It’s already a month into the Dubya era, but the rabid Internet right can’t seem to let go of their old political chew toy, Bill Clinton. A case in point is a posting by Los Angeles attorney Brian Buckley that is making the rounds of political junkies’ e-mailboxes. Buckley is the nephew of conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. and general counsel for FreeRepublic.com, a cyberspace rallying ground for the hard right and all things anti-Clinton (including some truly bizarre threads crowing with unrestrained joy over the former president’s skin-cancer diagnosis). Buckley is one of the so-called “freepers” who led the call to arms to boycott Clinton’s $100K appearance at a Morgan, Stanley get-together this winter.
Posting on January 25 under his FreeRepublic screen name “Clarity,” Buckley said, “Why be so easy on the Clintons? Even after they are dead, I say we stuff their bodies, fix them in some kind of preservative and display them at county fairs across the nation, on a rotating basis where the citizenry can have fun putting cow dung on them (remember that’s ‘art’). If that’s not in good taste, their bodies should be flattened thin as possible, again fixed in some kind of preservative and hoisted up a flag pole to flap in the wind.”
As a Brentwood-based attorney, isn’t Buckley worried his extremist tone could be bad for business? Apparently not.
“I know what’s going to come out in your newspaper,” says the lawyer. “You’ve done hit pieces on us before, and I don’t care what you say.”
Buckley explains that his post was a send-up of a fellow freeper’s earlier, “obsessive and bizarre” post about the Clintons. “Someone put up this crazy post about hounding them to death, and my reply was merely Swiftian satire,” he says. ‘‘If my post is taken out of that context, of course it looks crazy.” Having unearthed the FreeRepublic thread in question, it seems to OffBeat that Mr. Buckley is doing a bit of verbal tap-dancing not unlike that of his nemesis, Clinton. The post that prompted Buckley’s diatribe reads as follows: “Clinton not only must spend the rest of his days in jail, but everything he stood for and championed must be thoroughly repudiated, discredited, and disgraced . . . He must never be given a moment’s peace from the continuing judges’ gavels as long as he roams the earth . . . The long legal knives of conservatives must be sharpened against Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, and they and their gang must be victimized by the legal system in a manner that will make all conservatives proud.” Satire is a tricky business, but surely a truly Swiftian take would have been to suggest the Clintons’ canonization, or naming an airport after them, like their patron saint, Reagan. But as a lackey of the Liberal Media, what would OffBeat know? —Johnny Angel
Denise Rich’s Spirit Muses
As federal authorities began investigating whether Democratic fund-raiser Denise Rich bought her ex-husband’s pardon, OffBeat found ourselves intrigued by the media’s oft-repeated description of the New York socialite as a songwriter. Rich, of course, is the former wife of fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose last-minute pardon by Clinton set off a political firestorm. Living in L.A., we’re used to “creative” titles like songwriter being bandied about with little substance. Lo and behold, this is no society dame scribbling a few lyrics. Rich is the composer of 400 songs, including “The Next American Hero” for the 1988 Olympics, Sister Sledge’s hit “Frankie” (1985), and “Don’t Waste Your Time,” a duet by Mary J. Blige and Aretha Franklin (1988), as well as compositions for Donna Summer, Marc Anthony and Diana Ross.
On her Web site, Richsong.com, Rich writes that she penned her first lyrics in the bathroom; she calls these her “bathroom tapes.” The BMI Web site says that Rich took up songwriting at the same time she first came to prominence as a Manhattan socialite and wife of a billionaire commodities trader, “originally as a method of addressing her troubled marriage.”
“Frankie” was written after a dream she had on a plane heading for Europe. The song is about a summer romance between a 12-year-old girl and 15-year-old boy that went sour when he dumped her for another (presumably prepubescent?) girl. “Oh, how you brought me down (down down); all I did was runnin’ around (around).” Years later, Rich attacked a similar topic with “Don’t Waste Your Time” for Blige and Franklin. “He’s got a sweetie on the side; stop making truth out of his lies.”
Rich attributes her musical success to the occult. “I think a lot of my ideas come from maybe my past lives,” she writes. “Maybe it’s a spiritual connection to people who have passed on. I know I get ideas from them.” If that’s true, maybe she needs to talk again with the spirit who told her to get mixed up in her ex’s affairs.
Rich still has a thing for controversial rich guys. Her new beau is rumored to be Herbert Black, a Montreal millionaire who most recently made the news by winning a ‘‘substantial amount of money’’ as part of a settlement of the Sotheby/Christie’s commission-fixing case. Herbert is also known as the “David” who took on the “Goliath” Sumitomo Corp. in a deal that sent the worldwide price of copper over the edge. The Japanese commodity giant ended up losing billions, while Black made a clear profit of over $75 million. Black also was involved in a bitter divorce battle with his second wife, Veeda Gilanshah of New York. The Iranian-born Gilanshah married Black in June 1990. Their divorce dispute began in 1992.
