The crazed, the cornball and the contemptuous come to the Clinton School in Little Rock.

First up, candidate/comedian Alan Keyes! Flamboyantly demonstrating that The Clinton will not be bound by hidebound liberal nostrums, they are opening their doors to the renowned nut/commentator.

The Clintonists recently hosted former White House Counsel and failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, on-the-lam from a Congressional subpoena for a “private session.”

If Keyes overnights in Little Rock he can do lunch next day with cheesy Mitch Albom at the First Annual Clinton School Scholarship Luncheon! The Five People You Meet In Heaven author shares his tales from beyond the grave for a hundred bucks a pop.

Feel the smarm!

If Keyes does stick around for the lunch they can compare notes on their mutually troubled* MSNBC show experiences.

*Keyes’s bitterness over his 2002 dumping by America’s third rated cable news network continues in the form of an online petition protesting the crime, still available on his web site!

Vanity Fair‘s “White House Civil War” account of Gore-Clinton spats and slights recalls those heady days when nothing seemed impossible, the President spoke in coherent sentences, and the White House was mired in minutia. When school uniforms walked like men, and V-chips promised to end filth as we knew it.

The piece excerpts from Salley Bedell Smith’s “For Love of Politics—Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years,” following the resource competition between Gore and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 campaigns for President and Senator.

Apparently the fate of the Republic turned on the teen marketing of “Resident Evil,” and whether Al Gore or Hillary Clinton would be credited with denouncing this scourge.

“One of the most dramatic examples occurred in September as the Federal Trade Commission prepared to release a report on violence in the media. The agency’s million-dollar study showed that entertainment companies were marketing violent movies, video games, and music to children under 18. Under ordinary circumstances, a vice president running for the presidency would have first call on publicizing the report. But Hillary insisted she should handle the rollout because she had already called for a universal ratings system. “It was a key point of her Senate campaign,” said Bruce Reed. “The president had singled her out for that in the 2000 State of the Union, so the finding of the F.T.C. was directly relevant to her campaign. The vice president’s campaign had concluded that cultural issues were hurting him, and they were dying to announce the report as well.”

An alternative reading of events might be that the September 11, 2000 [did the Mossad do this one too?] FTC release was a side show. Gore appeared on Oprah to lament kids today, while Bush kept his eye on the ball campaigning. In Florida.

In other news, the article confirms the status of former Clinton and Gore staffer Bob Boorstin as a national resource. His “I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I’ve ever known in my life” quote on Hillary to Carl Bernstein got a lot of play, and in the Vanity Fair piece he tops himself:

“Did we make mistakes? Yes. Would I say that Clinton was the only reason we lost? No. Would I say with absolute zero doubt in my mind that we would have won the election if Clinton hadn’t put his penis in [Lewinsky’s] mouth? Yes. I guarantee it.”

The National first Ladies Library is losing the sugar daddy who brings in four-fifths of it’s income. The Library is based in a Canton Ohio house once belonging to President William McKinley and wife Ida, and serves up a weird amalgam of decorating and democracy, a great deal of former White House china with a side bar of first lady anecdotes.

Retiring Ohio Republican Representative Ralph Regula has funneled cash to the Library for years through his position on the House appropriations Committee. The First Ladies’ most recent filing shows government grants accounted for $1,028,991 of the Library’s $1,344,415 revenue.

The Library’s Founder was sort of coy with CNN on where it all came from:

“You know, surprisingly, it hasn’t been difficult to raise the raise the funds. It seems to be an idea whose time has come. We raised over three and a half million from private and corporate funds.”

And she’s not sweating to do it either. The Library’s most recent filings for have her paid $68,808 for a 30 hour week.

She’s Regula’s wife Mary.

What does the money buy? They have a building and a library, from which they launch educational programs such as “Right To Read “The White House Pets”‘ Grades: K-6

“A First Lady will relate stories about many of the Presidential pets and the families who loved them. The program continues with a First Lady reading a book to your class with the help of puppets and possibly a willing student.”

They sell tchotskies in some way connected with first ladies, with Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan not represented.

You can save big on the Laura Bush China Box – prices slashed to $24.95 from $53.00!

Some of their expenses seem odd. In 2004, the most recently available yearly report, they spent $94,000 on “website update.” Look at the thing.

They paid Carl Sverrazza Anthony a hundred thousand dollars for his services as an author and historian in 2004. Anthony has carved out a specialty writing not terribly deep tomes commemorating first ladies and their offspring. The Library appears to be sponsoring him in writing a biography of McKinley’s wife Ida Saxton, the first volume of which has appeared this year. No information on their web site about who gets the book’s royalties if any.

Jonathan Demme’s “Jimmy Carter Man From Plains” documentary thunders into the nation’s metroplexes October 26th, using Carter’s last [but not current] book tour to remind the nation once again how he came to be so loved and loathed. The trailer seems designed to push all the Right’s buttons at once: “the conscience of the world,” and the “”most admired man in the world”

Back in the 70s Director Demme had other interests, giving the nation perhaps our finest women in prison film with “Caged Heat.”

In anticipation of the coming wave of Carter gush, and as the bombers warm up for runs on Tehran, some voices are pre-butting Carter and readying fallback defenses for the possible Iran debacle to come.

It is, was, and shall always be Carter’s fault.

Apparently Carter stabbed the Shah of Iran in the back, put the Mullahs in power, and/or America felt so shamefaced about having backed the Shah we hid his rug.

Moonbattery warms up:

“Jimmah also saw fit to call Rudy Giuliani “foolish” for leaving open the option of one day defending ourselves from Iran, which has been at war with us since Carter pulled the rug out from under the Shah during his disastrous presidency a generation ago”

The Mayor of Beverly Hills says Carter not only dumped the Shah but brought in the Bearded One:

“he changed the whole dynamic of the Middle East by his backing of Khomeini, and that has had a whole ripple effect in the Middle East, which America is still trying to recover from.”

Sage of Arkansas Paul Greenberg brings the feisty, using the beloved Harry Truman to disparage, um, all of contemporary society?

Let’s travel back to a simpler time with Greenberg:

“About the only feature I remember from my earlier visit to the Truman Library was a huge Persian carpet that had been suspended from the balcony. We’d pass it more than once during our brief tour, and each time Mr. Truman would say, “Yeah, that’s a rug the Shah of Iran gave me.“

“Old Mossadegh found out that the Shah had given me the rug, and he was burned up.”

But then Greenberg knew sin:

“The rug is no longer in sight. Political correctness must have overtaken even this monument to Give ‘Em Hell Harry.”

Whatever is his point here? That America once proudly backed a Ruritanian kleptocracy, then lost interest in the burdens of empire?

A National Defense University paper on how Carter turned his back on the Shah:

“On September 10, President Carter, with the approval of both Vance and Brzezinski, called the
Shah to make public his continuing support and to bolster the shah’s confidence. This action was interpreted by the moderates in Iran as signifying Carter’s approval of the massacre and probably proved
counterproductive to later U.S. efforts to relate to moderate groups in Iran…By late December clear divisions in recommendations emerged between Vance and Brzezinski, with Vance still seeking to find an acceptable coalition that would let the shah remain and with Brzezinski ready to urge the Iranian military, if necessary without the shah, to assume full control and crush the dissidents. The shah, apparently earlier than any U.S. leader, saw the impossibility of saving the monarchy and was unwilling to initiate the bloodshed of the “iron fist” approach. “

Awkward!

The Bush Administration says this one is on the other guy.

“The White House is not currently reviewing any Clinton presidential records because none are ripe for White House review,” a spokesman for Mr. Bush, Trey Bohn, said yesterday.”

Bohn claims it’s Bill Clinton who’s the holdup for releasing his administration’s documents, but is silent on what they’ll do once the requests go to the White House.

Meanwhile they can enjoy the spectacle.

“All current requests for Clinton administration records are pending review by President Clinton’s designated representative. The White House can take no action on any of the requests until the Clinton representative has completed its review of the records relevant to each request and reached a decision on either authorizing their release or withholding them.”

The Clintonians have tried to lay the controversy on the White House.

And as titans clash, the National Archives either can’t or won’t say who has ’em:

“Archives officials have indicated that the presidential review process for all Clinton White House records released so far has averaged eight months. A spokeswoman for the archives, Miriam Kleiman, declined to discuss whether aides to Messrs. Clinton or Bush have been responsible for the delays.“The National Archives is not in a position to determine where the hold-up is,” Ms. Kleiman said. “The only information we can provide is that they are in the pipeline.”