I'm Back for More Cash

by Tony Kornheiser

  After reading these transcripts, I feel terrible for Monica. Between her testimony to the grand jury and her conversations with Tripp, there doesn’t seem to be anything left to tell us. Nobody wants her book. How’s she going to make a buck off this, like everybody else? Now that Oprah’s turned her down, she’ll have to get in the pig pile with Roseanne: I can see it now: “Pooky and Baba: Hands Off My Man!”

  All this new information will do, of course, is carve the political battle lines even more deeply. Even though recent polls indicate that a significant majority of the American people don’t want Clinton to be impeached (notwithstanding the percentage who want him “strapped to a La-Z-Boy and forced to watch That ’70s Show until he screams for mercy”), Republicans continue to press for impeachment. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry “Mack Daddy” Hyde is getting ready for his star turn by trying to disassociate himself from his claim that having an affair between the ages of forty-one and forty-six was a “youthful indiscretion.” (Hyde’s new position: “Dr. Jekyll did it.”)

  Sensing it may be a tough sell to force a president from office for mere “ministering,” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott lowered the bar. “Bad conduct, frankly, is sufficient for impeachment,” he said the other day.

  Bad conduct?

  You mean like shoving in the lunch line?

  Impeach him? Shouldn’t they just give him a time-out?

  What’s the next threshold after bad conduct, bad manners?

  I don’t remember the Democrats trying to impeach George Bush after he puked all over the prime minister of Japan.

  Where does it end? Bad pores? Bad posture? His lawn’s overgrown?

  As the Republicans agitate for impeachment, the White House has attempted to paint Clinton as your basic guy next door—if you live next door to the Booby Trap Strip Club. Congressional Democrats, though, put the kibosh on a major effort to air TV spots that would have shown Clinton in a positive light, going about his daily chores in the Oval Office—all tastefully shot from the waist up, of course.

  Clinton did get a great run from an exclusive interview with butt-kicking journalist Trude Feldman last weekend, in which he was asked a series of provocative questions, such as: “What is the name of your dog?”

  White House officials were so pleased at how well Clinton did with Feldman that they have scheduled an interview with Toni Morrison, whose piece in the current New Yorker asserts that Clinton is a black man—which is a surprise, admittedly, but not nearly as big a surprise as if she had said Al “Master Freakblaster” Gore was black. Morrison is expected to ask the president: “If you could be any member of the Temptations, who would you be?”

  I’ve already put in my request for an interview with the president. Here’s my question: How desperate would you have to be to have phone sex with Linda Tripp?

  Oral Hygiene

  I have a confession to make.

  Linda Tripp has me on tape.

  I dated Linda Tripp. It was four hairdos ago. (Hers, not mine.) Before the frizz, before the straight cut, before the French braid. At the time Tripp was wearing her hair where it belonged—under a hat.

  And I know she’s got me on tape, because whenever I would lean over and whisper, “Look in my eyes,” she would say, “Talk into my brassiere.”

  We broke off our relationship because we disagreed on the definition of a good friend. I said a good friend was someone you loved and cared about. She said a good friend was “somebody vulnerable who confides in you, then you use that information to land a huge book deal, and then you shed your good friend like a rattlesnake’s skin.” To which I said, “Oh.” And then, “Check, please!”

  Any day now Kenneth “That’s Not a Lightbulb, That’s My Head” Starr is going to subpoena me. He’s already called in every live woman in the country to talk about President Clinton’s sex life, and he’s seeking a court order to exhume Eleanor Roosevelt. It doesn’t seem to matter to anybody that Starr has spent $30 million and three years investigating Clinton and the closest thing he’s ever had to evidence was Monica Lewinsky’s laundry—and it turned out not to include the smoking dress. If Starr were in charge of NASA, we’d be lucky to land a man on New Hampshire. Yet more people are drawing a paycheck from Ken Starr than from the Pentagon these days. If Starr ever wraps up this investigation, half the country will be out of work—including President Clinton, of course.

  So now we’ve got Gennifer Flowers, Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewinsky on the docket. Where are they going to impanel the grand jury? At Hooters? How much worse is this going to get for Clinton? Is there any chance he’ll show up on SpectraVision? (Seymour Hersh must be dying. He wrote about the wrong president.)

  The president’s defense, so far, consists of sending Hillary out to the talk shows to foam about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that includes a secret alien mind ray that has somehow turned Mike McCurry into Shecky Greene. If that doesn’t work, Bill’s lawyers are working on establishing that he and Vernon Jordan were chipping golf balls on the White House lawn during all the nights in question.

  I can’t wait to be deposed. I want to give my view on what constitutes sex.

  Like most men, I don’t believe that oral sex is sex. I also don’t believe that oral history is history. And I certainly don’t believe that Orel Hershiser is … going to win twenty again.

  You’re probably tired of this sex scandal already. You’re probably asking, “Tony, why are you writing about this?”

  I’m weighing in because it’s good for my career.

  It’s a natural impulse. Every time CNN runs a picture of Monica “90210” Lewinsky, stage mothers all over the country smack their foreheads and say, “Why didn’t my daughter think of that?”

  I’m completely envious of my pal, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, who’s on TV twenty-four hours a day now. It’s Isikoff-O-Rama. He makes Wolf Blitzer look like D. B. Cooper. (One of his coworkers said in praise of Isikoff, “He has the stomach to go after stuff nobody else would touch because it’s in such bad taste.” Gosh, that’s like praising the biggest horsefly on the pile.)

  The more dirt you can dish on Clinton, the more in demand you are. The other night I watched Larry King interview the comely Gennifer Flowers, doyenne of the big-hair, big-teeth babes. Larry asked her, “Do you think Bill Clinton has been a good president?” And Ms. Flowers, who the last time I checked was a lounge singer, said: “I think Bill gets too much credit for the good economy. I think Alan Greenspan did most of the work.” Well, thank you, Marilyn vos Savant, and would you do us a favor and sing “Feelings” in the next set?

  Later I was watching Meet the Press and the distinguished panel included Matt Drudge, who writes a gossip column on the Internet. The Internet, for heaven’s sake, where half the folks who log on believe—from reading the Internet—that if you go into a bar in New Orleans someone will slip you a Mickey, and you’ll wake up in a tub of ice with one of your kidneys surgically removed. And Mr. Drudge was asked about the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky, and he said something in a breathless way that made him look like a Doberman on a choke chain. And then the next question about Clinton went to William Safire of The New York Times, one of the most erudite journalists in the country. Teaming Safire with Drudge is like Sir Laurence Olivier sharing a stage with Tony Danza.

  Then there’s that ponytailed wing-wang Andy Bleiler, who’s only one set of hot curlers away from being Linda Tripp. Bleiler was Monica Lewinsky’s drama teacher at Beverly Hills High and then supposedly had an affair with her while he was married and she was at something called Lewis and Clark College, where I guess she majored in maps. “I couldn’t in good conscience just sit on this, and not tell the authorities what I know,” Bleiler said. Oh, really? Hey, Stanislavsky, sit on this.

  This is what we need, more maggots coming out of the woodwork. Like Dick Morris! Now he’s speculating on the chilly nature of Bill and Hillary’s sex life. I’m sure they can’t wait to hear mo
re radio advice from Dick the Love Doctor: “First, you put on a dog collar. Then you get Mistress IIse to spank you with a rolled-up copy of The American Spectator …”

  Hunkering down for the siege, Clinton has called in some old loyalists: Mickey Kantor, Harold Ickes, Harry Thomason, Clemenza, Tessio. I’d say that the president was prepared to go to the mattresses, but I’m afraid that’s how this whole thing started.

  I’m reluctant to pick up the paper because all the great lines are taken before I can make them up. On the front page last week, a former White House colleague of Lewinsky’s described her thusly: “She’d take little things and blow them up.”

  I wouldn’t touch that one with … well, never mind.

  Speechless

  By now we know everything about Monica Lewinsky. We know about her parents, we know about her former lovers, we know about her taste in clothes and books, we know who does her hair, we know what she eats. We’ve seen transcripts of her conversations. We know how she thinks.

  There’s only one thing we don’t know about Monica Lewinsky.

  So far she hasn’t said one word in public. But inevitably Monica is going to look out over all those microphones, from beneath that preposterous eggplant of hair, and … say something.

  We have no idea what she sounds like.

  Jeez, what if she sounds like the Nanny?

  “Oh, my Gahhhhd, will you look at all these cameras. I’m like totally plotzing here. Oh, Mister Ca-cherrrrris, be a doll, and get me a hankie and some water. Can you believe this? My grandmother would just DIE to see this. Not to mention a certain Miss Robin Eileen Goldblatt from Beverly Hills High School with the size five dress and size twelve tuchus she should get a heart attack from envy.”

  Or what if she sounds like Kerri Strug?

  Monica, please, don’t speak.

  Look what speaking out did to Linda “Testing: One, Two, Three” Tripp. After not saying a word for six months, Tripp took center stage the other day and declared herself “an average American.… I’m you. I’m just like you.”

  Excuse me?

  You are not like us. We do not always seem to be chewing on a rancid anchovy. We do not always feel underdressed unless we are wearing a wire. And if we strapped a microphone on our inner thigh so the FBI could listen in on our close friend yammering away about excruciatingly embarrassing details of her sex life, and then we sort of copped a smoke when they burst in and hauled her into a back room and tried to scare her witless, igniting a nightmarish national scandal in which that close friend is ridiculed as a liar and a trollop, we would probably feel really, really bad.

  Also, our closest confidant isn’t the unapologetic Lucianne “The Gaboon Viper” Goldberg. Moreover, we do not ride a broom.

  No. Linda, you are not just like us.

  Up until now Monica has been Greta Garbo. Her mystery has been her allure. But once Monica opens her mouth, so to speak, her mystery is gone.

  From the moment we actually hear from Monica, her career will head straight downhill until she inevitably lands on the set of Leeza, sitting between the girl who played Cindy Brady and a woman who used to do the nails of Victor Borge’s real estate agent.

  What can Monica tell us that we don’t already suspect? That she had sex with Bill Clinton? Oh, hold page 1! Look, nobody—nobody!—believes Clinton’s story that he didn’t have sex with this woman. People who believe in flying saucers don’t believe this. People who believe O.J. don’t believe Clinton’s story.

  Actually, the conversation between Monica and Ken Starr is not the one I’m most eager to hear. The one I want to hear is the one that will take place somewhere down the road, probably at a Bloomingdale’s, when Monica inevitably runs into her old pal Linda. That ought to be a doozy. I’m figuring Monica’s opening line will be: “Love what you’ve done with your hair. It looks a little less like a deceased hyena.”

  By the way, I’m still trying to figure out what transactional immunity is. It sounds mildly dirty, like protection from sexually transmitted diseases. But transactional immunity seems to be the crème de la crème of immunity. As I understand it, so long as Monica tells the truth, she can testify about anything and not be prosecuted for it, ever. I can imagine Monica arriving before the grand jury with a carton of shoplifted Gap T-shirts, a stash of pot, and six years of old tax records (“… and in 1994 I took my mother’s Shih Tzu, Wallace, as a dependent …”). I’m assuming transactional immunity is connected to a type of psychotherapy that was popular in the 1970s called Transactional Analysis. The key phrase in Transactional Analysis was “I’m okay, you’re okay.” So I guess in transactional immunity it’s “I’m immune, you’re immune.”

  I wonder, though, why Starr granted Monica’s mother transactional immunity, too. How does it work? Is it like a family pass at Kings Dominion?

  Does everybody get to ride free?

  You’ll forgive me if I seem a little blasé about this scandal. It’s hard to get excited about whether a president is lying to cover up his sex life, given what presidents have lied to cover up in the past. This seems so Mickey Mouse.

  Give me a good White House scandal. Give me Watergate. That was a scandal that gave us more than we could have ever expected. And what a cast of characters—Katzenjammer Kids Haldeman and Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, Martha Mitchell, John Dean, Smokin’ Mo Dean, Anthony Ulasewicz, Jeb Stuart Magruder, that whack job Liddy. There were Cuban defectors, political dirty tricks, laundered money. Watergate was a tour de force. In your wildest dreams did you imagine that everything was on tape in the Oval Office? A smoking gun!

  Don’t you think the lack of a smoking gun is what, shall we say, stains this scandal?

  All Aboard!

  The Lewinsky Bandwagon. Week 5:

  A week without red meat.

  The dish is getting pretty thin out here on the front lines of quality journalism.

  No Monica. No Monica’s mom. No Monica’s mom’s emergency medical treatment team.

  The only Monica news all week was that mystery tie she bought.

  What color was the tie? How much was the tie? For whom did she buy the tie?

  Help, Ken Starr, help! I’m being subjected to an avalanche of Ties!

  Excuse me, Tony, but six sentences ago you called this the Lewinsky Bandwagon.

  Yes.

  We remember your hideously boosterish Redskins Bandwagon a few years back. Week after week you wrote the same self-indulgent columns. They were puke! Does this mean we’re stuck with endless Lewinsky columns as you fasten yourself to her like a Victoria’s Secret undergarment?

  The most beautiful sound I ever heard. All the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word.

  Lewinsky.

  Say it loud, and there’s music playing. Say it soft, and it’s almost like praying.

  Lewinsky, I’ll never stop saying Lewinsky.

  Lewinsky, Lewinsky, Lew-in-sky!

  Hey, why can’t I further my career here? Why should William Ginsburg be the only one to get famous off of Monica’s service to the country?

  What else can I do? What else is there to be funny about? There’s no war with Iraq. How many laughs can I get after I’ve said “Kofi Annan” sounds like a flavor at Starbucks? Oprah udderly outflanked the Mad Cow Police. Where else should I turn? Ruthann “Honey, I’ll Cook Dinner Tonight” Aron?

  So I’m stuck with Sweet Monica the Harmonica and her lawyer, (Oh No, It’s) Mr. Bill.

  The zenith of my week was a phone call from Lucianne Goldberg, the New York literary agent who got the ball rolling by encouraging Linda “8-Track” Tripp to enter the lucrative field of character assassination literature. Ms. Goldberg’s reputation for being a shark is such that I thought of holding Richard Dreyfuss’s picture up to the phone.

  Being a crack investigative journalist, the first thing I quizzed Ms. Goldberg about was her client’s ratty hair. “How about my hair?” she replied. “When this thing broke I hadn’t had my roots done, and I had to give a press conf
erence with two-inch black roots! I was mortified.”

  She hasn’t gone on TV since, though all the network hotshots are plying her with flowers. “This place looks like a well-kept grave now,” she said.

  That’s because you’re to die for, Lucianne.

  During our chat, she revealed that she’d like to sign Monica as a client. “I’d represent her in a heartbeat,” Goldberg said. “Her book would fly out of the stores.”

  I wonder who’d ghostwrite it?

  Maybe a former journalist like … Sidney Blumenthal!

  Blumenthal was part of the parade of nonentities who trudged in and out of the grand jury last week, including folks who worked with Lewinsky at the White House. But it was the appearance of the condescending Sid “The Squid” Blumenthal that made all working journalists cry foul, because they felt that the First Amendment was being abridged when a White House aide could be hauled in and made to spill the names of the hacks he was talking to off the record. The issue of exposing confidential sources is a very touchy one in my profession. The last thing we want is for a grand jury to ask who the “source” was on that $150 expense account dinner at the Palm.

  All this played out amid the backdrop of the ongoing hissy fit between the White House and Ken Starr, Sheriff of Nottingham. Starr, who’s so thin-skinned it’s amazing he can shave in the morning and not bleed to death, is flinging subpoenas at a rate that is going to single-handedly provide a new S-class Mercedes for every lawyer in town. Imagine getting paid five hundred dollars an hour just for sitting outside a grand jury room. It’s enough to make college kids stop wanting to write Ally McBeal and try to be Ally McBeal.

  So just as this was turning into everything I dreamed for—a story that would allow me to use the phrase “oral sex” in every paragraph!—it has become a lawyer’s story.

  Now it’s about subpoenas and executive privilege. Or maybe it’s about the privilege of the executive’s subpoenas.

  So the spotlight’s on the lawyers, especially Mr. Bill, who now goes everywhere with his new best friend, Wolf Blitzer. I’ve heard they’re planning to do La Cage aux Folles in summer stock.