Eccentric Flower:199808/we interrupt this program

twenty-one august ninety eight noon

we interrupt this program

So ... the Globe, in its six full pages of Clinton coverage today, had a cute little side story about how Press Secretary Mike McCurry and the press corps out on Martha's Vineyard got a little surprise.

Apparently, they've been using a local elementary school auditorium as an impromptu briefing room, not that there's anything to report. McCurry comes in every day and announces what the president had for dinner, how the birthday party went, who gave what gifts - no, I'm not making this up. That's what the news stories have been like for the last few days. The man's on vacation, for heaven's sake!

You might ask yourself why the press are even down there, then, and you'd be justified in asking. I figured it was so they could get a free trip to Martha's Vineyard, one of the more overrated locations on the East Coast.

But today, in the middle of the birthday party news, McCurry was handed a memo, got kinda agitated, and said, "I need to do a very important piece of business. In about ten minutes the president will be here."

Ah, the rewards of vigilance! To the reporters resigned to non-news came the spoils - the first announcement of the bombings.

I have said five times, in various places, that I wasn't going to write about the Clinton mess again, and five times I've been wrong. It just keeps getting weirder and weirder!

OK, perhaps these bombings served a worthwhile purpose (although if Clinton's advisors think that bombing Khartoum is in any way going to soothe Sudanese relations, they need to be dismissed). A symbolic purpose, anyway. Question is, symbolic for whom? For the terrorists? For the Islamic nations? For the American people? Who will benefit from this symbol?

It gets harder and harder to like Clinton. Why did I like him this long anyway? Why do I persist?

Well ... I got an email this morning. I'm going to quote a sizable chunk of the middle; apologies to whoever originally started circulating this Xeroxlore.

It purports to be the "unedited" text of Clinton's confession speech. It starts with the admission "I banged her," but the salient part's here in the middle:

Six years ago, there was not a man, woman, or child who didn't know I was as horny as Woody Allen. But you elected me anyway, which turned out to be a good move on your part. Your other choice was Bush, an aging baseball player and part-time resident of some place called "Kennebunkport" who thought he could bomb his way into the White House; and Perot, a whining nasal-toned munchkin with his own vision of the Ivory City.

Before them there was Reagan, who left the office with the same Alzheimer's he came in with; and Carter before him who brought you a 17% prime interest rate, smiling the whole time like his lithium drip had just kicked in. It was Nixon who before that coined, but never really understood, the concept of "plausible deniability," and almost got a one-way ticket to San Clemente for his crackerjack style of governing. Johnson was an inbred, power-mad war criminal whose major contribution to American society was Johnson City and chili. And finally John Kennedy, who was a little naughty himself, who didn't hang around long enough for America to spot that curious atavistic tic for "beaver-wrestling" shared by at least a dozen former residents of the White House.

Which brings me back to my point. Since I have been strumming the Deliverance banjo here at the White House, government is doing more. The budget is balanced for the first time since JFK did a one-gun salute to Marilyn, a fact the press didn't seem to care about, evidently. Unemployment is so low today a blind felon could get a job as a night-watchman. The stock market is higher than a D-student on a full gram of dumb-dust, and anyone with a degree from a junior college who can spell "internet" has enough money to ponder the annual maintenance cost of his yacht, instead of where his or her next meal is coming from.

That was clearly written before yesterday's events. It was a lot easier to agree with, to laugh at, before then.

The problem is that I can forgive sex, lies, and videotape, but bombing someone - whether for political reasons or not - is higher up on my list of sins. One of the few ideals I cling to is that it is impossible to fight fire with fire.

After all, I didn't dislike the Republican presidents because they were Republicans - I disliked them because of their militaristic streaks. (And because of their bigoted streaks. And because they hated the poor. None of that automatically comes with being Republican, although these days it does seem to be a package deal.)

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at Clinton. Adultery and shows of military might both spring from the same place. Clinton is a fine president - as I have noted before - except when he thinks with his penis.

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