Bill Clinton finally came clean today and posted a list of the more than 200,000 people who have donated to his foundation over the years. Unfortunately, putting the information on his website—after declining to do so for so long now—probably explains why the Clinton Foundation website is now down. Try again later, scandal-seeking Republicans! [NYT]
It's kind of comforting that, amid economic collapse and a new political order, Ron Burkle is still a dirty old billionaire luring teenagers onto his jet and caressing distracted girls in clubs. Why, just this weekend he was out with Leonardo DiCaprio again, at Cipriani. Close personal friend Bill Clinton was not in attendance this time, but there's been no public sign of a split. Which, actually, is kind of a problem for president elect Barack Obama, particularly now that another of Burkle's sketchy business ventures has spectacularly exploded in scandal, this one involving large amounts of cocaine.
Unreconstructed Liberals have their own reasons for disliking the Clintons, and movement conservatives obviously have even more, but what the hell explains the pathological antipathy the Washington Press Corps still feels for President Bill and Senator Hillary Clinton? The roots of it go back 16 years or so, but what's amazing is to see it still in such pristine condition, as if we haven't had eight terrible years to get over it. Now, as the Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State job offer becomes yet another press-driven telenovela, with the Clintons as, I dunno, the country's presumed dead ex-lover who just turned up on the day of our wedding to Barack Obama, or something, it's instructive to see how the press corps still sees the former first family. Christopher Hitchens comes at the Clinton issue as an old-timey Leftist (leftists hate liberals!) and also a drunken contrarian, but his comments and criticisms have been accepted by the resolute centrists of the DC press corps as a, bizarrely, an argument against Clinton with a great deal of popular support. The opinion of Chris Hitchens represents the views of precisely one person on this planet. He is representative of no one on the left, right, or in the center. You wouldn't know that from listening to Joe Scarborough:
"Hillary Clinton will be the next secretary of state, unless she’s not." That's what John Koblin wrote last night in The Observer. Has the story advanced since then? Nope. Obama offered—but not formally offered—Hillary the job. She's considering. They're vetting Bill. Bill promised to stop taking money from foreigners. Hillary hasn't accepted because it hasn't been offered formally. Ted Kennedy wants Hillary to stay in the Senate. And hey, the news-starved press dragged Obama into the Clinton drama machine! As we all remember, the Democratic primaries were way more fun than the general election. A black guy versus a woman! The Clinton Machine versus Hope! Jeremiah Wright! Shouty angry Bill! Snipers in Bosnia! Bittergate! Whee! Once Hillary conceded, the Democrats closed ranks and the Obama machine stopped playing with the press entirely. McCain's campaign didn't get interesting until Palin showed up and didn't get fun until they all began infighting. But just like everyone had to make up some news about Bill not loving Obama enough during the primaries, now everyone has to figure out what the Clintons are up to with this SecState nonsense. It's fun to speculate about which sneaky Clinton players are leaking what to whom, and is Bill's camp pushing it, and does Obama know what he's getting into? In truth, Obama probably just told Hillary the job was hers if she wanted it, depending on how Bill's vetting goes, and she's weighing her options now that Bill's seemingly acquiescing to Obama administration requests. Meanwhile, Tom Daschle just agreed to head Health and Human Services and act as Health Care czar and no one cares! As we've said, we've never been convinced that Hillary has any particular insight or expertise, foreign-policy-wise, or at least any more than any other Senate Democrat (and why pick from the Armed Services committee and not Foreign Relations?). We quite like her views on domestic policy. And with Ted Kennedy on the way out, it would be awesome if she spearheaded the Senate side of the upcoming sure-to-be-insane health care war. But she wouldn't be a bad Secretary of State, and she'd surely run a better State Department than Rice and Powell did. So sure, go for it. But on the whole, the media's going to need a new way to cover the Obama administration, as this has just been madness.
Guess who the new Attorney General will be? Eric Holder! He was an assistant AG back in—wait for it—the Clinton Administration! Yay, change! Hah, see, this is what happens when you only had an eight year vacation from your 40 years of desert wandering. Holder will help close Guantanamo Bay. Thankfully, Holder has a lot of experience freeing evil criminals, because he totally signed off on the Marc Rich pardon! Let's all take a magical trip back to that wonderful story, shall we? Marc Rich founded Glencore, a commodities supplier that does lots of business with "rogue states" and so on, back in the wild 1970s. Rich was a fantastically wealthy commodities trader and decided one day to evade some taxes and also to do some illegal business with Iran, during the oil crisis. He bought some cheap oil, from Iran, and sold it in the US for double the price. Some of this oil dealing happened while Iran was holding a couple Americans hostage. Whoops! Then Rudy Giuliani indicted him and Marc forgot to come back to America from Switzerland and he ended up on the Most Wanted List for a while. Some time later, Marc's lovely wife Denise donated millions of dollars to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, and she ponied up $450k for the Clinton library. One day, as his presidency ended, Bill pardoned Marc. Denise was thrilled! Some mean Republicans wanted to indict Bill, because honestly they'd just had a lot of fun hounding him for bullshit and were sad to see that wonderful time come to a close. But, you know, the president can pretty much pardon anyone he wants for any reason he wants. Pardoning an asshole millionaire because his socialite wife gave you money is probably more defensible than pardoning Nixon so the nation can heal or whatever. Still, it was gross and dumb, because no one liked Marc Rich besides his wife and some Israeli charities he donated to and the King of Spain. Not even his old lawyer, noted asshole Scooter Libby, actually liked him that much, though he defended the tax evasion, which was, oddly, the thing Bill didn't pardon him for. Anyway! Bill didn't seriously ask anyone in his Justice Department about whether or not he should pardon Marc Rich, but he did ask then-deputy AG Holder for his opinion, and Holder said he was "neutral, leaning towards favorable." So it's all his fault and he will be the worst Attorney General ever, as long as you pretend not to notice that the last three guys to do it have probably been the worst in history, or at least since Ed Meese. The Clinton scandals were fun because no one actually got hurt or was tortured and most American cities survived more or less intact.
Today, Newsweek posted the final chapter of their Special Election Project, the annual How He Did It book they've published for each presidential campaign since 1984 (when the answer was much easier: he just ran against Walter Mondale). The reporters assigned to the special project are embargoed from those publishing in the regular magazine, so they get jucier anecdotes, more hilarious quotes, and revealing stories, all of which are then packaged and in such a way as to make the winning campaign look like a well-oiled machine and the losing campaign look like a parade of idiots. Did you read the whole thing? We did! We'll share with you the funniest bits, the important takeaway, and the already solidifying conventional wisdom. In short, this is the story of the 2008 campaign: the Hillary Clinton campaign was a stressful psychodrama, the Obama campaign was an intellectual exercise, and the McCain campaign was a ragtag bunch of misfits who stumbled into an insane family nightmare from Twin Peaks, Alaska. Let's begin with Hillary and co. Hillary The Clinton campaign was beset by the vicious infighting among assholes, basically. The biggest and dumbest asshole was chief pollster/strategist Mark Penn!
Times columnist Maureen Dowd spent a decent chunk of this campaign trying to paint Barack Obama as another effete faggy Democratic wuss, as she did to John Kerry and Al Gore, just because, hey, why not. OBambi was all her, remember? Also she called him a "butterfly." Now, today, she's thrilled Obama won, and certain he'll restore dignity and grandeur to Washington and the White House. Obama "has the chance to make the White House pristine again." Yes, because Washington DC and the White House were certainly pristine before all this, right? Dowd explains how rough the last 16 years have been:
Obama beat them, and didn't need them to win. The punditariat clamored for Obama to beg Bill for his support, they trashed Bill for failing to deliver it lustily enough, and they fretted over whether Obama would underperform in the areas in which Hillary became an extremely unlikely working class hero. Then Obama won, handily, with barely any help from Bill and Hil, which was Bill's greatest fear, because Obama doesn't look to his presidency as a model for success, he looks to Reagan. The Clinton era: over. It'll barely register in the history books.We feel bad saying it, actually, because Bill is an incredibly gifted and skilled politician (we've seen him work a room, he's superhuman) and he meant well but his presidency, while on the whole a slight success, was kind of a mess. The economy was stewarded well and foreign policy was mostly responsible. But it also set up the Republican Revolution and devolved into a surreal farce that took up the entirety of 1998 and drove everyone mad and exacerbated the culture wars and led right to eight years of Bush, sort of. And for a while, it looked like Clinton's greatest legacy would be his political acumen and his new and improved centrist DLC, the organization that would provide the keys to the next Democratic victory. Well. In 2000 they got out-lawyered in Florida, in 2004 they couldn't eke out a slim victory from a divided elctorate, in the in 2008 primaries Hillary got beat, handily, by a charismatic nobody with a slim record. Come the general election, Obama went with a modified version of Howard Dean's 50 state strategy, expanding the map instead of focusing on two or three battlegrounds at any cost. He didn't reach out to Bill in any real way and didn't bitch when Bill didn't reach out to him. There's probably not room for Bill or Hillary in his cabinet, as much as a Bill Clinton Supreme Court nomination would be hilarious. And this means, basically, that the Clinton era has ended. He shoved the party to the right, yes, but it remains to be seen how long that rightward shift will last in a nation that might be trending left, economically at least. It's kinda sad, really, but Bill does still have his private jets full of models. All Hillary gets is her stupid Senate seat she didn't even want.
The list of election '08 losers is a long one: There's John McCain, of course, who will die angry and bitter, notwithstanding his rather gracious concession speech last night. Steve Schmidt, McCain's chief strategist, will probably have trouble finding a Little League team to advise, unless he manages to redeem himself somehow. From Republicans on the Hill to GOP strategists to snowmobile and hunting enthusiasts, plenty of people will feel the cold wind of electoral defeat for a long time to come. After the jump, a roundup of New York City's nine biggest losers.
When Diddy promoted "Vote or Die" in 2004, there were rumors that he didn't even bother to go to the polls himself. Guess there won't be a question this time around: He posed for photographers outside his local polling station in Midtown this morning. Click through for photos of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Clinton performing their civic duty.
♦ Britney Spears went to a Bronx school yesterday to visit some children. Unfortunately, the school was closed for the second day of Rosh Hashanah, so her handlers had to rustle up a bunch of other kids for the photo op. [OK!]
♦ Adnan Ghalib is backtracking on his Britney sex tape story. He now says there never was one to begin with. [MSNBC]
♦ Larry Flynt says his company has already shot a new porn movie starring a Sarah Palin look-alike, although he's not revealing the title yet. [R&M]
♦ Are Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady getting married? [Chicago Sun-Times]
♦ The woman who spotted Heather Locklear's car swerving and dialed 911 was former Us Weekly staffer Jill Ishkanian, who now runs a paparazzi photo agency of her own. [MSNBC]
Page Six thinks it has figured out why Bill Clinton gave such a tepid endorsement of Barack Obama on The View and David Letterman last week. Not that anyone was really scratching their heads, befuddled, as to why the ex-president couldn't get past his wife's bitter loss of the Democratic primary to Obama. But Page Six gets specific: Obama supposedly refused to promise Hillary Clinton a Supreme Court nomination as she demanded, so Bill exacted revenge. Clinton on the high court is not exactly a new idea. And her people deny the new version of the rumor. The timing of the gossip is interesting, though. As the Obama ticket battles it out with Sarah Palin, star of Thursday primetime TV, for former Clinton supporters, painting Hillary as shrill and demanding makes Obama look a bit more sympathetic. And celebrity gossip sheets may be nearly as good a way to reach Hillary Democrats as The View.
After giving short shrift to Barack Obama on two major broadcast TV shows Tuesday, Bill Clinton could hardly mention the Democratic presidential candidate's name enough on the basic cable Daily Show Wednesday. Perhaps comedian Chris Rock's well-aimed barbs in Clinton's wake on Late Show With David Letterman got through to the ex-president. But when host Jon Stewart brought up the Letterman incident, Clinton said Rock and other critics miss the point.
As in his appearance on the View, Bill Clinton offered the most tepid support possible for Barack Obama's presidential ticket on David Letterman's Late Show last night. After repeatedly invoking his vanquished wife Hillary, Clinton said the typical American voter will recall John McCain's heroic torture in a Vietnamese prison camp before deciding to "go the other way" and vote for... whoever that other candidate for president might be. In an inspired feat of booking, Letterman had comedian Chris Rock lined up to follow Clinton and, uh, remind him who won the primary. Video after the jump.
Bill Clinton will appear on David Letterman's show later tonight, but he gave a sneak preview of what he might say earlier today on the View. Don't expect the former president to come out swinging against Sarah Palin the way he did against Barack Obama during the primary. Asked a question that tied sexist treatment of his wife during the Democratic primary to supposedly sexist treatment of the Republican vice presidential nominee now, Clinton didn't utter a peep to challenge the shaky premise that Palin has been seriously hurt by a sexist media. Instead he talked about what a powerful force sexism has become — more ignored than racism, even! (Click the video icon to watch the clip.) But this doesn't necessarily mean Clinton is still bitter toward Obama.
Click to viewBoomp3.com The New York University chapter of the Alpha Phi Zeta held their annual fall kick off scavenger hunt over the weekend in the Big Apple. This particular team consisted of a few pledges and their future sorority sister who, according to them, will be victorious in the "Best Photo With A Celebrity" after stumbling upon Pineapple Express star James Franco in the street. Meghan Jefferson, who’s been with the sorority for three years now, believes that this strongest and biggest celebrity photograph so far. Jefferson said, “Last year, Jamie and Sarah got their picture taken with Bill Clinton, which in theory is awesome, but he’s nowhere as hot as James Franco. I mean, look at those eyes and that perky smirk of his. We’re totally going to get control of the DVR for the next two months.” [Photo Credit: Splash Pics] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.
Bill Clinton is going to be on The View! Which is, probably, a terrible idea? Or maybe not, who knows! He's going to talk about the Clinton Global Initiative, which is what he always is supposed to be talking about, but we imagine the conversation will turn crazy, because it is The View. Will Elisabeth Hasselbeck throw a fit of some kind, or embarrass herself? Yes. Actually the only real question is whether Whoopi and Joy will be sycophantic, because he is a respected Democratic former president, or sassy, because he is a philandering horndog. Bill will probably be gracious and charming. Because they're ladies. It's airing Monday! So you have all weekend to ponder how this insane television show became an important part of the national conversation. [UPI]
