Salon“–remains to this day the only man who’s dared to publicize the incident in print. Are we really sunk so low? Has the right-wing assault on America’s mainstream media finally succeeded in quashing all dissent?
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Here–from his November 25 column in London’s Guardian (there being no reputable American newspaper brave enough to publish the man)–is what “two eyewitnesses” told Sidney Blumenthal about President Bush’s homicidal daydream:
A most unsettling vignette, to be sure. What could Bush have been thinking, asks Blumenthal in the Guardian? “Was the president warning of an al Qaeda submarine, sneaking undetected up the Mississippi, through the locks and dams of the Arkansas River, surfacing under the bridge to the 21st century to dispatch the Clinton library?” Or, (b) “was this a projection of menace and messianism, with only Bush grasping the true danger, standing between submerged threat and civilization?” Or, (c) “perhaps it was simply his way of saying he wouldn’t build his library near water.”
Or, (d) could it be that Sidney Blumenthal, a notoriously malicious fable-spinner, just made the whole thing up?
We report, you decide.
‘Breaking News’ So to Speak
Wait, back up: It seems there’s an option (e). The “two eyewitnesses” Sidney Blumenthal cites as sources for Bush’s “nuke Little Rock” reverie may have heard a voice they thought was the president’s–but was actually being ventriloquized by their own buttocks. No, really. Stranger things have been known to happen. For confirmation of which The Scrapbook directs doubtful readers to an authority whose reputation for accuracy and integrity far exceeds even Mr. Blumenthal’s own. We refer, of course, to the Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid routinely overlooked by the Pulitzer Prize board, but otherwise indistinguishable from the Howell Raines-era New York Times.
Were there any real justice in the news business, for example, Weekly World News science writer D.G. Bulger would surely win a 2004 Pulitzer for a story he published earlier this year about a 40-year-old Michigan man named Jason Jablonski. “Linguists and proctologists from around the world are stunned by a Detroit man’s unique gift,” Bulger reported on August 26. Mr. Jablonski “is able to speak fluent French out of his buttocks.”
Unlike Salon‘s Sidney Blumenthal, incidentally, Mr. Bulger disdains anonymous sourcing and blind quotation. His information about Jablonski’s rare form of “Intestinal Linguistic Amplification” is plainly attributed to a professional expert, one “Dr. Edith Winters, senior fellow at the California Institute of Bowel Abnormalities.” Also unlike Blumenthal, Bulger ends his story on a thankfully upbeat, non-nuclear-holocaust note. It turns out that Jason Jablonski’s talking derrière has struck a blow for global comity. The Detroit furniture store he works in “draws many French Canadian customers from across the border, which has allowed his buttocks to sharpen [their] conversational skills.” Pleased with these results, Jablonski now hopes to work at the United Nations or as an embassy interpreter in a French speaking country.
Do as the French Do
And in other low-minded news involving French-speaking international diplomacy: France’s daily Le Parisien revealed on December 20 that one of that country’s best-known public magistrates, Pierre Hontang of Bayonne, is now under intensive Justice Ministry scrutiny for his alleged behavior at the Fifth Conference of European General Prosecutors in Germany this past May. Hontang attended the gathering as keynote speaker for a session on “fundamental principles of ethics for prosecutors.” According to a preliminary report by a joint task force of French and German police investigators, however, Hontang also slipped away from the conference at least twice, both times in order to visit a brothel. And while he is thought the first time to have used his own money for what one detective called “activities that are a little shameful for a magistrate of this standing,” Hontang’s return trip was apparently paid for with a credit card he’d stolen from a German colleague at the prosecutors’ conference.
“The affair came to light,” according to the Times of London, “after M. Hontang complained to the owner of the brothel . . . about the quality of its work. The owner noticed that he had not paid with his own credit card and alerted German police officers.”
French justice minister Dominique Perben has asked the country’s Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature to suspend M. Hontang pending completion of the inquiry. “It just wasn’t something we could ignore,” a Conseil spokesman told reporters, “even in France.”
That “even in France” part all by itself makes the whole story worthwhile, don’t you think?
City of Angels
On Friday, December 17, two copies of Los Angeles County’s 47-year-old official seal–the ones hanging on the front wall of its Board of Supervisors hearing room–were quietly covered over with temporary stick-um decals featuring a newly designed logo the county has chosen as a permanent replacement. What will eventually be a $700,000 county-wide reinstallation project got started back in May when the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California sent the Board of Supervisors a formal letter of complaint about the original seal, one minor iconographic element of which was a cross. The old seal was thus unconstitutionally Christian, the organization argued. And the supervisors–by a subsequent series of 3-2 votes–agreed.
Here’s the thing, though: By the time the Board of Supervisors got back to work on Monday morning, December 20, the covered-over cross had somehow made itself clearly visible again, right through the stick-um decal’s paper fabric. “It’s a Christmas miracle,” said a spokesman for supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, one of the Board’s two replacement-project opponents. Antonovich’s colleague, supervisor Don Knabe, agreed: “It is very symbolic that the cross has reappeared on a new seal directly above the new icon of [the San Gabriel] mission, which does not have a cross.”
Nah, “I’m pretty sure it’s a graphics problem,” explained Tom Tindall, a general manager of the county’s Internal Services Department. Either way, ACLU spokeswoman Elizabeth Brennan tells the Los Angeles Daily News that it’s unfortunate the cover-over effort seems to have failed. “But they’ve made a good-faith effort,” at least.
That “good-faith effort” part all by itself makes the whole story worthwhile, don’t you think?
