From: "Eric Beck" <rayrena at mail.accesshub.net> Date: Thu, 19 Aug 99 15:15:44 -0400
Is there a working journalist more schizoid than Cockburn? In his NYPress column last week he wrote a brilliant, trenchant piece about Hillary's run for the Senate; a political and historical tour de force it was, with massive scope and astute analysis. This week, he's back to vintage Alexandrian-idiocy. This piece, pasted below, has nearly every element that is so disgusting about AC when he's off: salacious gossip; sensational personal digs parading as psychological and political insight; crass innuendo; and pedastal-peering sneers at the foibles of others. Oh, and as an added--and extremely offensive--bonus, he sprinkles in a bit of social stereotyping that borders on flat-out racism. Check it out.
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The N Word
"Some junior high n-----r kicked Steve's ass while he was trying to help his brothers out; junior high or sophomore in high school. Whatever it was, Steve had the n-----r down. However it was, it was Steve's fault. He had the n-----r down, he let him up. The n-----r blindsided him."
This was the First Man's brother Roger Clinton, as recorded in a covert police surveillance video made on June 27, 1984, when Roger was using cocaine and discussing a recent encounter his dealer had had with a local black teenager. The clip appears in the 1996 documentary The Mena Cover-Up: Drugs, Deception and the Making of a President, distributed by Citizens for Honest Government.
Chris Ruddy, who runs the Newsmax.com website harshly ciritical of the First Family, notes the line, put out by the Clinton p.r. machine, that the President's ethnic sensitivitiy derives from the President's grandfather, Eldridge Cassidy, who worked in the poorer part of Hope, AK, [sic] and who taught him to respect the black customers of Eldridge's grocery store.
"But didn't Roger Clinton have the same grandfather?" Ruddy asks. "Yup. So how did little brother manage to miss out on all that racial sensitivity training? Or has some carefully crafted public relations obscrued the entire Clinton clan's redneck sensibilities?"
Odd that the press never picked up on Roger's remarks. In the past, presidential brothers--whether the late Billy Carter, or Nixon's or Reagan's brothers--were always reckoned to be fair game by the Fourth Estate.
Footnote: Incidentally, despite everything, I can't help but feel a stab of sympathy for Bill C., watching him being dragged through those ghastly houses in Connecticut and New York. Here's a man whose natural habitat is some cross between fast-food joint and whorehouse and he may be doomed to a mausoleum in the genteel suburbs of the Northeast. Small wonder he looked gloomy on that recent house-hunting jaunt.
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