By Jeffrey Page

A wonderful Yiddish expression goes like this: Pish nisht af mein fus, un dertzail mir az si regant. Translation: Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. In other words, spare me the fairy tales and get to real life.

With that in mind, let us turn to a few people who have been relieving themselves on the legs of America lately.

Start with the inimitable Dana Perino, who served as President Bush’s last White House press secretary. Recently, 11 months into President Obama’s term, Perino was on television being interviewed by Sean Hannity.

Hannity lobbed her some softball questions about why the Obama administration refuses to call terrorists “terrorists.” “I don’t say this to be political,” Perino said. “But we should call it what it is.”

Remember those words: We should call it what it is.

Perino then went on to inform viewers about the differences between Bush’s and Obama’s leadership in times of crisis. “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term,” Perino said. We should call that what it is, too. It’s garbage.

Perino recalled the Bush glory days and the inferred illusion that no enemy would dare attack the United States with George W. Bush in command. Just one problem. They did attack and he was in command. America was attacked eight months into Bush’s watch on that day he read “The Pet Goat” to some school kids in Florida and froze when an aide whispered what had happened in New York.

So much for Perino’s not wanting to be political. But did Hannity jump in and correct her misstatement? Not that I saw.

Speaking of Hannity, I recall his report a while back about Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook’s refusal to accept Army orders deploying him to Afghanistan on the nutty ground that Obama is not a native born U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to be president, therefore ineligible to be commander-in-chief, and therefore ineligible to order Cook or any other soldier to do anything.

Hannity noted Cook’s argument with seriousness. “President Obama has not proven that he’s a U.S. citizen.” I wondered who was the last president of the United States who was asked to prove his citizenship.

In the last few days we have been reading of the two White House gatecrashers, Tareq and Michaele Salahi. They say they were invited. The Secret Service says they were not on any list of invitees to the state dinner honoring Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister. Eventually this will be resolved.

For now, however, there’s the question of the genius at the Secret Service who reassured a worried nation that President Obama was never in any danger posed by the Salahis because this fun couple from Virginia had passed through metal detectors on their way in to the festivities.

In fact, an official White House photo shows the president extending his right hand to Michaele Sahali. She is grasping it with both her hands as her happy husband looks on. Had Obama and Sahali been any closer they could have done the foxtrot. Not in any danger?

The fact is that if the Secret Service agents working the metal detectors that night were as inattentive and unfocused as the ones handling the guest list, President Obama was in extremely serious peril.

Let us be specific. The current rate of death threats directed against President Obama is 400 percent higher than it was when he assumed office in January. A bumper sticker available on the internet says “Obama lied, our economy died” (a highly charged accusation and another that gives Bush a pass since the economy tanked before Obama ever took office). And, there are the inevitable anti-Obama materials that are illustrated with apes.

Not in any danger?

I need a shower – and plenty of soap.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

With one glaring exception, I’ve opposed capital punishment ever since I read Clarence Darrow’s autobiography in high school. Darrow, among others, has been credited with the observation: Hate the crime, not the criminal.

What I’ve learned about myself is that my mercy has limits, and that I find that in many cases I hate the crime and the criminal.

I veered from my moral comfort zone in 1995 when I saw a picture of Baylee Almon that came over the AP wire in the newsroom in Hackensack. Remember Baylee? She was the little girl – dead in the Oklahoma City bombing – being cradled in the arms of a burly fireman. She was 1 year old. Her face was pointed away from the camera, giving her a Christ-like appearance – like the vision of Jesus in Salvador Dali’s famous painting of the Crucifixion.

Her head was covered in blood. There was a bad gash on her right arm. It was hard to determine what she was wearing except for her bloodied white socks. Her legs, lifeless, dangled over the fireman’s left arm. I was not supposed to hate the criminal, but I hated him passionately.

Later there was a conviction. Timothy McVeigh would be put to death, and I wrote at the time that while I wouldn’t take joy in doing it, I would press the plunger of the hypodermic to carry out the sentence.

I concede that my reaction to McVeigh’s barbarism was emotional, not based in reason or compassion. Compassion? For McVeigh? Aside from Baylee’s, there were 167 more graves to dig in Oklahoma City. I justified my reaction to McVeigh and his crime by directing every ounce of my compassion to Baylee’s mother, to that fireman, and to Baylee. If not for McVeigh, Baylee Almon would now be 15 years old.

So I flunked McVeigh’s test. Once, I believed that capital punishment is never justified, if for no other reason than its irreversibility. And then, with McVeigh, I concluded that sometimes it is quite justified. Soon, I returned to that comfort zone, hoping that never again would I be so tested.

But now there are new tests, and in at least one instance, I’m failing again.

There is the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who acknowledges that he planned the attacks on America of Sept. 11. The result of his operation: 2,976 people dead, not including the hijackers. He too could face a death sentence if convicted.

So what does a restored death penalty opponent such as myself think?

I recall the catalog of Mohammed’s savagery. The hijackings; the slashings with box cutters; the unimaginable terror aboard the three planes being flown into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and the one plane crashing in that wretched field in Shanksville; people looking out their office windows and seeing a plane coming at them; the crashes; the fires; people jumping out of high windows to escape the flames; the prayers on the run; the rush to get down the stairwells; the buildings coming down; people still in the towers falling to their deaths, the panic in the streets as people ran for their lives.

I think about another baby, this one named Christine Lee Hanson, 2½ years old, who was flying to California with her parents Peter and Susan Hanson aboard United Airlines Flight 175. This was the plane that was flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

Mercy for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should he be convicted and sentenced to death? By the very extent of his cruelty and evil, mercy is not possible. I would press the plunger.

Despite that thought, I will, in this season of giving, write a check to the Innocence Project (100 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10011), whose noble work in freeing wrongly convicted people – in both capital and noncapital cases – is exemplary.

I don’t like the moral position I find myself in. I still oppose the death penalty – usually – but I’m not as comfortably absolutist as in the years before McVeigh.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Much of what passes for political discourse on talk radio makes no sense and often sounds like nothing but expressions of barbarity. But the hosts are not journalists; they’re entertainers. If what a caller says rubs a nerve in the audience, that’s show biz. Truth? Doesn’t matter. Accuracy? Who cares? Good taste? You must be kidding.

Still, every so often, a caller will say something so outrageous, so beyond the pale, that you expect the host to chime in and put a stop to what amounts to full-throated slander against someone the caller and/or host don’t like.

Over the weekend, I caught a few minutes of the Larry Kudlow show on WABC. I always thought of Kudlow as an intelligent guy.  Conservative? You bet. But not a bomb thrower. He seemed like a decent man and so I was astonished at what he allowed a caller to get away with in an attack on President Obama.

It was Greg from New Jersey calling, and Greg was in rant mode.

President Obama is “charting the course to America’s ultimate destruction,” Greg said.

Really? I don’t think Obama is capable of such a thing for any number of reasons, most notably Malia and Sasha. Or was Greg suggesting that Obama would sacrifice his own family so that he could destroy America? Does Greg think Obama is insane? I waited for Kudlow to say something. But nothing.

Greg wasn’t through. The president, in his appearance at Fort Hood after Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 people there, expressed “selfishness, divisiveness and arrogance,” Greg said but did not elaborate.

Greg said President Obama thinks we Americans have too much of the good life – did you ever hear Obama say that? – and what he really wants to do is take away our wealth and spread it around the world.

“He hates this country, Larry,” Greg said, still unchallenged.

“He hates Americans,” Greg said. Not a word to stop the embarrassment Kudlow was bringing on himself and his program by refusing to say something as nonconfrontational as “What on earth do you mean by that?”

“He hates the fact that we live good,” Greg said.

“He’s been brainwashed since early childhood into Marxism and communism,” Greg said, and I pictured Obama’s grandmother reading him a bedtime story from “Das Kapital”: “Time for beddy-bye. Goodnight sweet Barack, goodnight. Give Grandma a kiss and always remember that ‘Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation.’ ”

Greg didn’t say how he knows all this, Kudlow didn’t bother to ask.

“He’s heartless,” Greg said.

Heartless?

Come on, Kudlow, you know this is ridiculous. You know it’s time to put a stop to this. But he didn’t.

“Look at his eyes,” Greg said. “There’s no soul in that man.”

Finally, Kudlow was heard. “You’re getting very personal,” he told Greg.

A sage observation. But he never told Greg that he thought he was nuts. He never questioned Greg about heartlessness and evil eyes.

These talk show characters have the same First Amendment rights we all have. But don’t they also have an intellectual obligation to step in and inform Greg and his kind that they sound crazed and that it’s time to end the monologue?

“I don’t like to be personal,” Kudlow said.

The next caller was Lou who said Obama is taking us down the road to socialism.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

As the Democratic leadership in the House goes about patting itself on the back over the historic passage of national health care legislation, it should be noted that the vote was no mandate. In fact, for a party that won 55 percent of all votes for House members in last year’s election, it was pathetic.

This was the bill put forth by House Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A few 2008 election statistics are necessary here. Pelosi was reelected with 72 percent of the vote last year. In the mid-Hudson Valley, John Hall was sent back to the House with 59 percent and Maurice Hinchey won reelection with 66 percent of the vote.

The health measure, meanwhile, squeaked by over the weekend with a scant 50.7 percent of votes cast in the House.  Thirty-nine Democrats voted against it; what do they know that Pelosi does not?

This vote could make matters difficult for the party and for President Obama when voters go to the polls one year from now because, if nothing else, it suggests that the Democrats – wildly triumphant last year – are not invincible.

Obama and Pelosi handled things badly. During the summer just past, Democrats made light of the crowds attending tea parties and town hall meetings against health care reform. It makes no difference that some of the protesters – the civil ones as well as the yahoos shaking their fists and calling their congressional representatives liars to their faces – might have been ill-informed. Who will soon forget the guy who told his congressman that he didn’t want the federal government intruding on his Medicare coverage?

Obnoxious or polite, right or wrong, the important thing is that the protesters were out there when they could have been enjoying a summer evening. They turned out again last week when about 10,000 people showed up for an anti-health bill rally on the Capitol steps. This with just two days notice.

Obama seemed to be on a nice long vacation over the summer. As far as medical care legislation was concerned, he let his friends in the House take the heat. His decision to stay out of the fray was as badly conceived as John Kerry’s allowing six precious weeks to pass during the summer of 2004 before responding to the Swift Boaters and their lies about his military service in Vietnam.

In another example of bizarre leadership, Pelosi, in deciding to hold the House vote late Saturday night, was guilty of Old-Think. It used to be that if a politician scheduled an unpopular announcement for anytime between 5 p.m. Friday and 5 p.m. Sunday, no one would know about it. But in the age of the Internet and 24-hour cable news, everybody knows everything all the time, or at least has a headline in mind. For politicians, there’s no hiding.

The next time Pelosi put her foot in her mouth was soon after health care passed – by a not especially uplifting vote of 220 to 215 – when she was asked about the nature of bi-partisanship.

“That vote was bipartisan,” she said, referring to the fact that 219 Democrats were joined by one Republican, Anh Cao, a first-term backbencher from New Orleans who is likely in for a spirited primary next year.

Actually it’s the Republicans who can claim the bipartisanship banner. They got 39 Democrats to switch sides and join them in voting No.

Next year, the 258 Democratic members of the House will have to answer for Pelosi’s midnight vote and delusional definition of bipartisanship.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

We have a president who’s not afraid to let the American people know the true meaning of battlefield casualties. They’re not just a number listed in six-point type in the newspaper. They’re not the nameless people that some talk show hosts posthumously thank for making the ultimate sacrifice – praise from armchair warriors who managed to never spend a day in uniform and who know nothing about sacrifice.

Earlier this year, Barack Obama lifted the ban on news organizations photographing the flag draped coffins being carried off the planes at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. That was the image George W. Bush hid from the American people. Bush may have misunderstood a lot, but was sure of one thing: Repeated pictures of soldiers being brought home in coffins would raise questions that, despite the idiotic certitude of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, Bush could not answer.

How long?

How many more?

For what?

Now,  Obama’s military commanders want up to 80,000 more troops to continue the war in Afghanistan and because he promised a decision soon, he’ll probably have to answer those questions.  His deliberation, of course, is what the appalling Dick Cheney had in mind when he accused Obama of  “dithering.” How much misery might have been saved had George W. Bush given more serious thought to war and death instead of just plunging ahead like an elephant in heat? Because here we are, eight years later, still trying to crush the elusive Taliban.

(We must never forget that the invariably wrong Cheney bleated to America as the Iraq war started, “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” That he said of the Iraqi foe in 2005, “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” That in 2005 he said America was “firmly committed” to the Afghan democracy.)

Democracy? Our men and women are still being killed in Afghanistan. And to what end? For President Hamid Karzai’s challenger to drop out this week because no one can be sure that Karzai’s government would have allowed a free, fair election?

Last week, President Obama did what Bush chose never to do. He traveled to Dover in the middle of the night, stood at attention with military officers, and saluted the latest return of coffins.

It took only a day for the Nut Right to have at him. Rush Limbaugh dismissed Obama’s salute as a photo-op, forgetting that the president is the commander-in-chief of the military. Photo-op? Could be. But I checked: If Limbaugh ever dismissed as a photo-op Bush’s landing on the aircraft carrier in his soldier outfit six years ago to say combat operations in Iraq were over, I missed it.

Photo-op? I’m proud of this president for making that short flight to Dover.

There’s a but of course.

But if he decides to continue the fight in Afghanistan, Obama must answer the questions that Bush never would. How much longer will America remain in Afghanistan? Why must there be more coffins at Dover if Karzai believes democracy begins and ends with himself? And how will America know when it has won or when it has lost?

Obama can’t be vague. To dance around these questions would invite utter contempt from the very people who support and admire him.
 
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

First, a note of thanks to the many Zest readers who took a few minutes to respond to my questions about how the site is doing. Your notes were thoughtful, detailed, helpful and, most of all, encouraging. You say we’re doing a good job and that, for some of you, we’ve become essential reading. Thanks for that.

                                                 * * *

Someday there will be a Hall of Fame of Asinine Public Comments and the People Who Utter Them. I hope never to be enshrined myself, preferring to be chairman of the admissions committee.

Here are some recent nominees for glory in the hall.

–It’s 2009, right? New millennium, new century, right? Civil War ended 144 years ago. Voting Rights Act in place since the Sixties, Civil Rights Act about as old. And oh yes, there’s a black fellow sitting in the Oval Office.

Well, it’s not 2009 in Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana where the witless Keith Bardwell presides as justice of the peace. Bardwell is the judge who recently refused to issue a marriage license to Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, one of whom is black, one of whom is white.

His denial was outrageously un-American enough. Worse was his bizarre reasoning. “I’m not a racist,” Bardwell said. Then, focusing on the children of mixed race couples, Bardwell declared: “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.” How do they suffer? He didn’t say. Put them through what? He didn’t say.

What he said was that he tries to treat everyone equally. And oh yeah, some of his best friends are black.

Humphrey and McKay said they intend to ask the Justice Department to investigate Bardwell’s brand of jurisprudence.

–In Grahamsville, Donald Daggett walked into the Tri-Valley high school packing a .38. This is against the law.

During a talk with the principal, Daggett mentioned that he was armed. The principal asked for the weapon and Daggett handed it over.

What might have happened had a kid seen the butt end of the gun, recalled a place called Columbine, and gone tearing down the corridors to warn classmates and staff that there was a guy with a gun in the school?

“It was a stupid mistake,” The Times Herald-Record quoted Daggett. “I never even thought about it.”

The school thought about it and called the cops. Daggett was arrested. Maybe he’ll think about it next time.

–Roman Polanski, 76, is still in a Swiss jail with U.S. officials seeking his extradition to face charges of having sex with a girl in 1977, when Polanski was 43 and the girl was 13.

A gaggle of Hollywood swells have flocked to Polanski’s defense. Oh come on, they say. It was three decades ago, they say. The girl was sexually experienced, they say. Polanski had a horrific childhood when the Nazis overran Europe, they say. He’s a great director, they say. He won an Oscar, they say. He’s an artist, they say.

Among the newest reasons for going easy on Roman Polanski is money.

His lawyers have appealed to the Swiss courts to ask that Polanski be freed on bail because he has several months more work to do on his latest movie. And if he doesn’‘t get this work done, he could go bankrupt.

Not only that, the attorneys sniff, if Polanski can’t finish the movie, his backers stand to lose $40 million. In keeping him behind bars, it’s likely the Swiss judges recall that Polanski was freed on bail in the United States in 1977 – after pleading guilty – and promptly fled to France, where he has been living ever since.

The legal team’s equating child rape and movie profits is obscene. If you buy the argument that Roman Polanski needs to be free so he can avoid bankruptcy, you might approve the same request from Bernie Madoff. And you wouldn’t do that, right?

Care to join me on the Hall of Fame’s admissions committee? Just drop me a line with the dumbest public comments you’ve come across.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Hello, anybody there?

I’m just checking to see if anyone’s reading Zest of Orange. Please note that this is not an official posting by Zest of Orange, but just by me.

Though I must tell you that some others in this little cabal are wondering the same thing: Are you there? Do you find us informative? Entertaining? Do you agree with what you see in Zest? Or do you think we’re totally off the mark? Any suggestions?

I did a quick check over the weekend at the Zest of Orange site and found that the Zest writers, photographer and artists have posted 125 columns, photographs and paintings since late May, when the site got under way. Since then, we’re received 120 comments. Not much of a dialogue – about one reader-comment per posting.

Common sense tells me that if readers have nothing to say about what they read, they must be bored. And God protect readers from being bored. The idea of Zest of Orange is to be sharp, witty, provocative and entertaining. I would hope we’re doing a pretty good job.

So, are you reading us? What do you think?

Let us know.

Thanks.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

There’s the kind of death where they put you in the ground. Another kind is where you survive unspeakable injuries that never heal.

Similarly there are judges who treat drunken drivers, and the misery they inflict, almost as a joke when they pass sentence, and those who understand that a drunk behind the wheel places everyone in danger and sentence accordingly.

Which brings us to Willie A. Thompson. In 1989, the third time Thompson drove drunk – at least the third time anyone knows about – he killed a cop with his car. He spent 11 years in prison for that. Last winter, in his eighth drunken driving arrest, Thompson slammed into trees and a fire hydrant, and for that, he’s been sent to prison for 15 years to life after telling the judge about his own troubles. “I’m very sick,” he was quoted by The Times Herald-Record. “I’m very sorry that things have happened the way they did.”

Thompson is 72 and indeed a sick man. It’s possible he’ll die in prison. He got his 15-to-life when he appeared before Orange County Court Judge Robert Freehill who concluded that the public needs protection from the likes of Thompson. Freehill deserves plaudits for sending him away.

Before anybody chirps, “But Thompson didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” allow me to introduce Barbara Rokas, whose dreadful injuries and terrible suffering demonstrate how drunken driving sometimes is not taken seriously.

In June 1990, Barbara Rokas was a first-grade teacher in Kearny, N.J. She estimated that in her 28-year career, she had taught 1,000 children how to read and do arithmetic. She loved her job and was good at it. She was on her way to confer with a colleague when she drove into the intersection of Stuyvesant Avenue and Chestnut Street. She stopped for the stop sign, then proceeded.

A teenager – 19 years old; too young to drink in New Jersey – came flying down Chestnut Street. He didn’t bother with such niceties as stop signs or brake pedals and smashed into Rokas’s car. His blood alcohol concentration was 0.19, almost twice the legal limit in 1990.

There was so much of Barbara Rokas’s blood on the pavement that an ambulance driver covered her face with a sheet. Then someone noticed that her hand moved. She was alive. And this is a catalogue of what that drunken driver did to her.

Because of him she needed 500 stitches to close her head wounds and many more to close other parts of her cut-up body.

He caused her to have brain damage.

He put her in a coma for 22 days.

He fractured her thighbone and broke her collarbone.

He paralyzed her entire right side due to nerve damage he inflicted through the fracture of her collarbone.

He left her deaf in one ear.

He left her with double vision.

He left her with severe memory loss.

He left her unable to get around without a wheelchair.

He left her with slurred speech.

Her injuries were such that when her husband went to see her for the first time in her hospital bed in Newark, her doctor issued a warning. This is what Bob Rokas said when I wrote about Barbara for The Record of Hackensack: “[The doctor] told me: ‘When you go in there, she’s going to look like she’s dead, but she’s not dead.’ He had his hands on my arms, sort of holding me up against the wall to make sure I understood what he was saying. I opened the door and went in. She was bald and her head was bandaged. I never saw anyone that color before. She was sort of yellow or orange. My wife.”

In fact, when her lawyers brought an action against the taverns that had served the 19-year old, they filled five pages with her injuries. This is what her lawyers wrote, “[She] has also suffered, and will continue to suffer, loss of the pleasures and pursuits of life and a diminution and impairment of her capacity to enjoy life.” Next time someone says, “But he didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” think of Barbara Rokas who remains one of the more courageous people you’re likely to meet.

She would need aides to help her live her life. It would take her two hours to get dressed in the morning and two hours to get undressed to go to bed. She required help to take a bath, comb her hair, brush her teeth, eat a meal.

Much, much later, if she and her husband wished to have dinner in a restaurant, people would stare at her and the very slow way she ate her meal. They would watch as one of her arms involuntarily slid along the table and pushed her plate away. 

“I have aides around the clock, seven days a week,” she told me in 2001. “My life is basically a zero.”

When the man who reduced her life to a zero appeared for sentencing, the judge likely knew that he didn’t mean to hurt her.

And so, for what he did to Barbara Rokas, the man would have to serve two months of weekend home confinement, the judge said.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

As Roman Polanski sits in a Swiss jail, fighting extradition to the United States to face a judge on his admitted rape of a young teenager, Whoopi Goldberg weighs in with one of the more bizarre quotes of the new century.

“It wasn’t rape-rape,” she said, as if to suggest that somehow it wasn’t really rape despite Polanski’s having pleaded guilty to it. Goldberg can know nothing about the crimes of Roman Polanski.

In this case, it was the 43-year old Polanski having his way with a 13-year old girl in 1977. Not rape? It defined rape. When it occurred, it carried an odd sentencing range: six months to 50 years. The story is that Polanski, in a deal, pleaded guilty to rape, had other serious charges dropped, and expected a minimum sentence. So Whoopi Goldberg notwithstanding, it was rape to Polanski, rape to the girl, rape to the judge, rape to the district attorney, and rape to Polanski’s defense team.

But when Polanski was seized with fear that the judge might slap him with major prison time, he fled to Europe, where he has resided ever since.

Polanski’s friends yammer about the supposed injustice of jailing him for something that happened so many years ago, and ask why the United States never went after him before. It doesn’t really matter because no matter how they slice it, the “something” was a rape committed against a kid.

And Goldberg neglected to discuss other facts of the case against Polanski, who was 31 years old when his victim was born. 

–The girl, Samantha Geimer, told the grand jury 32 years ago that Polanski drove her to the home of Jack Nicholson – Nicholson was not home – to shoot fashion photos of her. To get things started, Polanski gave her a Quaalude tablet and champagne and then suggested she take off her clothes and take a dip in the whirlpool bath. Then he took off his clothes and joined her in the water. They were alone, this middle-aged man and girl.

–CBS reported the following from the grand jury report: “The victim testified that after she left the whirlpool bath, Polanski told her to go to a nearby bedroom and lie down. Answer: I was going, ‘No, I think I better go home’ because I was afraid. So I just went and I sat down on the couch. Question: What were you afraid of? Answer: Him.”

–“He reached over and kissed me,” she said. “And I was telling him, ‘No,’ you know, ‘Keep away.’”

–He asked the girl if she were on any form of birth control. When she said she was not, he asked if she preferred anal intercourse. She said she did not. Then he had oral sex with her. When he was through, he had vaginal intercourse with her.

–“I was ready to cry,” she said. “I was kind of – I was going, ‘No. Come on. Stop it.’ But I was afraid.”

–Later, Polanski drove her home and advised her not to tell her mother or boyfriend about what he had done. She testified, “He said, ‘You know, when I first met you I promised myself I wouldn’t do anything like this with you.’”

–Polanski was indicted for furnishing a controlled substance to a minor, performing a lewd or lascivious act on a child under 14, rape by use of drugs, oral copulation, sodomy, and unlawful sexual intercourse with a female under the age of 18. All but the last were dropped in the plea deal.

Yes, Polanski and his family beat it out of Europe just before the Nazis inflicted themselves on his native Poland. Yes, he’s a renowned film maker. Yes, he suffered an unspeakable horror when Charles Manson’s gang stabbed his pregnant wife Sharon Tate to death in 1969.

And yes, Polanski deserves to do serious prison time for inflicting himself on a young girl. If what he did was not rape, there is no such crime. But you and I know there is.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

No one except political candidates takes endorsements seriously anymore. Are you going to be swayed because Bill Clinton flies into town to say nice things about some Democrat or because George W. Bush arrives on behalf of the Republican? Maybe years ago, but nowadays? I don’t think so.

Still, politicians seek out celebrities to bolster their campaigns, but sometimes fail to understand that certain endorsements are liabilities. The perfect example of this occurred last year when Barack Obama won the ringing endorsement of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Why anyone in his right mind would voluntarily acknowledge the backing of a minister whose most notable quote was “God damn America” is beyond comprehension.

Various Obama detractors – and supporters – raised a huge stink. It took Obama a little time but he finally broke with Wright and found a new church.

And so, we come to a little item in last week’s edition of The Warwick Advertiser about a campaign appearance in Warwick by Assemblyman Greg Ball. Ball is seeking the Republican nomination to oppose Rep. John Hall, D-19 in 2010.

And in the audience to lend support were none other than Rep. Peter King, the Long Island Republican who is the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Bernard Kerik.

That Bernard Kerik?

The same. Kerik is the former New York City police commissioner who President Bush nominated in 2004 to be his Secretary of Homeland Security. One week later Kerik, citing a potential problem regarding the immigration status of a woman who had worked in his home, withdrew himself from consideration. Later he would be indicted for failing to mention the nanny matter to White House officials conducting the vetting process on his nomination.

And, oh yeah, there was an allegation about a little matter of Kerik’s receiving $255,000 worth of renovations to his apartment from a contractor wishing to do business with the city. Apparently he forgot to mention that, too.  

Kerik would have more substantial problems. Later, he was charged with conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and for lying to the Internal Revenue Service by forgetting to report the $255,000 as income.

In 2006, he pleaded guilty to illegally accepting that remodeling of his apartment from a contractor which, the city believed, had links with organized crime.

His withdrawal from consideration as Homeland Security Secretary was a great embarrassment to the Bush Administration, courtesy of Kerik himself, who was subsequently indicted for lying to White House investigators, and courtesy also of Rudolph Giuliani, who had pressed Bush to appoint Kerik to Homeland Security, and was Kerik’s biggest cheerleader.

There have been other bumps in Kerik’s road. Last winter, for example, The New York Times reported he had been indicted for allegedly failing to report $500,000 in income in 1999.

Something to bear in mind: As obnoxious as Wright’s comments were, he wasn’t indicted for anything and hasn’t pleaded guilty to anything.

What was Ball thinking when he accepted Kerik’s support? That the voters won’t notice the company he keeps?

Message to Greg Ball: They’re smarter than you think.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.