“HOW IRONIC was this? Senate Democratic leaders declared their intention to boot photographers and periodical reporters out of their Capitol work space on the eve of Independence Day, the holiday celebrating American liberties, including freedom of the press,” Roll Call says.
“On the Friday before the Fourth of July recess, the new Democratic majority decided to arbitrarily crack down on the media in a surreal scene that resembled Moscow more than Washington,” the Capitol Hill newspaper said in an editorial.
“Photographers and periodical reporters were ordered to vacate their third-floor offices by the following Monday morning. The two galleries were told to merge with the Daily Press Gallery and the Radio & Television Gallery, both of which are already overflowing with correspondents. After howls of protest, Democrats backed off the immediate eviction, but insisted that the journalists have to find new space by August.”
The newspaper, which is one of the 220 news organizations facing eviction, added: “It’s stunning that this is happening under the watch of Daschle, who is very accessible to the media.”
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10 presidential candidates
Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe predicts that 10 Democrats will run for president in 2004.
“I think that’s good for the party,” Mr. McAuliffe says in the July issue of the Delta Shuttle Sheet.
He named the following in order: Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, “maybe” Al Gore, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and California Gov. Gray Davis.
That adds up to nine, but Mr. McAuliffe said he hopes a woman enters the field. However, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton “has told me she will definitely not run in 2004,” McAuliffe said, adding that only a Democratic woman could hope to win the presidency.
As for the political future of Mrs. Clinton’s husband, “I can unequivocally tell you that Bill Clinton will never again run for office,” he said.
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Taking aim at the president
President Bush’s ideological foes in the media, who have been writing the administration’s obituary because Mr. Bush’s poll ratings have fallen to about 50 percent, “are engaged in a clever game that you might call ‘defining political illegitimacy down,’” John Podhoretz writes in the New York Post.
“His declining poll numbers are not merely snapshots of a presidency and a nation in the midst of economic uncertainty. Oh, no, say the pundits: They are reports from the front lines of national public opinion, which has already made up its mind that Bush favors the rich, hates the environment and wants to line the pockets of evil oil companies,” Podhoretz said.
“Sound familiar? It should, because it’s the Gore-campaign line on Bush updated to the summer of 2001. The pro-Gore pundits are, in effect, declaring Bush’s presidency illegitimate because a) one very liberal Republican senator from Vermont decided to switch parties and b) Bush’s poll numbers aren’t as high as Bill Clinton’s were during the two-year period when the US economy was the strongest the world had ever seen.
“But there’s something more pernicious going on here. For the effort to delegitimize Bush is, more profoundly, an effort to delegitimize conservative ideas by declaring them ‘beyond the mainstream’ — a form of political combat that stifles debate, poisons serious discourse and does violence to the truth.”
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Resentful analysis
“I cannot be the only one to have been nauseated by the sight of the two Bushes, pere and fils, careening about on a golf cart wearing matching baseball caps, emblazoned with the numbers ‘41’ and ‘43,’” pundit Andrew Sullivan writes at andrewsullivan.com.
“That picture must have appeared in countless papers across the country, as well as television. Did (New York Times editorial-page editor) Howell Raines coordinate the shoot? Nothing could be better used to depict the Bushes as smug, aristocratic, out of touch, and callow. The self-congratulation of it all is the first truly irritating moment of this presidency. And some Bushies wonder why their man seems to growing numbers of Americans as ‘out of touch’ with their lives. Gee, I wonder why.”
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Oliver North — truth is stranger than fiction
Oliver North is writing a trilogy that he insists is fiction.
That’s so even if, the retired Marine lieutenant colonel and National Security Council aide to President Reagan tells journalists, it’s “about a US Marine assigned to the White House who is confronted by a mission that in his heart he knows is wrong, but he takes it anyway.” Hmmm.
“And he is ultimately faced with a very serious ethical challenge,” says North, now a Washington-based columnist and radio host.
Except this Marine was assigned to the White House after 1993, he says, when you-know-who was in charge.
“My goal is to finish the three books without mentioning the name ‘Clinton,’” says North, who will have the first book, ready for release next summer.
