Something's got to give: Osama is still dead, says Mark Steyn, but otherwise the news is not good, and Bush is going to need more than luck in 2003.(Osama bin Laden; George W. Bush)

Publication: Spectator

Publication Date: 28-DEC-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)

New Hampshire

NOT every political development is discernible even to the shrewdest analyst. I did not foresee, for example, that the year would end with Bill Clinton dating Demi Moore, as the livelier newspapers have reported. One of the few things I liked about the guy was that at least he had an appetite for real women--twangy Paula, pudgy Monica, fragile, wounded Kathleen Willey.... In many ways, it was the only real thing about him. It seems rather sad to think of him covered in bruises from too sudden an embrace of Demi's bullet-proof chest. We do not yet know how this latest twist in the Clinton saga will play out in the Democratic presidential race, but, putting aside the conspiracy theorists who say Bill and Hill have to stay married so they can't testify against each other, the wedding of Teflon Willie and Silicon Demi would be like one of those old European dynastic unions, formally sealing the relationship between the Dems and Hollywood, just when both parties, if they had any sense, should be figuring out that they ought to be seeing less of each other. Like Sean Penn holding press conferences in Baghdad, there are times when the Dems could use fewer celebrities. Far fewer.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have gone from post-election jubilation to the edge of the Congressional precipice, all because their incoming Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott, decided to put in a good word for segregation at Senator Strom Thurmond's hundredth birthday party. At the 1948 Democratic Convention, Strom and his fellow `Dixiecrats' broke with Harry Truman when a presidential panel recommended a Federal anti-lynching law. This is Democratic party history and only a chronically club-footed idiot like Lott would think it a smart idea to bring it on over and hang it round the Republicans' neck. The controversy is already said to have cost the GOP the Senate seat up for grabs in the Louisiana run-off this month: allegedly motivated...

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