The GOP Can't Let Go; Wiesel and the Rich Pardon; San Fran Dog Daze; The Worst Hack in Moscow; Pearl Harbor Is Avenged!

Now Arlen Specter is broaching the possibility of retroactive impeachment for Bill, on account of the pardons. Is the idea to offer distractions while "President" GWB gives away the store?

Actually I'm beginning to swing round in favor of Marc Rich, mostly on account of his ex, Denise, described as a socialite and songwriter. Her website discloses some success in the latter capacity. A disco song performed by Sister Sledge called "Frankie" represents the summit of her choric art. At one White House party, according to a committee witness, she apparently managed to prize Bill away from Barbra Streisand, a feat for which Bill should have given her the Medal of Honor he had reserved for Teddy Roosevelt.

The investigation into the Rich pardon conducted by Rep. Dan Burton's subcommittee has elicited many delightful details, including the frantic hunt for a rabbi to lobby for the fugitive commodities trader. According to Alison Leigh Cowan's very amusing story in The New York Times of Feb. 10, "In another flurry, Robert Fink, Mr. Rich's longtime lawyer in New York, reported on Jan. 2 that he heard that the pardon request was being taken seriously inside the White House but lacked someone inside eager to push it. 'We need a rabbi among the people in the counsel's office,' the e-mail message reads. Rich's man in Israel, Avner Azulay, having spent the previous six weeks compiling a book of letters from Israeli and American Jewish leaders, took the request literally and responded: 'I don't understand the comment about the rabbi. Our book is full of rabbis. Could you get more specific?'"

Quinn and his merry troupe, so the Times asserted, needed a person of high moral caliber, and so they whistled up Elie Wiesel, who allegedly put in a word for Rich. As I read this I thought that Wiesel doubtless reiterated the endorsements of a former Mossad chief, Shabtai Shavit, who, according to Niles Lathem's story in the New York Post on February 5, had told the White House that Rich had spied for Israel and so was an all-around good guy. I thought that maybe that's why Jonathan Pollard didn't get his pardon. Bill reckoned one spy for Israel was enough. I also reflected on the fact that normally Wiesel charges $25,000 for a gig to discuss moral darkness, but since in this case he was talking about moral excellence (Rich's) he presumably didn't invoice for this particular chore.

The Feb. 10 Times story was specific in its citation of Wiesel's role: "On Dec. 25, between notations that Mr. Wiesel and Shimon Peres had both weighed in with the White House in mid-December, Mr. Quinn [Rich's lead lawyer] told his co-counsels that 'the greatest danger lies with the lawyers. I have worked them hard and I am hopeful that E. Holder will be helpful to us,'" a reference to Eric H. Holder Jr., the deputy attorney general in the Justice Dept.

But then this Monday Cowan had an update in the Times: "Contrary to the documents' assertions that he had weighed in with the White House, Mr. Wiesel said, 'I didn't do anything.'" Wiesel thought a pardon for Rich was a long shot, and thus presumably a bad investment of his moral credentials. "Besides, Mr. Wiesel said, he was concerned about diverting attention from the person he really wanted pardoned, Jonathan J. Pollard." So my instincts were right.

Dog Days

Aside from the Pardons, the big national story remains the San Francisco dog saga, in which the dearly departed Bane (a Canary-mastiff cross) tore out Diane Whipple's throat; Bane's pal Hera is being held, pending trial this week. It's unclear whether Hera has legal counsel, beyond her stand-in owners Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller, the San Francisco lawyers who were co-owners of Bane and Hera with the lifer in Pelican Bay who is also their adopted son. The Pelican Bay lifers were running a Presa Canary breeding business, supplying killer guard dogs for the meth trade, no doubt describing their entrepeneurial ventures as a faith-based operation performing charitable services.

It's true, Bane and Hera are the least interesting characters in this story. It's also unclear whether Terrence Hallinan, D.A. of San Francisco, will prosecute Noel and Knoller for manslaughter.

There are some interesting bloodlines here. My neighbor Joe Paff says he can remember Kayo's father Vince Hallinan, a famous Bay Area radical, running for mayor of San Francisco in the early 60s on a platform with a strong anti-dog plank. Joe says his sister, another dog hater, kept calling him, asking why we can't have a candidate like that in the East Bay. Progressives all too often have an antipathy to dogs on sanitary grounds, also because they represent improper social priorities (kids not dogs, etc., etc.). Of course people like dogs for the same reason Marx recognized they like religion: "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the soul of a soulless world."

Progressives, always worrying about public transport and clean sidewalks, can be pretty dumb. In Switzerland there's a strong movement for a public defender for dogs facing misdemeanor or felony charges. Why not? When dogs or pigs were up for trial in the Middle Ages they had proper counsel. If the state of California can put up $300,000 for a death penalty defense for a human, why not some funding for pooch defense? They make us pay for dog licenses, after all, thus recognizing dogs as part of the social contract. Cats, being smarter and legally off the books, don't need lawyers.

The Worst Hack in Moscow

Fans are exulting that The eXile, the excellent and extremely funny English language mag put out in Moscow by Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, is running its annual Worst Foreign Journalist in Moscow Tournament. Last year's contest was won by the tirelessly tedious David Hoffman of The Washington Post. This year The eXile says that The New York Times' Michael Wines is their number-one seed.

For the last four years The eXile has poured pitiless and deserved scorn on the ghastly coverage of Russia offered by foreign journalists. (One shining exception, duly noted by The eXile, has been The Independent's Patrick Cockburn, brother of yours truly.) The main contours of this lousy coverage have been the ridiculous lies touted about capitalist reforms in the early Yeltsin years, followed by brazen and impenitent rewriting of these same lies when the whole system collapsed in 1998. The new theme is Russia's need for a Strong Man, a role currently allocated to the appalling V. Putin, with M. Wines as one of his prime apologists.

But as Taibbi notes, every now and then it takes the national exposure of the March Madness tournament to bring a great talent to light. Thus sudden fame may be in store for the Knight-Ridder service's Dave Montgomery. Taibbi offers Montgomery's Jan. 3 story, "Dreams of Better Life End in Sexual Slavery," as "a perfect example" of the Montgomery technique.

"Here's the lead: 'DNIEPRODZHERZHINSK, Ukraine?It was the simple dream of working in an honest job for a modestly better life that got Yelena into trouble. Like so many others, she ended up forced into sex slavery and imprisoned in brothels and dreary hotel rooms while her captors stood guard.' This lead reminded me of a little bit of a movie spoof from the Zucker brothers film Kentucky Fried Movie. They did this trailer for a fake movie called Catholic High School Girls in Trouble, which showed a huge pair of tits being mashed over and over again against a glass sliding door in a shower, along with the voice-over: 'Never before has the beauty of the sexual act been so crassly exploited!'

"Montgomery couldn't wait even a sentence before he started mashing those tits against the glass door. Now, everyone knows the press is sensationalistic, that what sells papers is war, plane crashes and hot, dripping snatch. But most reporters for 'respectable' newspapers at least throw hats over their hard-ons before they put this stuff in print. They at least pretend that there are real issues at stake? Take this passage from the piece, when he describes the experiences of a 15-year-old St. Petersburg girl?'blond with a ponytail'?who'd been forced into prostitution: '?Another girl persuaded her to meet two Azerbaijani men at a cafe near a St. Petersburg subway station. Looking downward as she clutched a small black and white stuffed dog, Julia recalled the terrifying two weeks that followed.'

"The little black-and-white stuffed dog is the giveaway here. No detail Montgomery could possibly have thought up would have been more guaranteed to send his middle-aged male readers in Philadelphia reaching for their peckers; they'd be acting out of the Pavlovian response developed after years of reading passages just like this one on websites like frightenedlolitas.com and chicksincages.de. Montgomery writes the word 'terrifying' here, but if he felt even a second of anything like terror, then I'm a gay pastry chef. This is an article that was typed with one hand, that's guaranteed."

I'll keep you posted as the tournament continues.

Know Nothings

So how come not a single one of those high-flying, White House-connected newshounds managed to get hold of that pretty significant news item, finally disclosed last week, that Bill Clinton and Al Gore hadn't spoken in a full year before they finally had a meltdown gripe session not long before the most recent election.? As always, it turns out we know nothing about what really goes on in the White House. George W. could be shoving cocaine up his nose and partying till dawn and four years down the road we'll still be reading about him and Laura tucked up by 10:30.

We can look forward to months, if not years, of civil war between the Clinton and Gore factions. Late last week a very senior pollster in Clinton's inner circle spotted a journalistic acquaintance in a Georgetown supermarket and pinned him against his shopping cart with a vibrant diatribe against Gore. How, the pollster hissed, can we explain that Gore was unable to run on the Clinton economy, unable to mention millions of jobs created through the Clinton 90s? She answered her own question. Because to do so would have meant mentioning Clinton's name and Gore couldn't bring himself to do that.

Why not? The answer, the pollster said, went far back, before the Lewinsky affair that so troubled Al and Tipper. It seems that Al has always felt that it was he who actually won the 1992 election, bailing Bill out of all his problems over draft-dodging and Gennifer Flowers. Through Clinton's two terms Al's conviction that he rather than Bill should by rights by sitting in the Oval Office throbbed painfully in his psyche. Result: he never spoke to the boss and couldn't bear to ask him to help in those last desperate campaign days.

Pearl Harbor Is Avenged!

The Japanese are saying that the U.S. crewmen aboard that submarine just sat and watched as the folk on the Ehime Maru fishing boat thrashed about in the water. Pending the inevitable coverup, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, facing his first big crisis, sounds defensive.

The Japanese slurs sound plausible. After all, when they blew away that Iranian airbus full of civilians back in the 1980s, the crew of the Vincennes congratulated themselves on a job well done, and later the Defense department gave them all medals. The Iranians were pissed off and hired the PFLP-GC group to blow up Pan Am 103 by way of retaliation, thus allowing the U.S. to blame Libya. Maybe the Japanese will take the same route.