Celebutards (16 page)

Unfortunately for Bill (or maybe not) Monica Lewinsky had a big mouth. She blabbed of the affair in conversations surreptitiously tape recorded by White House staffer Linda Tripp, who hoped to write a book.

Bill gave unfortunate testimony to a Grand Jury, in which he explained he was telling the truth when he said he isn’t sexing up a lowly intern.

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he said. It should be etched on his tombstone.

Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had been looking to nail the Clintons for financial malfeasance related to Whitewater. But Clinton was prosecuted for lying about Monica. That’s right, the president of the United States, leader of the free world, was impeached for receiving a blow job.

Bill Clinton became only the second president in history to be impeached, charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. (The Senate acquitted him in 1999, as it did Andrew Johnson 131 years earlier.)

For Hillary, life began here. She was transformed into the sympathetic, wounded party. In her memoir,
Living History
, Hillary shrieked with raw emotion at Bill, whom she exiled to sleep on the couch. The histrionics seemed unlikely from a woman so controlled. But the description polled well with her core supporters: women.

For the Cuckolded First Wife, a career was born.

I suspect that Hillary has always held lofty political ambitions that she buried when she wed an ambitious, natural politician. A man who makes charming the pants (literally) off the public look so effortless, in comparison to Hillary’s painstaking hard work. But with Bill out of the White House and Chelsea grown, she had little to absorb her day. So ahead of the 2000 election, Hillary packed up Bill, bought a house in Chappaqua, New York, and ran as a Democrat for the Senate. Never mind that she sought to represent a state in which she’d never before lived.

If one wants to shed the title of “carpetbagger” in New York, she’d better prove her affinity to the Jewish people. To that end, a funny story appeared in the
Forward
newspaper in 1999, revealing that Hillary’s grandmother, Della Murray, had in the 1930s married a Russian-born Jew with the authentic name Max Rosenberg. Why Hillary’s distant Jewish connection was unearthed at this critical moment was never revealed, nor was the identity of the person who planted the story. Who knew?

During her campaign, Hillary visited every last one of New York’s sixty-two counties, most of them rural and majority Republican—places that hadn’t seen a politician in, well, ever. Hillary nonetheless rolled into towns and sat in the auditorium, the living room, the barn, nodding her head until I feared it would fall off, while listening to the people’s gripes and groans about a collapsing upstate economy. Hillary outclassed her forgettable opponent, Republican Representative Rick Lazio, in November 2000, winning by a margin of 55 to 43 percent. Six years later, she won re-election against Republican John Spencer, 67 to 31 percent.

I got a rare—and purely accidental—up close insight into the Clintons’ unholy union during the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston, which propelled John Kerry to the presidential nomination.

Attending an event co-attended by the two Clintons, I wearily plunked myself into a chair. I didn’t realize that my bottom had penetrated the inner sanctum of the VIP room.

Bill arrived first. Looking thinner, paler and older than I’d ever seen, the result of a heart ailment for which he’d soon undergo a quadruple bypass, he set himself up at one end of the VIP room, inches from me. He brightened as he posed for pictures with pretty girls, and signed copies of his memoir,
My Life
, for giddy supporters.

Several minutes later, arriving separately, Hillary marched in.

Immediately, she made a bee-line to Bill, moving her head in the direction of her husband’s. And then I witnessed a bit of physical confusion that normally takes place between complete strangers.

Watching Hillary’s face approach his, Bill apparently thought Hillary was about to give him a kiss. So Bill puckered his lips and shut his eyes. But he remained unkissed and looking silly. Hillary’s face grazed past Bill’s and settled by his ear, not his waiting mouth.

“That’s John’s brother,” I heard her snap. Bill looked momentarily confused, opened his eyes, and shut his lips.

“John Kerry’s brother!” she exclaimed impatiently. Hillary had walked over to tell Bill he must greet Cameron Kerry, the candidate’s sibling.

Then she turned on her heel and walked away.

Bill returned to his book signing, his pictures with pretty girls. It was the only thing that made him smile. At one point, he even put his hand on my bare shoulder. Moments later, a Hillary staffer strode up and barked, “The Senator is ready when you are!” The Senator. I wondered, do these people know each other?

But Bill ignored her, and engaged in several more minutes of schmoozing before another staffer came over and said, more sharply, “She’s ready!”

Finally, Bill reluctantly slunk out of the room and met his wife onstage with daughter, Chelsea. The couple linked hands. Hillary said, “Let me introduce you to Chelsea’s father, a best-selling author, the man who taught the Democrats how to win again. A great, great president for the country to love…” No mention that she was married to him.

I found myself feeling sorry for Bill as he told the crowd, “I want to say thank you for being so rowdy and irreverent and loud.” Before the party, he said, “I felt pickled and old and half-dead—and you were having such a good time.”

Then he pointed to his wife, the Senator, “She’s the only one who can do anything for you anymore. She’s got a real job.”

Along the way, a funny thing happened. Hillary wore me out.

For so many years I had disliked this woman, despised her unnerving sense of entitlement. I wondered why having a cheating husband should grant anyone access to public office. Why Hillary?

I was not alone. The sputtering, undirected hatred from people like me had only served to make Hillary stronger. I believe she actually took comfort in my disdain. It was a known quantity, and it gave her focus. I had to declare it. I was done beating her up.

Around this time, Hillary announced that she would seek the presidency, not really a shock. She was fulfilling a promise she’d long ago made to herself, and her still-husband Bill: It was Hillary’s turn.

I was forced to take a long, hard second look.

Well, she’s certainly improved her look. And her talk. Years of practice and hard work had helped her on the stump to the point where I would give her a grade of “B.” She’ll never be as good as her husband—talent like that is inborn.

But what of it? Hillary has been around so long, made so many mistakes, it seemed unlikely she’d repeat them. She won’t shove national health care down our throats again. She even voted with the Senate in favor of invading Iraq—it was the right thing to do at the time. Unfortunately, that vote handed Democratic opponent Barack Obama a blunt object with which to beat her about the head, in a war that had grown decidedly unpopular.

After a long look, I’ve come to this conclusion: Hillary is the devil we know.

In January 2008, she teared up on cue while campaigning in New Hampshire. Tears in New Hampshire sank the 1972 presidential campaign of Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie. But voters liked to see Hillary cry. She won the primary.

But in March 2008 came an even more telling moment.

“I remember landing under sniper fire,” Hillary said about a visit to Bosnia as First Lady in 1996. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

Hillary’s curiously detailed description of her heart-pumping Bosnia arrival immediately resulted in the appearance of videotape that demonstrated her landing in that country was entirely peaceful. In fact, she was greeted on the tarmac by a local child who read a poem. No bullets came close to Hillary’s airspace. The military, responsible for Hillary’s safety, was understandably perturbed at her insulting recollection. Bosnians, who cared for her, were furious.

Under fire now, for real, Hillary said she “misspoke” when recounting the danger. Of course, the Obama campaign helpfully produced three other examples in which Hillary “misspoke” about being shot upon, like some kind of latter-day Rambette.

There was no other explanation. It was a bald-faced lie intended to make the flailing candidate appear macho. And it was a lie from which Hillary would not recover.

A short time earlier, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh made a fierce observation about Hillary, who’d turned sixty: “Will our looks-obsessed culture want to stare at an aging woman? Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?”

It was devastating to note that Hillary, the energetic survivor, had grown far from the Wellesley prodigy. She was Grandma.

I confessed in a column that I actually pulled the lever for Hillary on Primary Day in New York—yes, I’m a Democrat who frequently votes Republican. I’m as shocked as anyone. But I had no choice.

I’m not so naïve as to believe that politics has anything more than a passing acquaintance with public service, or even something as basic as truth. It is rather a sales job, in which candidates sell us on how they believe we should think and feel, not only about our country, but ourselves. What a load of BS.

I made a mental note to cancel out my primary vote for Hillary by choosing the Republican in the general election.

T
HEY CAN BE
as wickedly entertaining as they are wicked—the self-appointed civil-rights rock stars of the age. This pair will stop at nothing, not racist whites, not skeptical blacks, not even poorly maintained hotel room service, to get their faces on the six o’clock news. With their traveling dog-and-pony shows and well-practiced
schtick
, each man pops up at the drop of an “N-word,” anywhere on the map, in time for deadline. They practically mutilated one another in 2007 to be first to arrive in Jena, Louisiana, to protest charges, including attempted murder, unjustly leveled against six black youth accused of beating a white student who’d hung nooses on a tree. But a black police officer murdered on the job by blacks rarely makes for a sexy cause.

That two such clownish figures could lay claim to being the leading civil-rights leaders of the day, supposedly walking in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speaks to the void that exists in the higher echelons of the movement.

What do they do for a living? These men may be ordained members of the cloth. But they represent organizations that seem to exist primarily to give them national platforms, for good or for ill.

Jackson ran for president in 1984, winning primaries in Louisiana, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, Virginia and Mississippi, then ran again in 1988, winning more. But he will forever be remembered as the man who referred to New York City as “Hymietown,” a comment that revealed the gulf that exists between Jews and blacks, and the gulf that sits between Jackson’s ears: He thought the reporter to whom he made the slur, Milton Coleman, would maintain his silence because he was black, too. With that single word, Jackson’s political career evaporated overnight. I’d like to see Jesse Jackson win over primary voters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Losing the trademark gold medallions, crazy bouffant hairdo and ample gut with which he rocketed to fame in the 1980s, a slimmed-down, besuited Sharpton ran for mayor of New York City and sought the Democratic nomination for president in 2004. With his quick wit and acid tongue, he made a few converts, and as many enemies. Try as a he might, he can’t run from his support in 1987 of Tawana Brawley, a case that made, and ended, Sharpton’s legitimate political career.

These days, I’ve made my peace with the Rev. Knowing I will never in this lifetime agree with anything that comes out of his yap, he likes to poke fun at me during the rare instances I cover his events. At least my criticism is a constant. In another life, Sharpton should have been a night club comic. Heck, I’d even buy a ticket.

Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. was born October 3, 1954, in Brooklyn, New York, to Alfred Charles Sharpton Sr. and Ada Sharpton. His parents split when he was ten so his dad could pursue a relationship with his stepdaughter, Al’s half-sister. His mother worked as a maid, but depended on welfare to get by. At the age of four, Sharpton preached his first sermon. At nine, he was a licensed Pentecostal minister, but later became Baptist. Al Sharpton attended Brooklyn College, dropping out after two years. He was a tour manager for James Brown in 1971 when he met his wife, backup singer Kathy Jordan. They split in 2004, and have two daughters.

Sharpton got his first shot at the spotlight in 1986, when three African-American men were chased by whites in Howard Beach, Queens, onto the Belt Parkway, where one of the men was struck and killed by a car. Sharpton, then in his track-suited, wildly coiffed stage, became a national hero after leading 1,200 marchers through the streets, while residents hurled racial epithets. It was not Queens’ finest moment. It was, however, Al’s last great hurrah.

The next year came the fiasco which will be carved onto his tombstone: The Tawana Brawley affair.

Brawley was a fifteen-year-old African-American girl from Wappingers Falls, New York, with a story to tell. After going missing for four days, she was found smeared with feces and lying in a garbage bag near her apartment, her clothes burned and torn and racial slurs written over her body in charcoal. She said that six men attacked her, raped her, and held her hostage. At least one of them, she said, was a police officer. For Sharpton, it seemed too good to be true.

Well, it wasn’t.

Brawley ran away, a grand jury concluded after seven months of investigation, probably because she feared being beaten by her mother and stepfather for skipping school to visit her boyfriend in jail. She was seen at a party during the period she was “missing,” and was witnessed crawling into the garbage bag herself. The racial slurs, written upside-down on her body, were likely written by Brawley.

But Sharpton simply refused to accept that his icon for racial savagery was slipping through his hands. He ratcheted up the volume, accusing Dutchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones, an innocent man, of being a “rapist” and “racist.” Brawley, who has converted to Islam, has never spoken about it.

All Pagones got for his pain and suffering was a 1998 judgment of $345,000 against Sharpton and attorneys Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason. Sharpton dragged his feet over forking out his $65,000 portion, claiming he just couldn’t afford it.

Can’t afford it?

In an eye-opening 2000 deposition in the lawsuit, Sharpton testified that he owns not a single suit of clothes or television set, silverware or stereo, nor does he have access to a bank account. These things and more are provided for his use by his production company, Rev. Als Productions, and by the organization that has fed him for years, the National Action Network. Even more tricky, Rev. Als paid the $30,000 tuition bill for his daughters’ private school, not a legally kosher move.

It all went away in 2001, though, when friends including Johnnie Cochran paid the $65,000 judgment to Pagones, who remains bitter to this day. Who can blame him?

Twenty years later, Sharpton said if he had to do it over again, he still would have taken the Brawley case—but he would not have made it personal against Steven Pagones. Too late, Rev. Too late.

Sharpton remains among the most polarizing figures of the day, though he’s claimed to have mellowed after he was stabbed in the chest by a drunken white man in 1991 while preparing for a march in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, over the killing of black youth Yusuf Hawkins. Mellow? That’s an unlikely adjective, when you consider Sharpton’s actions during one of the ugliest incidents in city history, the Crown Heights riots in 1991. It was the event that spelled the end to the one-term mayoralty of David Dinkins. Too bad reverends can’t be impeached.

The riots started after a seven-year-old Guyanese boy was tragically—and accidentally—killed by a car driven by a Lubavitch Hasidic Jew. Riots by black residents of Crown Heights raged for four days, as the mayor fiddled. Stores were looted. Jews were trapped in their houses or beaten on the streets. Members of the mob shouted “Heil Hitler!” toward the Lubavitcher headquarters on Eastern Parkway. A moment of welcome levity arrived when
New York Newsday
columnist Jimmy Breslin was pummeled and stripped down to his underwear by the mob, then proceeded to file a column by telephone.

On the first evening of destruction, a Hasidic scholar visiting from Australia, twenty-nine-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum, was murdered—stabbed and beaten to death. When all was over, Jews rightfully called the riots a “pogrom.” It was the darkest episode of anti-Semitism we’d seen in this country for quite some time. An utter disgrace.

Days after the dust settled, Al Sharpton did further damage to the shattered city’s psyche when he led 400 protestors through Crown Heights. He led the mob in chants: “Whose streets? Our streets!” And, “No justice. No peace!” Mellow? No. Shameful? Yes.

Sharpton would like the city to forget his role in the arson and murder committed at Frcddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem in 1995.

It started after a black Pentecostal church, which owned commercial property on 125th Street, planned to ask its Jewish tenant, the owner of Freddy’s Fashion Mart, to evict a black sub-tenant who operated a record store. The record store owner did not take his eviction lightly. He called Sharpton, who promptly blamed not the church, but the Jewish man who operated Freddy’s.

Sharpton made yet another statement that should forever be imprinted on his tombstone: “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.”

After listening to this bunk for two months, a protestor, Roland J. Smith Jr. went into the store with a gun—shot three whites and a Pakistani—mistaking him for a Jew. He then set a fire that killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and one black security guard whom the protestors derided as a “cracker lover.” Smith also died. Sharpton, by the way, was not found legally culpable for the massacre.

In the aftermath of the Freddy’s bloodshed, Sharpton sued the
New York Post
and myself for $20 million in 2000. He was upset that I called him a “carpetbagger from New Jersey” as he prepared to run for mayor of New York City. (He had relocated from Teaneck, New Jersey, to a house in Brooklyn.) He also sued over an editorial that reminded readers of the deadly arson at Freddy’s, which he insisted was not his fault.

The suit was dismissed, with the judge pointing out the obvious: Sharpton had, in fact, lived in New Jersey. As for the fire, the judge said that whether Sharpton is “complicit” in the deaths in Harlem “is a matter of judgment, not of verifiable fact.” Sharpton never made it to elective office.

Much later, he said he regretted the “white interloper” remark. Too late for that.

A strange sideline evidently enjoyed by Al Sharpton was that of FBI informant. The hobby was unearthed in 2002, just in time to cast aspersions on his run for president.

Sharpton was seen in a 1983 videotape discussing a drug deal with a Mafioso, who wanted Sharpton to introduce him to boxing promoter Don King. It was a sting meant to leverage his cooperation in bringing down people from the “movement.” But Sharpton insists—hello!—that he’s a victim here. He contended that a second tape existed that would exonerate him. He also denied acting as an informant on other occasions, including trying to arrange for the capture of cop-killer Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur, in Cuba.

Sharpton got big-mouth Don Imus fired from his gig at CBS radio for calling Rutgers women’s basketball players “nappy headed ‘hos,” after Imus stupidly appeared on Sharpton’s syndicated weekly radio program. Imus was simply no match for the slick-tongued Rev. Weirdly, the event has elevated Imus as an icon for freedom of speech, and he signed a new big-bucks contract with ABC radio.

The Rev. received a boost in stature from Mayor Michael Bloomberg. For eight years, Mayor Rudy Giuliani banished Sharpton from City Hall. He simply was not relevant. Whine as Sharpton might, few people, save for his diehard disciples, paid any mind. But Bloomberg brought Sharpton back to the table. Now, he’s back as a constant on the scene. He held marches for the loved ones of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man shot to death tragically—and mistakenly—by panicky police officers, all of them minorities. Sharpton did not see it as an accident. Too bad he has little credibility.

J
ESSE
L
OUIS
B
URNS
was born October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, to a sixteen-year-old single mother, Helen Burns. His father, former boxer Noah Louis Robinson, was married to another woman and was not involved in his son’s life. Jesse took the last name of his stepfather, Charles Henry Jackson.

Nearly sixty years after his birth, Jackson would admit that, while married, he fathered a child out of wedlock by a staffer of the charity he heads. Controversy arose when it was revealed that Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, a tax-exempt charitable organization, paid the woman, Karin L. Stanford, enough to pay off a $365,000 house in Los Angeles. Charity officials insist this was not “hush money” but a legitimate business expense.

“I fully accept responsibility and I am truly sorry for my actions,” said Jackson, who ironically counseled President Bill Clinton about his own extramarital dalliances. I’d like to be a fly on the wall for those sessions.

Did Jackson embellish the reason he transferred from the University of Illinois to North Carolina A&T? He claimed he moved because the racist school wouldn’t let him play quarterback on the football team. But Illinois’ starting quarterback that year was African-American. Jackson was, however, placed on academic probation just before he left.

Jackson was ordained a minister in 1968. His reputation as a civil-rights leader was cemented that year, when the young man happened to be with Dr. Martin Luther King on a Memphis balcony the day he was assassinated. His power base would eventually grow into the Chicago-based Rainbow Coalition, later Rainbow/PUSH, best known for pursuing headline-grabbing causes that give maximum exposure to its leader. Dr. King he is not.

Jackson angered President Ronald Reagan in 1983 when, asking no one’s permission and feeling none necessary, he practiced foreign policy by traveling to Syria to secure the release of captured American Navy Pilot Lt. Robert Goodman, who’d been shot down over Lebanon on a mission to bomb Syrian positions. However, when the mission was a success, and Goodman came home Reagan made peace with Jackson and honored him. In 1984, he negotiated the release of twenty-two Americans held in Cuba by President Fidel Castro. These feats helped cement Jackson’s credibility as a political leader, propelling his campaign to the nation’s highest office.

It wouldn’t last.