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Dems' Fightin' Words

Wednesday August 7, 2002

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A MULLINGS EXCLUSIVE! The Transcript of the Clinton interview with an Israeli Recruiting Sergeant!
Right HERE!

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• Regular readers may remember that last April, covering the speech of Al Gore and The Democratic Wannabees in Florida, I said that the Democrats, from that moment on, had a "Gore Problem."

• The problem is: Al Gore wants to run again. And neither Joe Lieberman nor John Kerry; not John Edwards nor Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham; not Tom Daschle nor Dick Gephardt - That's about every Tom, Dick and Joey in the Democratic Party - wants him leading the ticket in 2004.

• Lieberman, who was thrilled beyond words to be Gore's running mate in 2000, has turned on his old boss by pointing out that Gore's "people versus the powerful" theme may have turned off large numbers of voters, "who," as Lieberman put it, "don't see America as 'us' versus 'them.'"

• Of course Lieberman neglected to make this point publicly during the campaign, an oversight for which we hereby re-title the Gore/Lieberman epic, "The Seduction of Joe Whinin'."

• As Ron Brownstein pointed out in his LA Times piece, Gore responded to Lieberman's right jab with a hard left uppercut in a New York Times op-ed piece on Sunday, writing:

  "The suggestion from some in our party that we should no longer speak the truth, especially at a time like this, strikes me as bad politics and wrong in principle."

• Here's the fun part: The Democrats, who have been falling all over themselves to make the "Collapse of the Bush Presidency" the August Story, now find themselves in open warfare over the soul of their own party, and the focus of way, WAY too much attention in the popular press.

• Speaking of fightin' words, the Former President Forever, Bill Clinton, was quoted while speakin in - of all places - Canada saying that "if the Iraqi or the Iranian army came across the Jordan River, I would personally grab a rifle, get in a ditch, and fight and die."

• Ok. Ok. I know. To that end, on the Mullings web page, there is a very funny parody: A transcript of the conversation between Bill Clinton and a recruiting sergeant for the Israeli Army. Read it HERE.

• The Hill newspaper has a story about the problems Washington lobbyists are having getting around the Capitol because of the new security arrangements. To that end the House and Senate committees which deal with administrivia have been working with the American League of Lobbyists to come up with a "frequent visitor card" which would give lobbyists approximately the same freedom to roam the, well, lobbies, as journalists.

• The President of the American League of Lobbyists said - I swear this is true - "When a lobbyist goes to the zoo, he doesn't mind standing in line ... But when we're working ... there needs to be a reconsideration of the issue."

• Here's the Mullings Question of the Day: In the context of lobbying, isn't the phrase "at the zoo" and the word "working" a redundancy?

• In one of those ironies which happen to me with some regularity, I got an AOL free trial CD which offered me 1,025 hours of free AOL access, but it had to be used within 45 days. That means that I have to be online 22 hours, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds PER DAY during the trial period to use all of the free time.

• That's not the ironic part. AOL shares have dropped from about $80 per share in January of 2000 to close yesterday at $9.90, a drop of about 87%. Here's the password they supplied for my trial offer: DOUSER-LOSSES.

• If I wanted (as suggested by AOL) to pass the CD along to a friend their password would be "PING-VELVET" which, while not being particularly funny, IS particularly precious.

• On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to the Clinton Recruiting parody, another to The Hill newspaper story about lobbyists, yet ANOTHER link to the Ron Brownstein piece, a photo of the AOL CD with the actual passwords, and the usual stuff.
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  Copyright © 2002 Richard A. Galen

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