Sjokkhilsen fra Bush-datter!

Which means, pardon The Scrapbook's Norwegian, something like "Shocking Greeting from Bush's Daughter"--the reference (by an anonymous headline writer at Norway's online Nettavisen newspaper) being to a photo-agency image of President Bush with daughters Jenna and Barbara at the recent Texas-themed "Black Tie and Boots" Inaugural Ball here in Washington. The picture in question captured Jenna Bush innocuously making the "Hook 'Em, Horns" pinky-and-index-finger gesture long associated with the University of Texas football program. But there's apparently a similar bit of Norwegian hand symbology associated, instead, with the late Oystein Aarseth, founder of the occultophile "death-metal" rock band Mayhem. So the Nettavisen people decided to have some obviously tongue-in-cheek fun speculating about Jenna Bush's involvement in the transmission of satantegnet--"satanic sign language." Inquiring minds want to know, the paper asked: Hva er det egentlig Jenna Bush driver med? Or, roughly translated: What's up with the president's devil spawn?

Good question.

Here's a better one, though: What's up with all the American reporters who then picked up this "story" and treated it like something that needed serious debunking? "Norwegians confused by Bush Salute," read the slug on an AP story out of Oslo. That "Hook 'Em, Horns" business, AP explained, "got lost in translation in Norway, where shocked people interpreted [it] as a salute to Satan." Innumerable other U.S. media outlets followed suit, all citing the same Nettavisen headline, and each making one or another version of the same, condescending joke--about the ease and speed with which millions of "aghast" and "outraged" Scandinavians had somehow convinced themselves that America's First Family is in secret communion with the underworld. Don't "the Nordics"--as AP weirdly referred to them--know anything about Texas football, fer gosh sakes?

Except that actually, yes, it turns out the Nordics have heard of UT's Longhorns, and do know what the "Hook 'Em, Horns" sign means, and don't for a minute believe that Jenna Bush is a practitioner of witchcraft. And why are we so sure of that? Because we've pulled up " Sjokkhilsen fra Bush-datter" off the Nettavisen website and we've noticed that reporter Ole Valaker--way up top of the piece, in just his third full sentence--went out of his way to tell Norwegian readers exactly what Miss Jenna's pinky and index fingers really were up to. " Det kan imidlertid også v re at hun prøver å vise symbolet til University of Texas Longhorns," Valaker wrote.

Never mind.

Who Won Wisconsin?

For now, at least, the official tabulations still show John Kerry having edged out President Bush in Wisconsin last November--by a squeaker-small 11,384-vote statewide margin. But local, state, and federal law enforcement officials last week made two significant announcements indicating that Republican complaints about the fairness of that count are being taken seriously.

First off, on Monday, January 24, came formal felony charges against five former Kerry staffers alleged to have vandalized--and rendered unusable--a 25-vehicle fleet of rented vans the Wisconsin Republican party had intended to drive voters to the polls with on Election Day. Among those implicated in the crime (which carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a $10,000 fine): Sowande Omokunde, aka "Supreme Solar Allah," son of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore; and Michael Pratt, son of longtime local Democratic bigwig Marvin Pratt. Wisconsin Democrats continue to insist that the perpetrators did not act in their capacity as paid employees of the Kerry campaign. But at least one witness has apparently told investigators that Supreme Solar Allah & Co., "dressed in 'Mission Impossible' type gear, black outfits and knit caps, left the Democratic party headquarters at about 3 a.m. on Nov. 2, and returned about 20 minutes later, extremely excited and talking about how they had slashed the tires."

Meanwhile, a multiagency voter-fraud probe was announced last Wednesday by district attorney Michael McCann, U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic, the FBI, and the Milwaukee police. Government investigators are responding to mounting evidence--an extensive analysis of the November balloting recently published by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, most notably--that many thousands of unlawful votes were likely cast in Wisconsin's largest (and heavily Democratic) city. Specifically, the Journal-Sentinel has established that preelection Republican warnings about sham Democratic registrants were well founded: At least 1,200 presidential ballots were cast last fall from plainly bogus Milwaukee addresses--public parks and baseball fields, for example. And another 8,000-plus ballots appear to have been cast by (or on behalf of) people for whom election authorities have no record whatsoever.

The total number of suspicious Milwaukee votes has been growing larger with every passing week, and seems likely, sooner rather than later, to exceed John Kerry's statewide margin of victory. Will that margin survive a federal grand jury investigation?

The Horse Whisperee

To review: In December 2001, a few months after Washington intern Chandra Levy had gone famously missing, Vanity Fair "special correspondent" Dominick Dunne went on the Laura Ingraham radio program and told her audience that he'd heard--from an unnamed Arab sheikh by way of an unnamed veterinary psychotherapist--that then-congressman Gary Condit had been a regular guest at Middle Eastern embassy receptions where he and other Washington dignitaries were given prostitutes as party favors. Dunne further suggested--though "I can't vouch for any of this"--that at one such shindig Condit had complained to his hosts about his relationship with Levy, that "she was a clinger," that she wouldn't let him break it off, and that she was threatening him with public embarrassment unless he continued to see her. Levy, Dunne reminded his listeners, "shortly thereafter vanished," having been abducted--according to "what the horse whisperer said"--and then "dropped at sea" from a private airplane.

Mr. Dunne later repeated and embellished this amazing tale in a variety of private and public settings--even claiming, at one point, that he'd been recruited to work on it by the FBI. But the story was false from top to bottom, as Dunne seems now to have admitted in Manhattan's federal district court, where he is the defendant in an ongoing $11 million defamation suit by Condit. No, Dunne conceded to Condit's attorneys last September (according to a videotaped deposition partially leaked to NBC's Today Show on January 12), "I did not" at any point possess solid evidence to substantiate the embassy sex-ring theory. And no, as a matter of fact, Dunne hadn't ever really known anything at all about Gary Condit--except that "I found him furtive in appearance," and "I objected to the way he arrived at work, the House, carrying a coat over his shoulder, smiling for the cameras, when a girl, a young woman, whom he knew very well was missing."

Now, we know what you're thinking, here. "I found him furtive in appearance" isn't ordinarily considered sufficient basis for a reputable journalist to implicate a sitting congressman in a murder conspiracy. Mr. Dunne's defense, however? Basically, it's that he isn't really a reputable journalist. "Dominick is more in the nature of a diarist or a raconteur, in the Samuel Pepys tradition," one of his lawyers has argued. "This is not serious investigative reporting."

Good point.

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