The Gang’s Still Here
It’s over. Like a baseball game that turned “extra innings”--from a treat into an endurance contest, in which the parking lot had long since been drained and only those on the payroll remained within the friendly confines--the Bill Clinton-Monica S. Lewinsky saga is a done deal. Network news ratings may stop their yearlong plunge, and the federal government may yet emerge from the stasis in which conservatives wish it to be indefinitely mired.
But nothing this good and this bad, this entertaining and this boring, can just end. Like our other recent protracted public spectacle, the O.J. Simpson drama, this thing, so amorphous that it even defied a commonly accepted nickname (Monicagate, Zippergate and Flytrap all were found wanting), will send its tentacles into our future. The millennium may change, but the Mess on the Dress will resonate down the months and years. What exactly can we expect?
* Atty. Gen. Janet Reno will take Maureen Dowd’s advice and fire independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. Susan McDougal, Julie Hiatt Steele and Sidney Blumenthal will convene a victory party on the White House lawn, prematurely shut down by Secret Service agents for violating the “no-gloating rule.” Starr, needing funds, will accept MSNBC’s offer to pair with Oliver L. North in the new nightly series “Right You Are.” Remaining hard-liners in the Office of Independent Counsel will succeed in indicting Clinton after he leaves office. Signing on as his spokeswoman in a stunning turnabout: Susan Carpenter-McMillan.
* Senate and House Democrats, denied the ability to pass a censure resolution, will append a denunciation of the president’s affair to every piece of legislation: “Whereas William Jefferson Clinton disgraced his office and dishonored his oath, therefore we appropriate $100 million for interstate highway repairs.”
* Toni Morrison will write a piece for the New Yorker declaring that Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), the only conservative Republican with actual lips, is America’s first black Southern white racist.
* Jerry Falwell will begin selling a videotape that offers startling evidence the Clintons conspired in the 1977 Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash, because the band members had seen the future president inhale.
* Christopher Hitchens will appear on television not looking as if he’d just tumbled out of bed at a homeless shelter.
* Rallying to talk-show host Alan Keyes’ stirring cry, “Who lost impeachment?” conservative Republicans will vent their sense of betrayal by forming a circular firing squad. Their targets: Starr, the House and the Senate Republicans. Left standing as good guys: the House managers and Keyes.
* Linda R. Tripp will star in a series of television commercials promoting 10-10-TAPE, a service that offers discount long-distance rates and automatically records every call.
* Geraldo Rivera will move his base of operations to Denver for the early weeks of his new program, “JonBenet in Crisis!”
* Exhausted by his ordeal, Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) will celebrate his 75th birthday with a brief youthful indiscretion.
* Matt Drudge, burned out on politics, will become the Internet’s leading source for sports gossip. He’ll then sell his Web site to ESPN and parlay his early experience in the CBS gift shop into the presidency of the Disney Stores.
* Clinton will announce the centerpiece for his New Agenda for a New Millennium: childproof caps for Viagra bottles.
* Lucianne Goldberg will become Mark Fuhrman’s acting agent.
* In a surprise move, the pope will beatify Clinton defender Lanny J. Davis, in preparation for his elevation as the patron saint of thankless jobs.
* Rep. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) will be wooed away from his congressional career to lend his folksy talents to a new daytime series for public television, “What Do We Tell The Children?”
* David P. Schippers will retire as majority counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, inviting both his wife and mistress to the farewell dinner.
* Lisa Myers’ interview with Jane Doe No. 5 will finally be broadcast by NBC after Clinton leaves office. She will accuse him of forcing her to have sex by biting her lip, the first documented instance of Clinton biting someone else’s lip.
* William J. Bennett and Robert S. Bennett will do battle in a series of television commercials over which is better, Alka-Seltzer or Alka-Seltzer Plus.
* The words “imbroglio,” “peccadillo” and “semen” will disappear from journalists’ vocabularies. So will the phrases “rise to the level,” “finger-wagging,” “get this behind us,” “move on,” “the sacred oath” and “dry hole.”
* Vernon E. Jordan Jr. will begin billing on an hourly basis again.
* Early in the new century, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.V.) will finally figure out his position on the whole affair.
* Monica Lewinsky will move to Toronto to take up her job as public-relations director for Revlon Canada.*