Ferreting Out the News

Remember how, during last month's gala celebrations at the opening of Bill Clinton's presidential library on the banks of the Arkansas River, Clinton's White House successor, George W. Bush, was overheard musing aloud about a submarine-borne nuclear missile strike on Little Rock?

Yeah, The Scrapbook missed that story, too. As did every last one of the 1,000-plus professional journalists--The Weekly Standard's own Matt Labash included--who were on site to cover the event from start to finish. Go figure.

Go figure, more to the point, how come it took an altogether unprofessional journalist to break the news of President Bush's scandalous remark. For that matter, ask yourself why it is that the altogether unprofessional journalist in question--Sidney Blumenthal, "Washington bureau chief of Salon"--remains to this day the only man who's dared to publicize the incident in print. Are we really sunk so low? Has the right-wing assault on America's mainstream media finally succeeded in quashing all dissent?

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Here--from his November 25 column in London's Guardian (there being no reputable American newspaper brave enough to publish the man)--is what "two eyewitnesses" told Sidney Blumenthal about President Bush's homicidal daydream:

At the dedication of the Clinton library last week in Little Rock, Karl Rove and President Bush received separate tours of the dramatic building, a glistening silver, suspended boxcar filled with light and with a panoramic view of the Arkansas River. . . . Bush appeared distracted, and glanced repeatedly at his watch. When he stopped to gaze at the river, where secret service agents were stationed in boats, the guide said: "Usually, you might see some bass fisherman out there." Bush replied: "A submarine could take this place out."

A most unsettling vignette, to be sure. What could Bush have been thinking, asks Blumenthal in the Guardian? "Was the president warning of an al Qaeda submarine, sneaking undetected up the Mississippi, through the locks and dams of the Arkansas River, surfacing under the bridge to the 21st century to dispatch the Clinton library?" Or, (b) "was this a projection of menace and messianism, with only Bush grasping the true danger, standing between submerged threat and civilization?" Or, (c) "perhaps it was simply his way of saying he wouldn't build his library near water."

Or, (d) could it be that Sidney Blumenthal, a notoriously malicious fable-spinner, just made the whole thing up?

We report, you decide.

'Breaking News' So to Speak

Wait, back up: It seems there's an option (e). The "two eyewitnesses" Sidney Blumenthal cites as sources for Bush's "nuke Little Rock" reverie may have heard a voice they thought was the president's--but was actually being ventriloquized by their own buttocks. No, really. Stranger things have been known to happen. For confirmation of which The Scrapbook directs doubtful readers to an authority whose reputation for accuracy and integrity far exceeds even Mr. Blumenthal's own. We refer, of course, to the Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid routinely overlooked by the Pulitzer Prize board, but otherwise indistinguishable from the Howell Raines-era New York Times.

Were there any real justice in the news business, for example, Weekly World News science writer D.G. Bulger would surely win a 2004 Pulitzer for a story he published earlier this year about a 40-year-old Michigan man named Jason Jablonski. "Linguists and proctologists from around the world are stunned by a Detroit man's unique gift," Bulger reported on August 26. Mr. Jablonski "is able to speak fluent French out of his buttocks."