This just in: Marriage is hard
It’s amazing what you can learn in a supermarket checkout line. Like every red-blooded American man, I yearn to comfort poor Jennifer for what Brad did to her. I’m also worried about Chad Lowe and Hilary Swank, whoever they are. The tabloids say their marriage is on the rocks.
Apparently, so is George and Laura Bush’s 29-year marriage. According to a recent issue of the Globe, old Dubya’s hitting the Jack Daniels again. A “family friend” confided that “after their last fight over booze, (the president and first lady) just stopped talking — period.”
I hate it when that happens.
Bill and Sen. Hillary Clinton, too. The New York Times recently put 2,000 anonymously sourced words on its front page speculating about their marriage. Evidently, “several prominent New York Democrats” pronounced themselves concerned about, get this, an earlier Globe photo showing Bill Clinton leaving a Manhattan restaurant with a dozen people, among them a hot blonde Canadian politician. The Times thought that couldn’t help but “fuel coverage in the gossip pages.”
But, hey, if the Times is going tabloid, why not go all the way? Remember Bill’s alleged three-breasted mistress? More photos, please. (“I thought he was a leg man,” Hillary lamented.) The difference is that I’m pretty sure tabloid scribes are laughing when they write that stuff.
Look, there’s no denying Bill Clinton asked for it. But is this any way to run a democracy? The Times interviewed 50 people in psychoanalyzing the Clintons. It did an exhaustive compilation of their schedules to determine how many nights a month they spend together: on average, 14, which is going to make most long-distance truckers, not to mention National Guardsmen in Iraq, envious.
Shortly after the Times’ tabloid exclusive, Sen. Clinton gave a speech at the National Press Club about energy policy. What the newspaper’s ace columnist got out of it was that she hated Hillary’s “blinding yellow pantsuit” and that Al Gore must hate her for stealing his issue.
Broder, the Washington Post’s so-called “dean” of D.C. pundits, also hated the pantsuit. He wrote that the “buzz in the room was not about her speech,” but the Times’ gossip about the aforementioned Canadian hussy. Who cares if Hillary has what Broder sneeringly described as “a rational plan that will, she says, not only move the nation substantially toward energy independence but improve living standards for almost every American?”
No, the real issue to these jokers is that her husband’s a hound dog, she’s a cold, manipulative shrew, and their marriage a politically inspired sham. The real issue is that Hillary Clinton thinks she’s smarter than you — or smarter than the likes of Dowd and Broder, anyway, which may be the crux of the matter.
Smarter than me, too, for the record, except that I got over being outclassed playing high school basketball. Some people never adjust.
Will the Times profile the marriages of GOP candidates Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain, with five wives between them? Not likely.
The scripted D.C. pundits have their theme for 2008. As in 2000 and 2004, the Democratic candidate’s an elitist phony, while the Republican’s “authentic.”
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached at [email protected].