May 25, 1999 | "Every time I met [Ehud] Barak during the campaign, I couldn't take my eyes off his hands, thinking how many people he shot to death. This is a guy who went into Beirut dressed as a woman, knocked the door down and killed four terrorists. Then he gunned down two Jeeps full of Palestinian soldiers, got back on the mother ship and went to Israel. Goddamn! For someone who looks like my daughter's uncle, he's one tough mother."

-- Political spinmeister James Carville, meditating on the Israeli macho man whose victory he masterminded, in London's Daily Telegraph. (I wonder what he thought when he looked at Clinton's hands.)

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The Trench Coat Mafia's newest, chirpiest member

Has Katie Couric joined the Trench Coat Mafia? Have a bunch of "Today" show viewers completely lost their early-morning minds?

Amy Reiter Amy Reiter's column appears daily on the People site, Monday through Friday. + Biography + Archives Got a hot tip? Tell Amy!

Last week, the show was swamped with calls from conspiracy-minded viewers demanding to know what the morning show's chipper anchor meant by sporting what looked like a black trench coat as she interviewed students at woebegone Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., reports the Boston Globe. A spokesperson for the show denied that Katie's duds were of the deadly black variety, saying that while her coat may indeed have looked black on TV, it was really a raincoat of a harmless dark-blue hue.

Truly observant "Today" viewers will have noted, however, that if you play that segment backwards, you can distinctly make out the words "Paul is dead."

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Will the real best gal of the mentally ill please stand up?

No sooner has would-be first lady Tipper Gore made her play to become America's depression-survivor poster girl than former first lady Rosalynn Carter comes along to beat her at her own mental-illness advocacy game.

The Hartford Courant reports that Carter has harsh words for the heartless folks at Nestlé, who are producing taffy bars called "Psycho Sam" and "Loony Larry."

"Nestlé says those names are just jokes, they don't hurt -- but they do hurt," Carter, a devoted mental-health advocate whose family has long been into producing nuts, remarked at a fund-raising luncheon for a mental health counseling service in Connecticut. "They hurt people who are mentally ill, and they hurt their families.

Nestlé spokeswoman Tricia Bowles told the paper her company meant no "disrespect or ill intent" in the names, which are "created out of humor" and relate to "characters on the packaging with funny faces."

Crazy-cool candy concept, Tricia, and may I suggest also a "Trench Coat Mafia" bar with Katie Couric's funny face on the wrapper?

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Miracles do happen -- and maybe now she'll even get "All My Children's" makeup artists to stop doing that weird thing with her lipstick

"I truly never believed that this would happen ... I'm going to go back to that studio Monday and I'm going to play Erica Kane for all it is worth."

-- Soap star Susan Lucci, accepting her first Daytime Emmy for outstanding lead actress after a notorious decades-long losing streak

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Satirical site gets money for nothing, clicks for free

Nothing Personal reported last week that the young buck in the George W. Bush campaign who was to secure the rights to Internet domain names didn't do a very thorough job. The ambitious fellow did succeed in scoring URLs like bushsucks.com and bushblows.com, but he neglected to snatch up GWBush.com, GWBush.org and GBush.org. And now he's not the only one in big trouble.

The Bush campaign is seriously ticked at Zack Exley, a Massachusetts computer consultant who has called himself "a Christian who loathes hypocrisy." Exley and a California anti-establishment Web design company, RTMark, have launched a Web site that can be reached via the aforementioned addresses, so similar not only in locale but also in look and feel to Bush's official site at GeorgeWBush.com that it has logged in thousands of visitors who may not grasp right away that they've come to the site of a political satirist, not a political candidate.

Not-so-subtle differences in the sites, however, include phony (and moderately funny) news releases shrugging at drugs and targeting "pornographic" advertising, as well as a satirical campaign manifesto called Amnesty 2000, which describes a plan to pardon people serving time for cocaine possession.

But the Bush camp, which denies that the Texas governor is a former drug user, is not amused by statements it considers "libelous" and "untrue." It has issued a cease-and-desist letter claiming copyright infringement and sicced the Federal Election Commission on the site.

"Humor is fine, but this isn't humor. It's a political campaign against George W. Bush," a Bush campaign spokesman recently told Wired.

The funny part is, Exley had originally planned to sell the site to Bush's campaign for $350,000, but the Bush camp balked. And now, he says, he's no longer interested in selling because he's having "too much fun" -- and eyeing the money to be made from ad revenue.

Bet Al Gore is thanking himself for inventing the Internet right about now.
salon.com | May 25, 1999

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