Posted on 07/31/2003 12:15:44 AM PDT by kattracks
Edited on 05/26/2004 5:15:26 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Tentative because they're testing to see if people are as dumb as they think they are. "Let's call it AMERICAN something and see if we can catch a few idiot rightwingers."
I share the same opinion as others on this thread. Election night 2000 did it for me. (However, I will admit to being fooled by her previous to that. I even wrote to Fox News Channel and told them what a coup it was for them to grab her away from CBS. Egads!)
https://secure.mediaresearch.org/news/cyberalert/1998/cyb19980707.html#1
" Item #1 today has been rated TV-MA by the CyberAlert Content Review Board. It contains no explicit or crude sexual language, but does deal with oral sex and fanciful descriptions of sexual yearnings.
1 "I'd be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal," boasted former Time magazine White House correspondent Nina Burleigh about Bill Clinton. She made her offer known to Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz when he called to discuss a piece Burleigh penned in the July/August Mirabella magazine detailing her lust for Clinton.
Titled "King of Hearts," the two-page article carries this subhead: "Former White House reporter Nina Burleigh thought she was beyond being seduced by a man’s power, his status, his job. Then she played cards with the President on Air Force One." The article recounts her encounter with Clinton last year on a trip he took to Jasper, Arkansas for a funeral. At the time, Kurtz noted, she had left Time but was filling in on the trip as a "contract writer" for the newsweekly.
Prompted by the July 6 Kurtz story, I brought out my repressed feminine side and bought Mirabella. While I’m still looking forward to reading the article titled "Thigh Anxiety: Cellulite’s New Enemy," I did manage to get through Burleigh’s story and asked MRC intern Stacey Felzenberg to type into WordPerfect some of the more illuminating passages. Kurtz had room for only a few sentences from Burleigh’s piece, so even if you’ve seen his story most of this will be fresh to you:
"....I hadn’t expected to be so near Clinton that summer day. I was dressed for hot, humid Washington. My hair had been whipped into knots while waiting on the tarmac and was restrained in messy braids. I was wearing a very short, green Betsey Johnson seersucker suit, sandals, and no stockings -- probably just the kind of outfit Clinton’s former Deputy Chief-of-Staff, Evelyn Lieberman, would have sent an intern home to change out of lickety-split. My knees were scarred from a recent bike wreck. Bare legs still offend Washington propriety, and I now understand why: You’ll never know when you’ll need to protect your modesty, and perhaps your chastity, around a powerful man....
Enough with the set-up, now to the good stuff as she describes what transpired after she was asked to be the fourth for a game of hearts with Clinton and Bruce Lindsey. (She doesn’t identify the other player):
"The President's foot lightly, and presumably accidentally, brushed mine once under the table. His hand touched my wrist while he was dealing the cards. When I got up and shook his hand at the end of the game, his eyes wandered over to my bike-wrecked, naked legs. And slowly it dawned on me as I walked away: He found me attractive."
Are you a female with two breasts, two legs and under age 40?
As her narrative continues, note the condescending evaluation performed by Burleigh the feminist. Men can ogle her if they are powerful, but the gaze better not emanate "from a man of lesser stature." Construction workers beware.
"No doubt the President’s lawyers and spin doctors would say I wishfully imagined that long, appreciative look, just as all those other women have fantasized their more explicitly sexual encounters with Clinton. But we all know when we’re being ogled. The weird thing was that I didn’t mind. There was a time when the hormones of indignant feminism raged in my veins. An open gaze like that, at least from a man of lesser stature, would have annoyed me. But that evening, I had the opposite reaction. I felt incandescent. It was riveting to know that the President had appreciated my legs, scarred as they were. If he had asked me to continue the game of hearts back in his room at the Jasper Holiday Inn, I would have been happy to go there and see what happened
At the time, that seemed quite possible. It took several hours and a few drinks in the steaming and now somehow romantic Arkansas night to shake the intoxicated state in which I had been quite willing to let myself be ravished by the President, should he have but asked. I probably wore the mesmerized look I have seen again and again in women after they have met him. The same silly hypnotized gleam was displayed on the cover of Time magazine in Monica Lewinsky’s eyes....
"And yet there I was, walking away from a close encounter with the President of the United States, stupefied and vaguely hoping that he’d send an aide over to my hotel room to ask me up for a drink. What is it in some of us, that powerful men make us pliant and willing with a mere glance?...
She concluded by conceding that even a modern feminist will always go for a powerful man:
"I still cling to the faith that there are women of good order who are immune to this stuff. They wear sensible clothes and keep their legs well covered. I trust that Janet Reno, Donna Shalala, and Madeleine Albright are not rendered willing and pliant around Bill Clinton. They don’t need to put on his knowledge with his power when they have their own. For the rest of us, a powerful man’s admiring gaze is an intimation of all that is inaccessible, and that is the ultimate seduction."
I wonder if Henry Kissinger could turn her on?
In Monday’s Washington Post Kurtz summarized his conversation with Burleigh: "In an interview, Burleigh, now a New York freelancer, said she in no way felt harassed or pressured by the President but that it was ‘not unusual for women’ to swoon over him. What is unusual, for a journalist, is Burleigh's sexually charged declaration of support for Clinton. ‘I’d be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal,’ she said. [brackets the Post’s]
"But Burleigh says she was not ‘going easy on him’ as a White House correspondent in 1993 and 1994, when she sometimes wrote about the Whitewater scandal, and never thought about his looks at the time. By last year she was a Time contract writer, filling in on the trip to Jasper, Ark."
She may not have gone "easy" on him, but she went hard on his opponents. As the MRC’s Tim Graham reminded me, here’s a passage from page 180 of his book "Pattern of Deception: The Media Role in the Clinton Presidency," published in 1996:
In the April 11, 1994 Time, reporter Nina Burleigh wrote a story titled "Clintonphobia! Just who are these Clinton haters, and why do they loathe Bill and Hillary with such passion?" Burleigh found the suspects: "Two men who have benefitted as professional Clinton haters are behind-the-scenes activist Floyd Brown and conservative celebrity Rush Limbaugh." After tagging them as haters, Burleigh explained "Both profess not to hate Clinton."
But Burleigh ignored them and proceeded to label again: "The Arkansas branch of Clinton haters is led by two attorneys, Sheffield Nelson, who is a Republican candidate for Governor, and the quixotic Cliff Jackson," the former Clinton friend who helped bring out the stories of Arkansas state troopers and Paula Jones.
Burleigh’s oddest passage came at the story’s end, when she quoted (unlabeled) liberal historian Alan Brinkley. "Brinkley says Clinton is also a victim of a political fact of life: he’s on the wrong side of the tolerance fence. ‘Liberals tend to value tolerance highly, so there’s a greater reluctance to destroy enemies than among the right. Democrats are historically more likely to cooperate with Republican administrations than Republicans with Democratic administrations.’"
My memory of Paula Zahn is when she was on CBS during the Oklahoma City bombing and was smiling like the tragedy did not have any effect on here what so ever.
Thinking about it now, it probably didn't
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