Scandal Sauces 113th Gridiron: Anything Goes

Reporters depicting reporters are out in force, trench coats flapping, notebooks waving, hounding presidential prey and singing with gusto: “Just hold your nose--anything goes.”

It’s Saturday night’s 113th annual singe of Gridiron, a traditional dinner conclave of journalists roasting the officials they cover, a white-tie-and-red-roses bash in this scandal-shaded year of Monica S. Lewinsky and Paula Corbin Jones.

President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton topped the guest list, but many of the gibes, japes and sharp elbows were being directed at the Fourth Estate. As the song says, in love and in the selling of newspapers, “Anything Goes.”

“It’s very chic today, to print a leak today, we feel we must today, cover lust today, and a crime today, will seem sublime today, on many TV shows.”

Conclusion: “So when reporting stuff salacious, and even outright fallacious, just hold your nose. Anything goes. . . . Just one scoop can be your ticket--Pulitzers and instant fame. You must find some evildoers. Press your 1st Amendment claim.”

And the chorus: “Push it! Shove it! God, how we love it--wallowing deep in muck and slime. Lurid tales? We’re not above it. Sex sells papers ev’ry time.”

At least that part of the show the Clintons may have liked.

On putting the best face on things: Septuagenarian United Press International correspondent Helen Thomas, playing the first lady in pink suit and hair band, sang this about the beleaguered White House press secretary:

“Ask poor Mike McCurry not to be forthright, watch him spin around, and spin around with all his might.”

A make-believe George Stephanopoulos, the former White House aide turned television commentator, giving advice to White House intern recruits on how not to behave in front of the president: “Don’t blow a kiss at him, Don’t do that lovesick mope, Don’t pant for him on the rope.”

Gridiron, played out before nearly every president since Benjamin Harrison in 1885, is an equal-opportunity frolic.

The Republicans were shown as bewailing lost opportunities on the balanced budget and tax cuts: “It’s a dirty, rotten, stinkin’ shame, Clinton’s beat us at our game.”