CLINTON CASTRATED

Mark Steyn says the President has

undergone an operation rendering him no longer a danger to society

New Hampshire EVERY DOG has his day. And for Buddy the First Pooch it's Doris. Last week, Doris Day wrote to President Clinton demanding that he be neutered — the dog, that is. Of all the potential perils the modern world has to offer, the possibility that Doris Day will publicly call for your castration must rank as pretty remote. Nonetheless, Buddy's perky blonde nemesis is insistent. If the President's chocolate labrador were to be left intact, she says, he would be liable to prostate problems which might cause embarrassing urinary accidents on grand White House occasions.

Buddy, like the President and yours truly and most other old hounds, is willing to take the risk: que sera, sera, as Doris sang in less proscriptive days. My first thought was that Miss Day was, as the psychologists say, 'projecting': after all, she was the one prone to embarrassing urinary accidents on grand occasions. She once told me that at her very first public performance, in kindergarten in Cincinnati 70 years ago, she wet her pants while waiting in the wings. 'When I went on,' she said, 'you could see it. The red satin had turned black.' She began her recitation:

I'se going' down to the Cushville hop And there ain't no niggle goin' to make me stop!

At which point, she burst into tears and ran off-stage — the start of a life-long aversion to public appearances. Well, that's all water under the bridge to Buddy. But what are we to make of his own public appearance last weekend? On one half of the split TV screen, Paula Jones's defence team was releasing 700 pages of testimony portraying the Presi- dent as a crazed sex fiend; on the other, his damage controllers were doing their best to show him as a loving family man Mr and Mrs Clinton and Buddy were seen strolling arm-in-arm-in-paw towards the presidential helicopter for a weekend at Camp David.

As always these days, Mr Clinton couldn't keep his hands off the First Lady: it's well known that, when the cameras stop rolling, he removes his palm from the small of her back and steers well clear of the tactile stuff until the next photo-op. But poor old Buddy can't quite grasp these ground rules. The First Dog bound- ed free of his pat-happy master, scam- pered towards the helicopter and then paused halfway to urinate on the lawn: the most shameless White House leak of the month. Either the doomed Buddy has decided he might as well go out with a splash or he's showing symptoms of the same aversion to public appearances as Miss Day.

My money's on the latter. The poor mutt is clearly labouring under a great deal of strain. Buddy really is this man's best friend — the last remaining FOB (Friend of Bill), the only one who can't be subpoenaed. And, like so many others, he's now being called on to take the bullet or, in this case, the knife — for his pal. Bill Clinton wasn't forced from office, but Web Hubbell, his Assistant Attorney-General, was; Bill Clinton didn't go to jail, but James McDougal, his Whitewater partner, did; Bill Clinton won't be castrated, but Buddy's distinguishing characteristics are headed for the same shredder as Hillary's law firm billing records.

`I think the Clintons are really sort of like tornadoes moving through people's lives,' said Jim McDougal last year. 'I'm just one of the people left in the wake of their passing by. But I have no whining or complaining to do, because I have lots of company.' He died a week ago, in prison, aged 56, apparently of natural causes though, given that he was in the midst of singing to Ken Starr, we in the Vast Right- Wing Conspiracy don't like to rule any- thing out. FOB RIP.

Today the Friends of Bill have a recruit- ment problem. The President is said to feel isolated: he likes to talk, but nobody's dropping by for a chat. Vernon Jordan, the celebrated Washington fixer (that's some- one who finds jobs for Monica Lewinsky, not a guy who neuters dogs), is distancing himself: he wants to play golf with the next president, too. White House aides don't want to get too close, not because he'll grope you — that's the least of their wor- ries — but because you'll wind up either drowning in legal bills or taking the fall, like his secretary Betty Currie, who, according to his deposition, was the real reason for Monica's Oval Office visits. Ah, yes. It makes sense that this quiet, digni- fied, middle-aged woman would become bosom buddies with a shopaholic Valley girl. As Monica would say, like, duh.

If Buddy goes into a sulk after the oper- ation and the President needs a new White House pet, he might try Monica's lawyer William Ginsburg, who seems to be angling for the job anyway. We all liked Ginsburg when he first appeared on the scene a couple of months back: with his trim grey beard and soft-spoken manner, he looked like Raymond Burr in his last years as Perry Mason — and what better attorney could a gal in trouble ask for?

Sadly, he's not Perry Mason, but only Monica's dad's medical malpractice lawyer from California, whom the Klieg lights of celebrity seem to have fried into a world- class goofball. At first it was just minor breaches of attorney-client privilege, the humdrum incompetences of a man who, as OJ lawyer Alan Dershowitz noted, was way out of his league. But soon the drop-of-a- hat soundbites were flying off the graph: boasting of his long relationship with his client, he declared, 'I kissed that girl's inner thighs when she was six days old.' It was a startling image, given that his client is chiefly famous for her own proximity to another set of inner thighs, and it momen- tarily conjured up a kind of hunched, oscu- lar variation on the reflected intimacy of 'I Danced With A Man Who Danced With A Girl Who Danced With The Prince Of Wales'.

That's the odd thing. Everyone from Billy Graham down has remarked on how Mr Clinton is just one awesome babe mag- net. But he seems able to pull the boys, too. Vying with Ginsburg for the chance to be a metaphorical Monica to the President is, of all people, the guy who claims to have started the Vast Right-Wing Conspir- acy. David Brock is a former colleague of mine from The American Spectator (no relation), who published in 1993 a long account of Bill Clinton's sexual adventur- ing, including a reference to a woman called 'Paula'. That started the long, long trail a-winding all the way down to last Sunday's CBS interview with Kathleen Willey. Brock has now disowned the story and issued, in Esquire, a bizarre, self-flag- ellating apologia to the President for caus- ing his present woes. On ABC's Good Morning, America, the puzzled host demanded to know which details of the story were incorrect. Brock declined to say, but insisted he could no longer 'stand by the story'. He feels bad not because he got the story wrong, but because he got the story, period. He realises now that the Arkansas state troopers who were his sources were 'greedy and had slimy motives'. In journalism, that's an occupa- tional hazard: pretty well everyone's greedy and slimy — starting with fellow journalists, editors, proprietors, public relations flacks, lobbyists, Congressional aides . . . But Brock insists he can no longer live with his old right-wing self.

Happily, he can still live with his old right-wing money. Those troopers may have been greedy and slimy, but a fat lot of good it did them: today, they're just broke and slimy. Whereas the non-greedy, non-slimy Brock wound up getting half a million bucks for just five articles for The American Spectator and acquiring homes in Georgetown, New York's West Village and Delaware — all thanks to Trooper- gate. Presumably, he'll now be donating these ill-gotten gains to the Clintons' legal defence fund.

Back then, he wanted to hurt the Presi- dent; now he wants to help the President. To that end, he has been photographed by Esquire tied to a tree, with his clothes shredded, one nipple exposed and ankle- deep in . . well, I was going to say fag- gots, but, given that the homosexual Brock is now accusing his former right-wing pals of homophobia, let's just call it firewood.

At any rate, the President has said he `accepts' Brock's apology. And why wouldn't he? Brock's already been some help to him. In an earlier article, the ruth- less right-wing hatchet man described Anita Hill as 'a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty'. He now claims this line — the only memorable one in the piece — was inserted by an editor, but, whatever its provenance, it's been eagerly taken up as a standard defence by the White House `You haven't sexually harassed me, do you find me unattractive?' attack dogs. On Tuesday it was trotted out yet again, this time to trash Kathleen Wil- ley: poor woman, off her trolley, complete- ly besotted with him.

Will it work this time? Paula was too twangy, Monica too ditsy, Gennifer too cocktail-loungey, but in the fragile beauty and smoky voice of Mrs Willey the Presi- dent has at last come up with a woman we in the commentating classes wouldn't mind hitting on. But perhaps it no longer mat- ters. After all, David Brock claims it's all his fault. He's to blame for the fresh, ripe lips lurking under the Oval Office desk: mea gulps. Bill Clinton and his newest best friend at least have their egotism in com- mon.

From Monica to Buddy to David, it seems there'll always be someone willing to slobber all over the President. And, if it's any consolation to Buddy, he's not the first person in Bill Clinton's labyrinthine net- work of acquaintances to wind up neutered. Back in Arkansas, in 1985, Wayne Dumond was charged with raping a distant Clinton cousin. Before the trial, however, a masked gang burst into Dumond's house and castrated him. No- one was arrested for his assault, but shortly afterwards the local sheriff, Coolidge Con- lee, began displaying Dumond's pickled testicles on his desk as an attractive decora- tive paperweight. Sheriff Conlee was even- tually prevailed upon to move them, and has since died in jail while serving time for corruption. In 1992 Clinton's successor as governor, Jim Guy Tucker, shortened Dumond's prison sentence after doubts arose about his guilt. Since then, Governor Tucker has also been sentenced to jail, for his part in Whitewater. Dumond, for his part, has now sued his attorney over the $110,000 he won from Sheriff Conlee for displaying his genitalia, claiming the lawyer misappropriated $1,600 of what he calls his `testicle money' to donate to Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.

It's somehow fitting that Mr Clinton should be president because of someone else's balls. Unfortunately, his presidency is now neutered because he has none of his own: unlike Governor Tucker, Sheriff Con- lee and the hapless Mr Dumond, he can stay out of jail, but, until he has the cojones to come clean to the American people, he'll preside over a castrated administra- tion, unable to bomb Iraq, unable to rail- road his crazy federal child-care scheme through Congress, unable to do anything but play lonely golf rounds at Camp David. Wherever Mr Dumond's pickled testicles are now, they should be put in the Smithso- nian, as a perfect symbol of the Clinton Presidency.

Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now by Mark Steyn can be ordered for £20 post free from The Spectator Bookshop, 24 Seward Street, London, EC1V 3GB or call 0541 557 288, fax 0541 557 225. Please quote ref. SP030 when ordering.