To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People Sept. 1, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/col/reit/1999/09/01/npwed Dr. Laura: 20th century fraud? Greatest phonies of last hundred years; Newt no candidate for sainthood; Lucianne Goldberg likens Starr to a lounging lizard. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Amy Reiter Will Elvis overtake Yizhak Rabin to become Time magazine's Person of the Century? (It's possible; the King's a mere hip swivel away from the top-ranked peace-brokering leader in the online poll.) Will Adolf Hitler hold at No. 4? (His Evilness surged to No. 1 after an endorsement from U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, but was quickly crushed by the Rabin contingent.) Does Franklin Delano Roosevelt, currently lounging at No. 20, have the whole thing all wrapped up anyway? (Matt Drudge and the Wall Street Journal say yes; Time says no.) And what on Earth was obscure Irish soccer player Ronnie O'Brien doing atop the list last week? (Wacky computer glitch.) The buzz surrounding the selection of Time's Person of the Century honors has escalated from low hum to the noise level of, say, an AOL server room, but it's Time.com's newest, largely undiscovered poll, Phonies and Frauds of the 20th Century -- with its glinty hint of Schadenfreude -- that's caught Nothing Personal's attention. Let others debate the relative merits of Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi. We'd rather cast our vote for whether Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Jerry Springer, Don King, Donald Trump or Marion S. Barry is the biggest charlatan. (Poor Geraldo "the safe was empty" Rivera has nearly 21 percent of the vote thus far, with Linda "the heart was empty" Tripp just behind with about 15 percent.) But hey, even the Phony vote touched off a little controversy after its launch last Tuesday. Seems some folks weren't too tickled to see names like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton up there -- even though all of the names posted for voting were culled from a month-long nomination process on the Time.com site. The protest e-mails came flooding in and Time.com pruned out the names of religious leaders -- "no matter how well justified in some cases by their behavior," notes the Web site -- just two days later. "It was an interesting place where the irreverent culture of the Web clashed with the need not to step on people's faiths," Time Inc. New Media's executive editor, Dick Duncan, explained to Nothing Personal in a voice so kind and gentle you'd never guess he was behind such a giddily wicked poll. "I thought, well, in the end this is bad taste because you end up floating on other people's beliefs. And that's not a good idea. It's just not appropriate." But religious leaders weren't the only scammerific contenders deemed too hot to handle by Time.com's staff. "All presidents, prime ministers and top politicians, and their families and staffs, were disqualified on grounds that they are generally recognized as professionals in this field, and our contest is for amateurs and those who pretend to be something else," notes the site. "Also, we did not want this poll to degenerate into an expression of dreary partisan prejudices." So, although there were "a whole lot of Ronald Reagans and a whole lot of Bill Clintons" who came through the nomination process, you can't vote for them or Richard Nixon -- or their various hangers on. That's right, no George Stephanopoulos, no Haldeman and Ehrlichman -- although Ollie North, Henry Kissinger and J. Edgar Hoover have managed to skirt the censors (in Hoover's case, I suppose, quite literally). Perhaps they were deemed strictly amateurs after all? - - - - - - - - - - - - The Bells of Saint Gingrich "In the first place, nobody is a saint. I mean, if you believe in God, by definition you believe nobody is a saint. So the most religious of people should have the deepest understanding that you're not going to elect saints, you're going to elect a sinner, and hopefully, you elect a sinner who prays, a sinner who is self-aware, a sinner who is responsible." -- Serial adulterous wife-ditcher Newt Gingrich on sin, politics and responsibility, in a three-part interview taped the day after he dumped victim ... uh, I mean, wife No. 2, Marianne, and airing this week on C-Span. - - - - - - - - - - - - Goldberg did it! Speaking of charlatans ... If pressed to vote in an online poll for the Person I'd Least Like to Meet at a Party This Century (is anyone over at Time.com biting?), I believe I just might cast my vote for Lucianne Goldberg. Long-time NP readers may recall that I did once spy gabby Goldberg gobbling down the finger food at a fabulous D.C. fete, but I didn't actually meet the woman I like to think of as the Kato Kaelin of the Lewinsky-Tripp affair. Ken Starr, it would seem, can't say the same. (Now him I wouldn't mind meeting at a party. Loosen the legal fellow's tongue with a couple o' cosmos and I'm betting he could keep you in salacious stories for days!) Goldberg recently told George magazine that when she was introduced to Starr at a party not long ago, the independent council greeted her with a "blank stare, like an iguana on a log in sunlight." So Goldberg handed over a little more evidence. "I said, 'I'm Linda Tripp's friend,' like I was speaking to a retarded person. I still don't think he knew who I was." Or maybe he did. - - - - - - - - - - - - No animals were harmed in the writing of this column ... They say that every dog has its day, but apparently Mickey Rourke's dog's day just wasn't coming soon enough for his famous film-star owner. According to the BBC, the "9 1/2 Weeks" star scampered off the set of his latest film, "Luck of the Draw," after the first day of filming because the producers wouldn't let his pet Chihuahua, Bo Jack, appear in a shoot-out scene. So that's what "creative differences" means ... salon.com | Sept. 1, 1999