One thing I didn’t know about the Star Aquarius cruise: the three buffet restaurants there are included in the price of the room – breakfast, lunch and dinner. Although they stop serving dinner at 8:30.

Also, the name of the female singer is Wong Wai Yee, in case that means anything to any of you.

“It is strictly forbidden and extremely dangerous to burn incense, lucky paper and similar products in your cabin.”

NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes about two new books, “Speech-less” by former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer and “The Clinton Tapes” by Taylor Branch.

One day, W. was told that a joint appearance in Phoenix with McCain, designed to show the two men could stand to be on the same stage together, was going to be closed to the press.

“If he doesn’t want me to go, fine,” W. snapped. “I’ve got better things to do.”

Then the president was informed that the event was going to be closed because McCain was having trouble drawing a crowd. Latimer writes that an incredulous Bush mordantly asked: “He can’t get five hundred people to show up for an event in his hometown?”

Happy he wasn’t the only political wallflower, W. drove home the point: “I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford. This is a five-spiral crash, boys.”

Like W., Bill Clinton had an awkward final act supporting Gore, even though Gore was distancing himself from Clinton, and Bubba was chafing at the misguided Gore campaign. Like W. with McCain, he felt a Gore defeat would be bad for his legacy.

In his new book, “The Clinton Tapes,” Taylor Branch describes an explosive meeting between Clinton and Gore after the election characterized by Clinton as “surreal.” Gore said people around him blamed Clinton’s scandalous shadow for the defeat. And Clinton, who told Branch that W. was “an empty suit, meaner than his dad,” shot back that if Gore had used him more in the last 10 days in places where he was still popular, he could have swung the election. He chastised Gore for not running on bigger themes and for dropping the issue he was most passionate about: the environment.

Gore asked Clinton for an explanation of Monica Lewinsky; he wanted an apology. Clinton blew up. Focusing on his mistakes, he told his V.P., demeaned voters and ignored the public’s business.

Branch summed up Clinton’s bottom line to Gore: “By God, Hillary had a helluva lot more reason to resent Clinton than Gore did, and yet she ran unabashedly on the Clinton-Gore record” for the Senate and won handily. Gore, Clinton said, was in “Neverland.”

Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker on Jay Leno’s new prime time show:

The forensic evidence so far indicates that a kind of death is taking place before our eyes; the only question is whether what we’re witnessing is an accident or a crime scene.

Hongkie Town
Share