Genius and courage

If the framers of the United States Constitution could have lived to see the events of last week, they would be congratulating themselves on a job well done.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy led a 5-4 majority to rule in the case of Citizens United v. FEC that the First Amendment does not permit a law that criminalizes campaign ads paid for by corporations and similar groups.

Justice Kennedy wrote that the law in question, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (also known as the McCain-Feingold Act), was having a "chilling effect" on political speech. The law and the regulations following from it were so complex and uncertain, Justice Kennedy wrote, that they amounted to a prior restraint on speech. "A speaker wishing to avoid criminal liability threats and the heavy costs of defending against FEC enforcement must ask a governmental agency for prior permission to speak," he wrote, exactly the sort of government power "that the First Amendment was drawn to prohibit."

The people who currently hold government power reacted to this decision with extraordinary hostility.

"This week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence," President Barack Obama intoned in his weekly radio/Internet address. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he said, "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest."

Over in the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the decision will allow "special-interest dollars to dictate the details of public policy."

On the other side of the Capitol, Senator Chuck Schumer said he will hold hearings to look for a way to get around the Supreme Court's decision.

Speaker Pelosi said she's looking at "legislative options available to mitigate the impact of this disappointing decision."

And President Obama said he has "instructed" his administration "to develop a forceful, bipartisan response to this decision."

The president was so angry at the Supreme Court that he lashed out at the the justices during his State of the Union address, accusing them to their faces of believing that "American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities." He said he was "urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems." [That was milder than his written speech, which read, "to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong."]

Of course, the First Amendment can't be overturned by an act of Congress.

It was the genius of the Founders to protect our liberty by dividing and limiting government power. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," they wrote in Federalist No. 51, which is titled "The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments."

It was published in 1788, but it's still in what book dealers call "very good" condition.

Federalist No. 51, written by Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, says the "preservation of liberty" requires that each branch of government "have a will of its own," with the members of each department having "as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others." The framers agreed to "some deviations" from this principle, one being the appointment and confirmation of judges. Because of "peculiar qualifications being essential in the members" of the judicial branch, the most important consideration was "to select that mode of choice which best secures these qualifications."

The safeguard of liberty was "the permanent tenure by which the appointments are held in that department, [which] must soon destroy all sense of dependence on the authority conferring them."

That's exactly what you saw on television during the State of the Union address: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and five of his colleagues calmly dismissing a presidential rebuke and the congressional standing ovation for it.

It's the framers' design. The Supreme Court doesn't answer to Congress or the president.

Still, it takes courage to stand up for the First Amendment in the face of withering criticism from those who find freedom of speech to be an obstacle to their plans.

"It will be that much harder to get fair, common-sense financial reforms, or close unwarranted tax loopholes that reward corporations from sheltering their income or shipping American jobs off-shore," President Obama seethed in his remarks about the Citizens United decision, "It will make it more difficult to pass commonsense laws to promote energy independence because even foreign entities would be allowed to mix in our elections. It would give the health insurance industry even more leverage to fend off reforms that would protect patients."

He's angry because the Supreme Court threw out a law that would have kept banks and insurance companies and oil companies and other corporations from running ads to give voters their side of the story when they are threatened and attacked by progressive politicians -- "men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims," in Ayn Rand's words.

Corporations are no longer disarmed in the 30 days before a primary election because Justice Anthony Kennedy took a courageous stand for freedom of speech, and not for the first time. In 2002 he led a 5-4 majority in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, striking down a law that banned "virtual" child pornography, computer-generated images created without real children.

The withering criticism of that decision came from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

Justice Anthony Kennedy deserves credit for defending freedom of speech without fear or favor.

Incidentally, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the 1990 decision that was overruled by Citizens United, is a good example of the trouble caused by the Incorporation Doctrine, the Supreme Court's 20th-century project of applying some parts of the Bill of Rights to the states. Prior to the invention of the Incorporation Doctrine, the state of Michigan would have had a perfect right to restrict freedom of speech.

That's because the Bill of Rights was intended to apply only to the federal government, not to the states.

It was 1925, in the case of Gitlow v. People of State of New York, when the Supreme Court first suggested that the U.S. Constitution required the states to guarantee freedom of speech and the press. As late as 1922 the Court held that the Constitution "imposes upon the States no obligation to confer...the right of free speech."

Over time, the Supreme Court developed its theory that certain rights are so fundamental to the concept of due process of law that they must apply to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars any state from denying due process to any person.

It gets a little tricky when the Court tries to explain which rights are "fundamental" and which ones are not. It gets even trickier when the justices cut the states some slack and allow that there may be a "compelling state interest" justifying the law, and as long as it's "narrowly tailored" it's probably constitutional.

In the now overruled Austin case, the Supreme Court held that "Section 54(1) of the Michigan Campaign Finance Act," which prohibited corporations from using their general treasury funds for campaign ads, did not violate the First Amendment because there was a "compelling state interest" in "preventing corruption" and the law was "sufficiently narrowly tailored to achieve its goal."

When the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in the 2003 McConnell v. Federal Election Commission case, the Austin decision was cited as a precedent.

The made-up balancing tests that the Supreme Court uses to apply the First Amendment to the states -- fundamental rights, compelling state interests, narrowly tailored laws -- were being applied to a law made by Congress, even though the First Amendment says that when it comes to freedom of speech, "Congress shall make no law."

That's the muddle that has been made by the Supreme Court's ever-evolving and constitutionally unauthorized Incorporation Doctrine.

"The biggest stretch that the Court has made was interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment to apply the Bill of Rights to the states," Justice Antonin Scalia told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in February, 2006. "Nobody ever thought the Bill of Rights applied to the states. It begins 'Congress shall make no law.'"

But Justice Scalia would rather not talk about it.

"I'm not about to tell the people of New York state or of any state that their state government is not bound by the First Amendment," he said. "Okay?"

He's not really asking.

If we were following the Constitution as written, Michigan could ban corporate spending on campaign ads, and New York could require terrorists to testify against themselves, and California could ban jury trials, and Alabama could segregate its public schools. That's our federal system, as written, and as it used to be before the Incorporation Doctrine.

We have spent the last 75 or so years allowing the Supreme Court's decisions to substitute for constitutional amendments. That's why you hear about "test cases" going to the Supreme Court instead of "ratification debates" going on in state legislatures.

It's a risky practice. We're always just a 5-4 decision away from somebody's freedom being overruled.

Constitutional rights are most secure when they're in the plain language of the Constitution.

And even then it takes a Herculean effort to keep them.

Thanks, Justice Kennedy.


Copyright 2010

Source note: The Ayn Rand quotation is from Atlas Shrugged; it can also be found in her book, For the New Intellectual, in "The Meaning of Money."

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "Rewriting the First Amendment." For more information and complete source notes on the history of the Incorporation Doctrine, read "How the First Amendment Came to Protect Topless Dancing," free online at http://www.ExtremeInk.com/appendix.htm and also published as the appendix to the novel, The 37th Amendment

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Janteenth

Mark the day. January 19, 2010, is the day American taxpayers went to the polls and declared that they are not slaves to everybody else's needs.

It was October, 2007, when candidate Barack Obama told a small child in Durham, North Carolina, "We've got to make sure that people who have more money help the people who have less money."

That statement was at odds with the Constitution, which protects an individual's right to his own life, liberty and property. The U.S. government does not have the power or the responsibility to even out the distribution of wealth in the United States.

Now that Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown has defeated Democrat Martha Coakley for the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy, it's clear that the tea party protests in April and the town-hall meeting protests in August were not "Astroturf" demonstrations, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted again and again. They were the genuine article.

A lot of Americans don't want the government ramming through new entitlement programs and running up record-breaking debt; and then lecturing the country about shared responsibility, otherwise known as higher taxes and mandatory payments.

Freedom means the right to enjoy the fruits of your own efforts, what Abraham Lincoln called the right to eat the bread earned with one's own hands.

That's not going to change.


Copyright 2010

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Tabloid update: Exploding marriages

"Obama Marriage Explodes!" the National Enquirer headlined on an April 2008 cover, but at the time there was nothing inside the magazine to back it up. The story was about Michelle Obama's fears that there might be photos and love notes from women in her husband's past that could create a huge embarrassment for them just before the election.

Senator Obama reportedly told his wife that there were no love notes and no photos.

That was all there was to the story, but to a casual observer in the supermarket checkout line, the cover gave the impression of a full-blown Clinton-style scandal.

At the time, America Wants To Know speculated that the Clintons were behind the story, possibly planting it through their attorney, David E. Kendall, who had represented the National Enquirer for fifteen years.

We would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Mr. Kendall and to take another guess.

Recently we were reading up on the latest revelations about former senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards, not in the Enquirer -- we're getting to that -- but in New York magazine, excerpted from the new book "Game Change" by political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin:

Roger Altman picked up the phone in his 38th-floor office on the East Side of New York and found Edwards on the line. Altman, a former deputy Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and a supporter of Hillary’s, was chairman of the investment group Evercore Partners. Since 1999, Evercore had owned a stake in American Media, the publisher of the National Enquirer--and it was that connection which prompted the call that day in the first week of October [2007].

There was no reason for the Clintons to pay David Kendall's hourly rate when they could just pick up the phone and call Roger Altman.

So we stand by the guess that at a critical point in the 2008 primaries, the Clintons fed a phony story to the National Enquirer, trying to neutralize the infidelity issue by making voters think the Obama marriage was no different than theirs.

Or maybe everybody was just psychic.

Because last week the Globe headlined its cover, "Obama Marriage Explodes!" and this time it appears to be true.

Back to that in a minute.

The reason John Edwards called Roger Altman on that October day was to beg him to stop an upcoming story in the National Enquirer. The story was going to allege that he had an affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter. Edwards told Altman the story was outrageous and untrue.

It was all true.

Roger Altman told Edwards he didn't think he could do much about it, but he would call the publisher and talk to him.

Which he did.

But it was all true and the publisher had the evidence.

Then Elizabeth Edwards called Altman. "You must do something about this, she begged," according to Heilemann and Halperin. "It's cruel, it's unfair, and it's untrue. This is way too much for me. I can't take it. It's killing our family. It's killing me."

That was the strongest card she could play but it wasn't enough to stop the National Enquirer from exposing the whole sordid story of presidential candidate John Edwards recklessly cheating on his cancer-stricken wife with a woman his aides considered a dangerous bimbo groupie.

Edwards denied the story and denounced the Enquirer as trash, which the editors didn't appreciate. They ran a follow-up story in December showing Rielle Hunter six months pregnant.

Yet Elizabeth Edwards didn't walk out on the marriage. Instead she helped to develop a damage-control strategy and continued to help her husband run for the Democratic nomination for president in Iowa. Aghast at these developments, top staffers quietly plotted to leak the whole story to the New York Times and destroy the campaign in case Edwards somehow pulled out a victory in Iowa.

But Barack Obama won Iowa and John Edwards began an effort to sell his endorsement to the highest bidder in exchange for the VP nod, or the job of Attorney General, or something appropriate to his standing in the party.

Edwards was still holding out for a deal in February, when Rielle Hunter's baby was born, and in May, when Hillary Clinton won the West Virginia primary. It was then that Obama called Edwards and offered him a prime-time speaking slot at the convention, and for that, Edwards endorsed him.

Then in July, the National Enquirer staked out a Beverly Hills hotel and caught John Edwards meeting Rielle Hunter and their baby.

Edwards decided to appear on ABC's Nightline and semi-confess to infidelity without admitting paternity, which just made everything worse. The invitation to speak at the convention was withdrawn.

"Game Change" details the screaming arguments between John and Elizabeth Edwards as well as the couple's grandiose and abusive treatment of the campaign staff.

John Edwards was very nearly elected vice president in 2004, and there was a moment in time when he looked like he might become the Democratic nominee for president in 2008.

According to "Game Change," that's the precise moment when senior Senate Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, urged freshman Senator Barack Obama to run for president.

"Edwards was regarded almost universally by his former colleagues as a callow, shallow phony," the authors write.

Former colleagues certainly didn't rush to defend him this week when the National Enquirer hit the newsstands with its cover story, "John Edwards Caught Cheating AGAIN!"

But this time it's different. "Humiliated wife finally kicks him out," the cover promises. The story says Mrs. Edwards threw her husband out of the house after Christmas, screaming that she was finally going to sign the divorce papers that have been gathering dust since her lawyers drew them up last year.

"The Enquirer has learned exclusively that the philandering ex-senator embarked on a 'sex-and-booze bender' after what appeared to be a marriage-ending blowout fight," the tabloid reports.

John Edwards reportedly moved to the couple's vacation home on Figure Eight Island near Wilmington, North Carolina, where he crawled the local bars every night, hitting on female employees and customers. Bartender Stephanie Breshears said Edwards tried on "four consecutive nights" to get her to go home with him after her shift at the Kornerstone Bistro.

"I think he's scum," Ms. Breshears told the Enquirer.

Now THAT'S the kind of judgment we've been looking for in a president. Why don't people like this ever run for office? We'll come back to that.

But first, the Obamas' exploding marriage.

America Wants To Know suspected that the president was cheating on his wife when we saw the Secret Service's odd reaction to the gate-crashers at the state dinner for the prime minister of India.

We also thought it was a bit odd that the president's aides waited three hours to tell him that a suspected terrorist tried to blow up a plane over Detroit with an underwear bomb on Christmas Day. Three hours? Imagine for a moment that you worked for the president. Under what circumstances would you just not disturb him?

That's what we thought, too.

Three hours is about right.

The Globe says the president's marriage "has been pushed to the brink of destruction by the intense pressure of White House living. That's the word from stunned insiders who say the First Couple is fighting tooth and claw behind closed doors and their 17-year union is edging ever closer to a shocking final meltdown."

The Globe's sources say "their marriage has been like a war zone." They're "screaming at each other" and "glaring" and "stomping off in different directions."

President and Mrs. Obama were trying to patch up their marriage with the Hawaiian vacation, the tabloid says, renting a $9 million ocean-front house along with two neighboring houses for friends who joined them on the trip.

"The whole holiday was a disaster," a source tells the tabloid, "They got into a huge fight the second they were on the island."

Some of the Globe's details are corroborated by mainstream press reports. The Obamas didn't go to church on Christmas and the couple didn't exchange gifts. That's in the Globe and also in the Washington Post.

"Barack can't believe how much Michelle has been spending since she became First Lady," the Globe reports. The spending, if not the disbelief, is corroborated by the NBC TV station in Dallas with a slideshow of Mrs. Obama's designer clothes, including a pair of black flats by Maison Martin Margiela that retail for $640 (but can be had for less):



Reporters on the Honolulu trip also took note of Mrs. Obama's absence from the group of eighteen friends and family members who accompanied the president on a trip to buy shave ice, otherwise known as snow cones, on New Year's Day. "First Lady Michelle Obama didn’t make the outing," ABC News volunteered.

It doesn't prove anything.

But there have been signs of stress. There was that we-just-had-a-fight body language when the first couple arrived at the Blue Duck Tavern in Washington for an anniversary dinner last October:




And when they left:




And there were those odd comments Mrs. Obama made to a New York Times magazine reporter about "bumps" in their marriage with the president "studying the carpet as she answered."

And just this weekend the president surprised his wife with a birthday dinner at a local restaurant. The guest list included the first lady's mom, her chief of staff, presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett, two friends from Chicago, Attorney General Eric Holder and his wife.

As comedian Argus Hamilton would say, just the two of them and their food tasters.

We don't know whether Michelle Obama is the type of person who would stay or leave if her husband was revealed to be a faithless philandering egomaniac. She might be Elin Woods, packed and out of there, or she might be Hillary Clinton, staying in it for the power and the glory and the salaried make-up and hair stylists.

What we do know is that too many of our presidential candidates fit the description in "Game Change" of John Edwards' implosion: "an archetypal political tragedy in which the very same qualities that fuel any presidential bid--ego, hubris, vanity, neediness, a kind of delusion--became all-consuming and self-destructive."

Ego, hubris, vanity, neediness, a kind of delusion. The qualities that fuel any presidential bid.

This is really dangerous.

Is it an unintended consequence of thirty years of campaign finance reform?

Not so very long ago, a small group of people could donate a large amount of money and finance the candidacy of a person they believed would make a good president, or senator, or congressman.

No more.

Now a candidate has to be willing to spend two or even three years raising small donations and shaking every hand in Iowa and New Hampshire. Now a candidate has to be the kind of person who is so driven to be famous and powerful that no indignity is too great. Instead of thoughtful and accomplished candidates who do not wish to be publicly humiliated, we've got candidates who only went into politics because their parents stopped them from running away to join the circus.

Quick, guess how many recent presidential candidates have had issues with their fathers and are desperate to prove their success in a poignant and futile effort to win their father's approval.

Did you guess ALL of them?

Maybe we should take another look at those campaign finance laws. They were based on the belief that large donations were corrupting, but there must be a better way to keep corruption out than to make our candidates run a two-year obstacle course that no completely sane person could possibly tolerate.


Copyright 2010

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "The case for adultery," "Hillary's shocking secret illness!" "Political marriages on the rocks," "Obama marriage explodes!" and "The strange but true source of extreme partisanship."

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Jay Leno's winning hand

Do you remember where you were on that autumn day in 2004 when you heard the shocking news that NBC was going to replace Jay Leno with Conan O'Brien in five years?

It was shocking because the Tonight Show host had just signed a new contract, because he was number one in the ratings, and because nobody gets five years' notice that they're going to be fired.

Even in a business that competes to deliver ever-younger and more gullible audiences to advertisers, it was shocking that NBC would openly insult Jay Leno's viewers by publicly declaring that they were old and unwanted.

Jay Leno's old and unwanted audience was still delivering top ratings and profits for NBC when the clock ticked to the doomsday moment, and suddenly the decrepit old viewers of 2004 looked like a potential ratings smash for a rival network, a nuclear weapon that ABC or Fox could use to blow up Conan O'Brien.

And so the very best minds in the very worst business reached a wildly extravagant and screw-proof deal for Jay Leno to stay at NBC.

If he succeeded at 10 p.m., terrific. If he didn't, they knew a secret that would allow them to push Conan out of the way and put everything back as it was before.

NBC's agreement with its affiliates allows it to start the Tonight Show as late as 12:05 a.m. to allow for those occasional half-hour special reports on tennis championships, or the Olympics, or similar big events.

And now there are reports that Conan O'Brien's contract doesn't actually specify or guarantee the Tonight Show's time slot.

So NBC is able to avoid a huge contractual penalty payment to Conan O'Brien by moving the Tonight Show out of the Tonight Show's historic time slot instead of canceling it or firing him, and perhaps they could even sue him for breach of contract if he leaves the network. Conan's management team didn't see it coming when they negotiated his NBC contract six years ago.

Conan told his viewers he won't do the Tonight Show at 12:05 a.m. and he accused the network of trying to dismantle the great Tonight Show franchise. He complained that he was not given as much time as his predecessor -- only seven months -- to develop the formerly number-one show into a ratings success.

Now Jay Leno is being blamed for undercutting Conan O'Brien by staying at NBC, by delivering weak prime-time ratings that allegedly hurt the late-night schedule, and by agreeing to move back into the 11:35 p.m. time slot.

But the larger story here is the shattered myth of the all-powerful youth audience. Back in 2004, NBC executives were terrified that Conan O'Brien would go to another network and take the future of television with him. They had no confidence that Jay Leno could hold on to younger viewers. They made a bet that in five years, the decision to replace Jay with Conan would look like a stroke of genius.

Not quite.

Maybe someday, someone will bet against the Baby Boom and win.

Don't bet on it.


Copyright 2010

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Punch lines

So there's this very old joke about a Beverly Hills gynecologist who is seeing a new patient, a 67-year-old married woman, and he is startled to discover that she is still a virgin.

Without dragging out the story, the essence of it is that there's no medical, psychological or educational problem, it's simply that she's been married for 42 years and is still a virgin.

The doctor asks her why.

"Well, doctor, it's like this," the woman explains. "My husband is a William Morris agent. Every night he sits on the edge of the bed and tells me all the wonderful things he's going to do for me."

Does anything about that joke remind you of the health care bill?

On Saturday, President Barack Obama used his weekly radio address to claim that health care reform will create "good, lasting jobs" and "shared prosperity."

He claimed that it will offer the security of "quality, affordable health care" even if "you lose your job, change jobs, move or get sick."

He claimed that "costs will finally come down for families, businesses, and our government."

Then he said this: "Here's what else will happen within the first year. Insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care to their customers - so that we can start catching preventable illnesses and diseases on the front end."

That's the point where his argument went from absurdly comical to pie-throwing hilarious.

There's no such thing as "free preventive care." Somebody's going to pay for it, unless the president plans to propose the repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment so he can enslave medical professionals.

Whenever the government requires insurance plans to pay for something extra, the premiums go up to reflect the additional cost of the services.

America Wants To Know is self-employed and pays for an individual Blue Cross policy which goes up in price every single time the state or federal government mandates a new benefit. Remember the extra night in the hospital for new mothers? Premiums went up. Remember the last-minute addition to the October 2008 bailout bill, mandating coverage for mental health problems? Premiums jumped more than 30 percent the following January.

Nothing is free.

We're going to pay for it as policyholders, or we're going to pay for it as taxpayers, or we're going to pay for it in long waits and limited services caused by price controls. Or all three.

If the final health care bill really contains a provision requiring insurance plans to offer "free" preventive care, hundreds of millions of Americans are going to see their premiums and other co-payments rise to cover that extra cost. While that has happened many times before, this will be the first time that Americans can put all the blame on their elected officials.

And they will.

No joke.

There's something Shakespearean about the way the Democrats are barreling ahead to pass a health care bill before the voters can get to the polls to stop them. They're marching to their own tragic fate, unable to alter their course, doomed to fulfill the awful prophecy now revealed to have been their death sentence: Change.

Maybe it's not Shakespeare as much as it is Rod Serling.

("Mr. Chambers! Don't get on that ship! The rest of the book, 'To Serve Man,' it's... it's a COOKBOOK!")


Copyright 2010

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "Insanity," "Bad at math," "The midnight sausage factory," "Why health care reform will fail," and "Health Care Reform Dinner Theatre."

Source note: The quotation is from the 1962 Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man." Read more at The Internet Movie Database, IMDB.com.

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Tabloid update: "Found! Bush Love Letters to Condi"

Last week's Globe tabloid featured a "world exclusive" cover story promising proof that they've been right all along about former President George W. Bush's marriage-shattering affair with his Secretary of State and former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

While we don't doubt that they've been right all along, this story doesn't prove it.

"Intimate love notes George Bush sent to his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been found in a stash of missing White House e-mails," the Globe reports, "insiders believe."

It's true that a stash of missing White House e-mails have been found. On December 15, 2009, the Associated Press reported that computer technicians located 22 million missing White House e-mail messages from 94 days of the Bush administration. The AP got this information from two groups that filed lawsuits over the Bush White House's faulty electronic record-keeping system.

The two groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive, said they're settling the lawsuits, which were filed in 2007.

But the e-mails haven't been made public. "It will be 2014 at the earliest before the public sees any of the messages because they must go through the National Archives' process for releasing presidential and agency records," the AP reports.

Nobody talking to the Globe claims to have seen the e-mails personally, but "a pal of the ex-Commander-in-Chief" told the Globe, "George is absolutely panicking" because "he has confided there were a series of e-mails between Condi and him during that time frame that should never see the light of day - NEVER."

The time frame in question is between March 2003 and October 2005, "when sources say the Bush marriage was already strained," the tabloid reports.

"He says during his lowest times he reached out to Condi and talked in detail about his loveless marriage to Laura - and once he even told Condi he wanted her by his side," the Globe's insider reveals.

America Wants To Know is a little skeptical.

According to published reports, President Bush stopped using e-mail when he left Texas and moved into the White House.

In June, 2008, former deputy associate director of the White House Communications Office Jaime Sneider wrote in The Weekly Standard, "George W. Bush told a small group of friends just days before being sworn in, 'Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace.' In the last eight years, President Bush has not sent a single message. And future presidents are all but certain to follow in his footsteps."

It's just not plausible that President Bush sent embarrassing love notes through the White House e-mail system.

Does that mean the Globe is one hundred percent wrong?

America Wants To Know doesn't think so.

If President Bush wrote embarrassing love notes to Condoleezza Rice, there's at least one person who would have copies of them.

Condoleezza Rice.

She's writing a book, you know. The Associated Press reported last February that Crown Publishers, a division of Random House Inc., will pay her $2.5 million to write three books, starting with "a memoir about her years in the administration of President George W. Bush," due out in 2011. "Rice will combine candid narrative and acute analysis to tell the story of her time in the White House," Crown's press release promised.

Could she be the source for this story? Is she the "pal of the ex-Commander-in-Chief" who talked to the tabloid?

It's not impossible.

Previous stories in the Globe have featured photos of former first lady Laura Bush looking glamorous and lovely, but this one has just one small photo of Mrs. Bush, and she looks like a witch.

The former president, who in the past has been pictured in the Globe looking like a wreck, looks impish and cute in this issue. There are four photos of Mr. Bush and Dr. Rice looking affectionate, two in which he's kissing her cheek, one that shows his arm around her shoulder as they both wave to cameras, and the cover photo, which shows them exchanging knowing looks as if they share an amusing secret.

Even if the former Secretary of State is not the source for the Globe's story, it's plausible that former President Bush is panicked over what might come out in her book, or in the book his wife Laura is writing. A year ago the New York Times reported that Mrs. Bush signed with Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, to write a memoir which will be published this year.

Scribner said the book will offer "an intimate account of Mrs. Bush's life experiences."

So, this much of the Globe's story we can be sure is true: the former president is panicked. With two women in his life writing a "candid narrative" and an "intimate account," any husband would be.


Copyright 2010


Editor's note: Catch up on your tabloid reading with "Suicidal Bush in Therapy!" and "Laura Gets $15M Divorce Pay Off!"