Tabloid update: Bush! Cocaine! Clinton! Mistress!

America Wants To Know promised to keep you up-to-date on the supermarket tabloids, because if you don't do your own grocery shopping you'll miss all this entertainment, and we wouldn't want that to happen.

The Globe's June 16th cover screams "Bush on Cocaine in White House!" but inside, there's not much sustenance for the hungry scandal-hunter. The story is a lot of baseless speculation that "the use of illegal drugs" along with "boozing," "could explain" everything from the invasion of Iraq to the president's crumbling marriage.

The only substance in the story is a quote from former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. McClellan writes that he overheard Bush, back when he was governor of Texas, tell a supporter that he couldn't remember whether he had tried cocaine or not. "We had some pretty wild parties back in the day," Bush allegedly said, "and I just don't remember."

The Globe didn't call any of the people who do remember, like Asleep at the Wheel's Grammy-winning front man, Ray Benson, who once told an interviewer, "I know a lot more about the president's past than I'll talk about. He wasn't a friend of mine, but I knew the circles he ran in. I knew the people on Sixth Street he hung out with."

America Wants to Know would never doubt the word of Brother Ray Benson.

We also don't doubt the Globe's characterization of the president's marriage as "almost destroyed" by his "boozing" and his "close relationship with Condoleezza Rice." We take note that when Laura Bush took off for a surprise trip to Afghanistan, the president took Condoleezza Rice to Camp David for the weekend and they returned to Washington looking very refreshed....



We also note the first lady's pointed upstaging -- or is it bigfooting? -- of the Secretary of State in Paris Thursday at the donor conference for Afghanistan. Mrs. Bush gave the opening remarks, accompanied by a glitzy visual slideshow of photographs of herself on her Afghanistan trip.

No other speaker was given visual aids, the AP reported.

And Secretary Rice's remarks to the conference were bumped to the less-desirable post-lunch time slot.

Well, that's the way it goes when you're the other woman.

Not every woman puts up with that kind of treatment, as we see in the National Enquirer's June 23rd issue. You can't miss it, it's the one with the cover that screams, "Clinton Mistress Revealed!"

The Enquirer says it can now disclose the name of the woman with whom Bill Clinton had a long affair, starting shortly after he left the White House and continuing right up to the point when the woman realized that he wasn't going to leave his wife, he was instead going to campaign for her.

The woman is Julie Tauber McMahon, a wealthy divorcee who met Mr. Clinton in 1998 at her father's house, which President Clinton was borrowing for a little vacation.

Her father, Joel Tauber, is a major Democratic donor.

Bill Clinton was doing a donor's daughter.

You know, the Clinton Presidential Library really ought to have a wing devoted to Farmer's Daughter jokes.

But never mind about that now, the point is that Mr. Clinton allegedly began an affair with Julie Tauber McMahon sometime after he left office and moved to Chappaqua, where she lives just five miles from his house. He reportedly became something of a mentor to her three children, infuriating their father. The Enquirer says it got the story from one of Julie McMahon's family members, who passed a polygraph test.

Alas for our former president, the fabulously wealthy Ms. McMahon dumped him when she realized he was never going to leave his wife. The Enquirer says Mr. Clinton reacted by going on a "wild sex binge" and "was so out of control that even his closest pals were disgusted by his hound-dog antics."

According to the Enquirer's source, our 61-year-old former president "turned to a string of wild sexual encounters to lick his wounds."

Okay! More than we want to know!

Maybe you'd rather hear the gossip from across the pond, where Prince Charles' attractive forty-something private secretary, Elizabeth Buchanan, has resigned after second wife Camilla reportedly grew tired of seeing her at Prince Charles' side during official functions.

"Camilla simply loathed her," an old colleague told London's Daily Mail.

Perhaps Ms. Buchanan's resignation had something to do with the Globe's May 19th story of "Charles & Camilla's Secret Separation," which reported that "palace insiders" were predicting that the future king of England and his second wife would divorce by the end of the year. The couple "have been living apart for the past six weeks, following a furious final showdown over her boozing," the Globe said.

The Globe's story is full of sparkly little gems about Camilla's affection for "Gordon's gin and tonic" and her constant complaints about the "shackles of royalty."

Meanwhile, the Globe says, "Prince Charles is holed up at Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire during the royal couple's trial separation" while "Camilla has been living at her old country home, Ray Mill House, in the village of Lacock."

That's really the name of the village, don't look at us.

We're just trying to save you a trip to the supermarket.


Copyright 2008

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