President of the world?
TO CELEBRATE the annual Presidents' Day holiday last Monday, MSNBC broadcast what was possibly the most sycophantic documentary ever made about a US leader, titled President of the World: the Bill Clinton Phenomenon.
“Bill Clinton’s position in the world continues to grow. He’s part dignitary, part humanitarian, part politician, part international statesman, and somehow, greater than them all,” the presenter, Chris Matthews, announced reverently.
It was a surprisingly uncritical performance by Matthews, whose nightly Hardballprogramme is one of the best on US politics. MSNBC advertised the Clinton documentary for weeks in advance, with Matthews telling viewers to "get out a big popcorn supply". Upset-stomach reliever might have been more appropriate.
When Matthews wasn’t gushing himself, he was interviewing celebrities who were. “He’s a superstar who attracts all the iron filings to him,” Cherie Blair exuded. Tony Blair called Clinton “the single most ept politician I ever met” – more “ept,” perhaps, than Blair’s former partner in prayer, George W Bush.
The most effusive praise came from film stars. Mary Steenburgen called Clinton “president of the world”, providing the documentary’s title. Kevin Spacey recalled seeing a crowd in Africa chanting “peacemaker, peacemaker” to Clinton. It was enough to make you long for the humble Jimmy Carter, who has occupied his post-presidency with undertakings less glamorous, such as setting the record straight on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and fighting Guinea worm disease.
The documentary prompted something of a backlash. "Even diehard Bill Clinton fans had to have been a little creeped out by Chris Matthews' overly fawning docu-special," the Huffington Postopined. "Chris Matthews slobbers over Bill Clinton" was the headline on a report posted by the Media Research Centre.
Before the Clinton special aired, Matthews suggested on MSNBC that there might be “an aspect of making up for the past” to Clinton’s saintly past decade. “Who would have predicted that he would have left the White House, after Mark Rich , after Monica and all that, and done 10 years of really good work?” he asked.
Well, okay, fighting Aids and helping the victims of earthquakes and tsunamis are worthy undertakings. But I for one would have liked to hear more about the multi-millionaire former president’s astronomical speaking fees and the finances of the Clinton Global Initiative, which charges a $20,000 (€14,500) membership fee.
Matthews, who prides himself on his Irish-American heritage, followed Clinton to Ireland last autumn. He recounted a meeting in the North where “these are Protestant guys, most of them, I figure . . . They’re all sitting there around the table, looking at , asking him business advice like he’s their guru”. Matthews also placed the Clinton Institute for American Studies at “the City College in Dublin” instead of UCD.
The documentary was somewhat deflated by a recent Gallup poll that asked who was the greatest US president. Clinton placed third, after Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln.
'Don't ask, don't tell': it's not over yet
THE REPEAL of the US military’s discriminatory policy against gays was heralded as a triumph of the lame-duck session in December. President Obama signed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act on December 22nd. The 1993 policy was one of the less impressive legacies of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
So why are several service members still under investigation, and still at risk of being discharged because of their sexual preference? The timid lawmakers who drafted the repeal legislation said the policy would end 60 days after the president and top military brass certified that the Pentagon “has prepared the necessary policies and regulations” to carry out the change, and that it will not harm military readiness. Defence secretary Robert Gates warned that “service members who alter their personal conduct during this period may face adverse consequences”.
The Obama administration says it may begin the 60-day process . . . next summer.
Losing run ends after 26 years
THE CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE of Technology (Caltech) men’s basketball team broke its 26-year losing streak on Tuesday this week when it beat the Occidental College team 46-45.
Caltech had lost 310 games in a row. When Ryan Elmquist scored the winning point incredulous students and fans burst on to the court with wild cheers and hugs. Caltech’s previous win occurred before any of the current players were born.
Academic excellence is some consolation for the lack of athletic prowess at the small institute of technology. It boasts just 950 undergraduates but has been home to 32 Nobel prizes.
Biblio detective work restores Jefferson legacy
THOMAS JEFFERSON (right) is acknowledged to have been the US’s most bibliophile president. “I cannot live without books,” he wrote to another founding father, John Adams, describing his “canine appetite for reading”.
Jefferson sold 6,700 of his volumes to the Library of Congress in 1815, to relaunch its collection after the British had burned Washington. In the nine years before his death Jefferson amassed a further 1,600 volumes, known as his retirement library. These were sold at auction to pay his debts in 1829.
Endrina Tay, the project manager for the Thomas Jefferson Libraries project at Monticello in Virginia, has worked for seven years to reconstruct the retirement library. The catalogue from the 1829 sale led her to the collection of Joseph Coolidge of Boston, who purchased many of the books and married a Jefferson granddaughter.
A search on Google Books unearthed a reference to an 1880 article in the Harvard Register, which recorded Coolidge’s gift of his books to William Greenleaf Eliot, a founder of the Washington University in St Louis.
Thereupon, Washington University has just discovered it owns 74 volumes which belonged to Jefferson, many of them with his notations. So his retirement library has been virtually reconstructed, 182 years after it was dispersed.
It's elementary for humourless Watson
THE US IS still coming to terms with the recent victory of an IBM-programmed super-computer named Watson on the country's favourite television quiz show, Jeopardy!.
"Watson did not understand the questions, nor its answers, nor that some of its answers were right and some wrong, nor that it was playing a game, nor that it won – because it doesn't understand anything," John Searle, professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in the Wall Street Journalthis week. No computer will ever have a sense of humour, I heard a radio announcer comment, as if trying to reassure us.
It took four years to programme Watson with knowledge equivalent to that contained in one million books. It has a swirling green fluorescent graphic "face" and a syncopated voice reminiscent of the computer Hal in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey.On February 16th Watson concluded a three-day Jeopardy!game by beating the two all-time human champions, collecting $77,147 (€56,000) in prize money.
Meanwhile, Watson’s creators at IBM have teamed up with medical experts in Maryland to develop a “Dr Watson” that could marry case histories and scientific research to help medical practitioners diagnose patients.
"In the future, I see the software sitting with the physician as he is interviewing the patient, and processing information in real time and correlating that with the patient's medical record and other records," Dr Eliot Siegel, director of the Maryland Imaging Research Technologies Laboratory at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told the Baltimore Sun.
The five-year silence of Clarence Thomas
LAST TUESDAY marked five years since the US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas (left) last asked a question of lawyers pleading cases before the court.
Thomas was appointed by the first president Bush in 1991. During his Senate confirmation hearings he was accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill, a professor at Brandeis University. Last October Thomas’s wife Virginia made headlines by leaving a phone message asking Hill for an apology.
Thomas provided a key vote in the Citizens United decision which enables corporations and rich conservatives like the billionaire Koch brothers to fund right-wing causes without disclosure. The liberal group Common Cause has filed a petition with the Justice Department, saying that appearances by Thomas and Antonin Scalia, another conservative justice, at a retreat financed by the Koch brothers three years ago created a perception of bias in the case. Thomas was paid an undisclosed fee for speaking at the retreat. Last month Thomas was forced to amend 20 years of financial forms in which he failed to reveal his wife’s income as a conservative activist. He has observed silence on all these issues, as he has on the Supreme Court bench.
Drive for restraint to difficult for DC officials
WITH THE District of Columbia (DC) facing a $400 million (€290 million) budget shortfall, mayor Vincent Gray and city council chairman Kwame Brown came to office promising fiscal restraint. But the Washington Post has revealed that mayor Gray has doubled the number of deputy mayors and hired senior managers at salaries far higher than those of the people they replaced. The son of Gray’s chief of staff and the daughter of a close adviser were among those hired.
At the same time Brown was found to have leased not one but two Lincoln Navigator L luxury SUVs, at a monthly cost of nearly $4,000 (€2,900) to DC’s taxpayers. When he was elected in November Brown put in a request for a black Navigator with a DVD player in the back seat, a power moon roof, polished aluminium wheels and an all-black interior.
Brown rejected the first Navigator because it had a pale-grey interior. Because the lease for the vehicle was already signed the SUV was reassigned to the city’s car pool. Brown paid an extra $1,500 (€1,090) to have the second SUV delivered in time for his inauguration, then complained that the interior was black and tan, not black.
Following negative media coverage Brown announced this week that he will use his own car and reimburse the city for his brief use of one SUV, though not for the entire lease.
Irish woman freezes to death
GRACE FARRELL, aged 35, appears to have been the first person to freeze to death in Manhattan this winter. Farrell had emigrated to New York about 17 years ago, according to the New York Times, and her friends said she showed talent as an artist but married a man who abused her. She developed an alcohol addiction and became homeless, living in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.
A man calling himself Tony told the New York Timeshe had become close to Farrell during the last week of her life. They queued for free food and panhandled together. When the temperature dropped on the night of February 19th he left her in the alcove of St Brigid's Church and went to a men's shelter in the Bowery. When he returned in the morning, "I tried to shake her awake. She didn't respond. I couldn't wake her up."
Mary Brosnahan of the Coalition for the Homeless said that Farrell’s parents had accepted her body. “They refused to believe she was homeless. It was very sad.”
