After all this time, I doubt that anyone is particularly surprised by yet another revelation from the “Camelot” days of JFK’s presidency:
She always called him “Mr. President” — not Jack. He refused to kiss her on the lips when they made love. But Mimi Alford, a White House intern from New Jersey, was smitten nonetheless.
She was in the midst of an 18-month affair with the most powerful man in the world, sharing not only John F. Kennedy’s bed but also some of his darkest and most intimate moments.
In her explosive new tell-all, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, Alford, now a 69-year-old grandmother and retired New York City church administrator, sets the record straight in searingly candid detail. The book, out Wednesday was bought by The Post at a Manhattan bookstore.
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Chris Selley wonders why anyone outside the Ottawa media bubble would care about the Sun Media (or as Paul Wells usually spells it in his tweets, “Sun Meida”) faking the citizenship ceremony for a TV broadcast:
“Let’s do it. We can fake the Oath.” That is the universally accepted money quote, courtesy of a Sun News producer, to come out of this week’s fracas involving the fledgling cable news network, the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration and a citizenship ceremony that wasn’t quite what it seemed. On Oct. 19, during Citizenship Week, Sun viewers were told they were watching 10 people become Canadian citizens. Instead they were watching 10 citizens, six of whom were federal bureaucrats, reaffirm their Canadian citizenship.
“Congratulations to all of the new Canadians here,” co-host Alex Pierson gushed. “Ten of you here at Sun News Network, finally Canadian citizens!”
“Fake the Oath” certainly has the ring of legend. I think it could be to the Canadian media what “jump the shark” is to situation comedy. An example: “Oh for God’s sake, [insert media outlet], a talking dog on YouTube is news now? You guys have finally faked the Oath!”
But having gone through the documents behind this story, which were obtained by Canadian Press through Access to Information, I’m struggling to understand the amount of coverage this story got. Well, OK, I sort of understand it: Pointing and laughing at Sun Media is a national pastime among journalists and liberals these days. What I can’t figure out is how this matters.
Australian politics are so much more interesting than our boring old Canadian version:
A political scandal involving alleged payments to prostitutes by an MP, which threatens Australia’s minority government, deepened on Wednesday when the politician’s former union asked police to investigate his union credit card bills.
The move by the Health Services Union (HSU) increases the likelihood that police will launch a criminal investigation into the union’s former boss Craig Thomson over alleged payments using credit cards to a Sydney brothel.
Thomson, who is now an government MP, has denied any wrongdoing. But if he is charged with a criminal offence and then found guilty, he would be forced to leave parliament, prompting a by-election that could bring down Julia Gillard’s government, which has a one-seat majority.
Royson James sums up the Adam Giambrone scandal pretty well:
Mayoral candidate Adam Giambrone can be gay if he wants to, or bisexual. This is Toronto.
Giambrone the playboy can have a 19-year-old girlfriend on the side, a common practice among the political elite of the day.
Giambrone the TTC chair can use the couch in his city hall office to bed Kristen Lucas late at night when he should have been using the office to solve customer-relations problems at the TTC.
Giambrone the defender of the public purse can even give his girl and her mother inside information about an upcoming transit fare hike while barring commuters from hoarding tokens in advance of the said fare hike.
And when caught with his pants on the ground, the man with the clean-cut, fresh, youthful image can admit only to having an “inappropriate” text message relationship with the girlfriend, as if it amounted to mere digital sex, a peccadillo.
But the 32-year-old city councillor can’t do all that and expect Torontonians to embrace him as their mayor.
Update: Giambrone seems to have realized it’s over: he’s announced that his bid for mayor is over.
At least, for Canadians watching the game on CTV, we didn’t get to see most of these ads, including Audi’s brief trip into the very near future:
Audi’s effort won both best and worst titles from the readers at the Wall Street Journal.
Update: Nick Gillespie also thought this ad to be quite noteworthy:
. . . the great ad in last night’s game was, IMO, the Audi “Green Police” spot, and not simply because it showcased a classic Cheap Trick tune to astonishingly great (read: totally nostalgic for late-era boomers who grew up thinking Robin Zander was cool and Bun E. Carlos was an animatron and Rick Nielsen was crazy funny and that Tom Petersson was, like Kurt Von Trapp in The Sound of Music or Jan Brady in The Brady Bunch, well, I don’t know but he must have done something to be there) advantage. No, it was also right up to the moment I realized that it was a pitch for a car that I will never purchase, it seemed like a Mike Judge vision of a future that is almost the present (finally, a reason to thank SCOTUS for flipping the coin toward George W. Bush in 2000).
Will it move cars? Who knows. It moves . . . minds. Which rarely come with the sort of 100,000 mile warranty that is standard even on overpriced, underpowered, and breakdown prone vehicles like Audis.
Some interesting comments to Nick’s post:
grrizzly|2.8.10 @ 9:04AM|# Imagine a Holocaust movie. Jews are in concentration camps. Regularly sent to gas chambers. Suddenly one man receives documents proving he is not a jew. He’s set free. He walks away. Happy End. This is what the ad is.
iowahawk|2.8.10 @ 9:10AM|# I thought it was the best Super Bowl ad of all time, and not for the reasons Audi was hoping for. Hilarious, creepy and upbeat all at the same time. And the punchline: The sponsor (Audi) merrily approves of the dystopian fascism. My jaw hit the ground.
Enjoy Every Sandwich|2.8.10 @ 9:16AM|# When I saw the ad I was thinking “this will give Al Gore a hard-on, assuming he still gets those”. It’s a left-wing dream world.
PM770|2.8.10 @ 11:20AM|# Right. I think Audi probably owes Al one clean television.
Tulpa|2.8.10 @ 11:28AM|# It’s called extremely skilled advertising. Give different messages to different target audiences, hopefully a message that makes them want to buy your product. I looked at it and liked the (obviously ironic) portrayal of the Green Police, while your average lefty is saying “Yeah man, they should totally send swat teams to people’s houses looking for light bulbs!”
Update, 9 February: Added the tag GreenGestapo, as this appears to be trending in the blogosphere . . . I expect to have further use for the tag in the future.
Update, 2 February 2014: The original video has been removed, so here’s another link instead:
And Mark Steyn‘s original comments, recently republished:
A man asks for a plastic bag at the supermarket checkout. Next thing you know, his head’s slammed against the counter, and he’s being cuffed by the Green Police. “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy,” sneers the enviro-cop, as the perp is led away. Cut to more Green Police going through your trash, until they find … a battery! “Take the house!” orders the eco-commando. And we switch to a roadblock on a backed-up interstate, with the Green Police prowling the lines of vehicles to check they’re in environmental compliance.
If you watched the Super Bowl, you most likely saw this commercial. As my comrade Jonah Goldberg noted, up until this point you might have assumed it was a fun message from a libertarian think-tank warning of the barely veiled totalitarian tendencies of the eco-nanny state. Any time now, you figure, some splendidly contrarian type — perhaps Clint lui-même in his famous Gran Torino — will come roaring through flipping the bird at the stormtroopers and blowing out their tires for good measure. But instead the Greenstapo stumble across an Audi A3 TDI. “You’re good to go,” they tell the driver, and, with the approval of the state enforcers, he meekly pulls out of the stalled traffic and moves off. Tagline: “Green has never felt so right.”
So the message from Audi isn’t “You are a free man. Don’t bend to the statist bullies,” but “Resistance is futile. You might as well get with the program.”
Strange. Not so long ago, car ads prioritized liberty. Your vehicle opened up new horizons: Gitcha motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure. … To sell dull automobiles to people who lived in suburban cul de sacs, manufacturers showed them roaring round hairpin bends, deep into forests, splashing through rivers, across the desert plain, invariably coming to rest on the edge of a spectacular promontory on the roof of the world offering a dizzying view of half the planet. Freedom!
Update, 9 February, 2017: The original and revised video links have all gone sour, so here’s a current version of the ad, triggered by Audi’s latest Super Bowl ad fiasco.
Amusingly, the tag line shown at the end of the commercial, Audi: Truth in Engineering, is proven to be false by the company’s systematic cheating on emission testing software in their cars (being part of the Volkswagon group, where the cheating was first discovered in their diesel models).
In late 2015, Volkswagen Group became embroiled in an emissions cheating scandal that also involved its Audi brand. Delicious irony — here was a brand that had touted itself a leader in environmental stewardship only to be unmasked as a fraud of epic proportions.
As late as November 2016, new revelations about the extent of Audi’s emissions scam were still coming to light. It was revealed that the scandal was not limited to diesel-engine cars, as previously thought, but included gasoline-powered Audi models as well.
So it was a curious choice for Audi to pat itself on the shoulder for yet another politically correct stand — pay equality for women — when its credibility was torn to shreds in its core competency: automobile manufacturing. Perhaps Audi thought this would provide good cover from their credibility woes, or perhaps they banked on an inattentive public with amnesia. A pretty good bet, I admit. But I have a long memory and a nose for hypocrisy.
So what is the answer to George Clooney’s questions? What should he tell his daughter?
I would tell her (and mine) that once a person has lied to you, then you can no longer trust that person. That if the person is truly repentant, they will find a way to make it up to you and rebuild the trust. But if they they try to distract from the extent of their dishonesty, you might as well put that relationship in the junkyard.
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I don’t follow professional golf, so what little I knew of Tiger Woods was what the sportscasters managed to get in before I switched channels. I did think that he was an amazing golfer, and that he seemed to be well on his way to becoming the greatest golfer of his time (possibly of all time, depending on the measurement). So the sudden upheaval in his private life came as rather a surprise. According to Charles P. Pierce, there’s lots more surprises likely to be coming:
I can’t say I’m surprised — either by the allegations or by what’s ensued since Friday’s wreck. Back in 1997, one of the worst-kept secrets on the PGA Tour was that Tiger was something of a hound. Everybody knew. Everybody had a story. Occasionally somebody saw it, but nobody wanted to talk about it, except in bar-room whispers late at night. Tiger’s People at the International Management Group visibly got the vapors if you even implied anything about it. However, from that moment on, the marketing cocoon around him became almost impenetrable. The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers. The perfect marriage with the perfect kids slipped so easily into the narrative it seemed he’d been born married.
Anything dissonant was dealt with quickly and mercilessly. Tiger’s caddy, an otherwise unemployable thug named Steve Williams, regularly harassed any spectator whom Williams thought might eventually harsh his man’s mellow. The IMG handlers differed from Williams only in that they were slightly more polite. The golfing press became aware that stories about Tiger’s temper, say, or about his ties to unsavory corporate grifters, would mean the end of access to the only golfer in the world who matters. There is a quick way to tell now which journalists have made this devil’s bargain and which ones haven’t — the ones insisting that this “accident” is somehow “not a story” are the sopranos in the chorus.
But the more impenetrable Tiger’s cocoon was, the more fragile it became. It was increasingly vulnerable to anything that happened that was out of the control of the people who built and sustained it, and the events of last week certainly qualify. Now he’s got one of those major Media Things on his hands, and there is nothing that he, nor IMG, nor the clinging sponsors, nor anyone else can do about it. He is going to be everyone’s breakfast for the foreseeable future. (Among his many headaches, there is absolutely no way that the Enquirer quits on this story. See Edwards, John.) And he’s going to be some kind of punch line for the most of the rest of his public career. There is some historical irony in all that, and not just for myself.
