Ditch Bill Clinton

I've had a remarkable run of successful political bets in the past two months, winning enough small change to completely wipe out my 2002 heart-over-mind wager that the Boston Red Sox would win the World Series. Obviously, despite a dormant offseason so far from new Bosox GM Theo Epstein?the acquisition of Jeremy Giambi, now that'll slay the Curse of the Bambino?I'll play

the sucker once again next spring, with the usual sharpies taking advantage of my light-headed faith that the Sox will eventually reign as baseball's champs.

There was the booty from picking Bob Ehrlich over Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in the Maryland governor's race (although a certain Baltimore Sun columnist has yet to pay up). A last-minute prediction that the GOP would win back the Senate yielded another hundred bucks. Al Gore's withdrawal from the 2004 presidential race helped jam my mailbox with checks. Finally, my hunch that Bill Frist would replace Trent Lott as majority leader paid for a couple of PlayStation 2 games for Junior that'll be under the Christmas tree, Joe Lieberman's disapproval notwithstanding.

In the interest of spreading the wealth, here's a tip for recreational gamblers that'll pay off about a year from now. The Democratic nomination will be won by the first candidate who has the guts to repudiate Bill Clinton and his acolytes like Terry McAuliffe, Paul Begala and James Carville. Now that's what I'd call a supreme Sister Souljah moment!

Objectively, the independently wealthy John Kerry is in the best position to eschew the Clinton/McAuliffe fundraising machine in favor of principle, but a stiff patrician like the junior Senator from Massachusetts, who's uncomfortable drinking a beer from a bottle at a local bullroast, probably won't seize the opportunity. Of the candidates in play right now?Wisconsin's Russell Feingold, who apparently isn't running, is the Democrats' best chance against President Bush?my greenbacks are on Dick Gephardt, the underestimated former minority leader who's never been under Clinton's spell.

Clinton is a national embarrassment, a bored and bitter politician whose weekly routine is a mixture of lucrative (and usually incoherent) speeches around the world, socializing with celebrities and criticizing Bush with an unprecedented zeal, demolishing the tradition of an ex-president keeping mum, at least for several years, about his successor. Even Jimmy Carter, who disgracefully accepted a Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to him only as a rebuke to Bush, looks graceful in comparison.

The Arkansan's latest tirade was lapped up by CNN on Dec. 19, as he inserted (no pun intended) himself into the Lott fiasco. Clinton said: "How do they [the Republican Party] think they got a majority in the South anyway? I think what they are really upset about is that [Lott] made public their strategy.

"They try to suppress black voting, they ran on the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina, and from top to bottom the Republicans supported it." When a CNN reporter asked the man who pardoned Marc Rich if Lott should walk the plank, he responded: "That's up to them, but I think they can't do it with a straight face...

"He just embarrassed them by saying in Washington what they do on the back roads every day."

Clinton, still reeling from his ineffective campaigning on behalf of Democratic candidates in November, has willfully distorted the facts. In Georgia, for example, the issue of the Confederate flag was minor. The defeat of incumbent Democrat Roy Barnes by Sonny Perdue, was one of the biggest shocks of the midterm elections; had Perdue's promise of a referendum on the flag resonated so highly, it would've shown up in polls, which showed Barnes winning by a landslide.

As Mark Levin, among others, pointed out in a Dec. 20 National Review Online post, Clinton's record on race isn't pristine. For example, in 1985, as governor, the First Black President signed a law making "the birthdates of Martin Luther King Jr... [and Confederate general] Robert E. Lee... state holidays on the same day." In addition, while Clinton was governor, Arkansas law decreed that "The Saturday immediately preceding Easter Sunday of each year is designated as 'Confederate Flag Day' in this state." Levin notes: "Clinton took no steps during his twelve years as governor to repeal this law. And we know why, don't we? He didn't want to offend certain of his constituents."

Hillary Clinton echoed her husband's words just a few days later, telling Fox News, "I mean, what [Lott] did was state publicly what many of them have stated privately over many years in the back roads and back streets of the South." She then bashed Bush for his South Carolina primary campaign against John McCain in 2000?an ugly contest on both sides?in which leaflets were distributed highlighting McCain's adoption of a black baby, a smear tactic the Bush camp disavowed. The dirty tricks of losing candidates are quickly forgotten, but it's worth recalling that McCain wasn't pure in his media-driven bid to defeat Bush. In the Michigan primary, for example, his supporters called voters, saying that the Texas governor was anti-Catholic. In addition, McCain, speaking on the Straight Talk Express, referred to the "gooks" in Vietnam. The Senator's captivity during the war inoculated him from the slur, but had the media not been so besotted by McCain, it would've been more than a one-day story and Asian-Americans would've been justifiably outraged.

Sen. Clinton, like Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, has now publicly announced that Democrats will race-bait every Republican they possibly can in the coming two years. It's a losing strategy, but expect Frist to be the first castigated for imagined racial sins.

On Saturday, the Daily News' Zev Chafets wrote a withering critique of Bill Clinton. He said: "Clinton speaks with a certain authority. He is the Man from Hope, former governor of Arkansas, a son of the South.

"On the other hand, he now lives in Chappaqua, Westchester County, where, according to the 2000 census, the African-American population is .03%...

"Clinton's adopted town is not unique. The ex-President may not know this, but the anti-segregationist North?even here in New York?is dotted with lily-white towns, schools and neighborhoods.

"And clearly, not all the lilies are Republicans...

"The Democrats, meanwhile, have integrated in the Northern way?blacks can join the party if they stay in their own precincts. Representatives, yes; senators, no. Black governors? Find one and ask. Try Carl McCall...

"Don't misunderstand me. I'm not making excuses for [Lott]. I hope they ride him out of Washington on a rail...

"In fact, I hate Jim Crow just as much as the next white man who just happens to live in a virtually all-white neighborhood. Bill Clinton and I are on the same page there. And the same block."

Pod's A Putz

Trent Lott's realization that he couldn't hang on as majority leader was welcome news to conservatives who called for his ouster, but the unseemly self-aggrandizement of John Podhoretz was nauseating. The word "class" has never been associated with the New York Post columnist, but his short piece last Friday on National Review Online was beneath even his paltry standards.

He wrote: "The story here was that Lott was brought down not by liberals, but by conservatives, and that he was compelled to resign not by Democrats, but by Republicans. The passion voiced on this website and countless others about the unforgivable nature of Lott's repeated invocation of the problems we would supposedly be spared with an evil segregationist regime in Washington turned the tide.

"Lott said what cannot be said?what should not be said?in America today by a political leader. And the party of personal responsibility, led now by a president who said he wanted to lead the nation into a 'responsibility era' has just cleaned its own house with record speed.

"We passed the test with flying colors."

Podhoretz is a smart man who unfortunately lacks manners. But the conclusion of the Lott crisis didn't warrant popping the champagne; rather, it was a bullet dodged, and a reminder that the Democrats will continue to demagogue on racial issues from now until Jesse Jackson gets the thumbs-down from St. Peter.

10021 Malarkey

Tina Brown's Talk was shuttered earlier this year?a quiet euthanasia?but the 90s media icon resurfaced a few months ago with a weekly column in London's Times. Onetime detractors have hailed Brown's new venture (one suspects it's temporary until she lands a more high-profile vehicle) as simply marvelous, making the preposterous claim that if only the middle-aged lady's magazine showed as much verve...Talk would still be clogging newsstands.

That's bunk, of course, just another example of how the media elite, in due course, rally to those who've spent time in the penalty box.

Brown's Dec. 19 piece was extraordinarily vile, exhibiting the shallow, out-of-touch mindset that's just a smidgen more palatable than Maureen Dowd's semiweekly fantasies on The New York Times' op-ed page.

Presumptuous Tina wrote: "For New Yorkers, 2002 was one long morning after. We all just want to log off and slink away with a huge pile of DVDs and a mug of hot chocolate. After 9/11 we expected a paradigm shift, the discovery of what we really wanted for our children, our country, ourselves.

"But it didn't come... This, I suspect is what was behind the curious outburst of strike-nostalgia last week, an emotion inconceivable to Londoners who lived through the Winter of Discontent. New Yorkers felt almost warm and cosy about the impending chaos in Manhattan if, as they threatened right up to the midnight deadline, the transport workers had walked out...

"It was also, I suspect, the attempt to rekindle how we felt in the first months after the terrorist attacks. New Yorkers secretly miss the people they became at that time, elevated by a new connectedness and the exhilarating absence of materialistic trivia [like Talk, perhaps?]. Beneath the city's pace for a while there was a new undertow of meaning."

What a contemptible notion Brown so cavalierly commits to the printed page. I don't know of anyone who felt "warm and cosy" about the possible transit strike, a nightmare scenario that would've plunged the city into deeper fiscal crisis in the midst of the holiday season. Rather, New Yorkers were in near-panic about how they'd get to work, send their kids to school and the cost those would entail. As for Brown's theory that residents "secretly miss" the months after 9/11, the woman's clearly out of her mind. I wonder if she asked the families of the Trade Center victims if they were nostalgic about that horrific day. And does anyone doubt that 99.9 percent of New Yorkers entertain, daily, the futile wish that their city wasn't forever changed on that September morning?

What's next for Brown: perhaps an interview with Sean Penn about the wonders of Baghdad.

Calling John Edwards

Ordering takeout food is normally a benign exercise, a lazy and often expensive way to avoid the bother of making dinner. And you take some chances: just as a rodent or cockroach might be spied in a restaurant, the grub that arrives at your door might not be perfect. Or even worse, as a couple from Watertown, NY, discovered last November when a Domino's pizza they had delivered allegedly had an ingredient that most would find more objectionable than anchovies: pubic hairs.

Michael Widrick and Rhonda LaParr were rightfully incensed and some manner of redress from the Domino's franchise was certainly not an unreasonable request. However, as WNBC.com reported on Dec. 19, the pair upped the ante by suing both Domino's and the employee who presumably prepared the pie for $150,000. The victims' lawyer, Eric T. Swartz, claimed his clients suffered "emotional harm, anxiety, psychological and mental distress." No doubt there's a future in politics for Mr. Swartz, perhaps the U.S. Senate.

This is just one example of the absurd level of frivolous litigation in the United States today. While the mixing of pubic hair with onions and pepperoni, say, is a disgusting and egregious dereliction of sanitary conditions by Domino's, you'd think a Trent Lott-like series of apologies and perhaps free pizzas for a year would satisfy the customers' complaint. But anxiety and emotional harm? This is a perversion of the legal system.

Domino's will no doubt settle with Widrick and LaParr for a less substantial sum?with the lawyer taking a hefty cut?to minimize bad publicity. But this is just one more example of why immediate tort reform needs to be a priority in President Bush's domestic agenda?along with tax cuts and saying no to affirmative action?during the next session of Congress.

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