Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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The Mayberrys, RFD

Wednesday, June 7, 2000

On the Fox Network's Hannity & Colmes Monday night, Alan Colmes demanded to know whether my diatribe against Al "I-Delivered-Baskets-Of-Goodies-To-The-Poor-During-Vacations-From-Private-School" Gore was political.

"You bet," I said. "If this were a house that George W. owned you would be howling, HOWLING, about his 'compassion' � and you'd be right."

To review the bidding: Gore owns a house in Carthage, Tennessee in sight of the Gore Plantation Manor House. Tracy Mayberry, who lives there with her family, has been trying for a year, she claims, to get the company which manages Gore's properties to fix the backed-up plumbing, the worn out floors, and other substandard aspects of a commercial property.

She finally went to the local TV station, they did a piece on it, Gore called and promised to make everything better.

OK. Lose the next 220 words of the slumlord tirade and insert, in lieu thereof, the following:

An article in the Style section of the Washington Post by Kevin Merida details the empty office space, located on K Street in downtown Washington, DC., which the Gore campaign left behind when they suddenly Alpha Maled themselves to Nashville, Tennessee last fall.

For those not familiar with the flora and fauna of Your Nation's Capital, K Street is the natural habitat for grazing herds of Big Time Lobbyists.

These are the folks who, when they first came to work and were set upon by smiling senior Democrats or grinning senior Republicans, were given approximately the same advice by their bosses that Victorian mothers gave their daughters about to be married: Lie back. Smile. And think of Tom DeLay � or Tony Coelho.

According the Merida piece, two of the vacated floors were sub-let but one remains empty - at a monthly rental of $31,000. This, remember, is for the EMPTY space.

Mullings, ever eager to be of assistance, has an idea.

The Mayberrys were paying the Gores $400 per month. If Gore moves them directly into that empty space he can cut his campaign overhead by 1.3 percent, get the Mayberrys out of the news, fix up the house in Carthage and rent it to someone else at a higher rate, let the Big Time Lobbyists pretend they just inherited the Clampetts as their neighbors, and the Gore campaign can brag they brought a little bit of Carthage back with them to Washington, D.C.

If this isn't a win-win, then I don't know what is.

The D-Day museum opened yesterday in New Orleans on the 56th anniversary of the "largest sea-borne invasion in history."

A quick peek at "Today in History" showed that exactly 1,317 years before the opening of the D-Day museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England opened as the first public museum in the world.

Apropos D-Day, the Ashmolean's "Featured Exhibit of the Month" is a Roman coin showing Bellerophon slaying the Chimaera which, as a metaphor for what followed the assault on Normandy in 1944, works pretty well.

A beautifully written lead got through the AP editors and remained atop Brett Martel's advance on the museum opening: "Before time does what enemy fire could not, America's living World War II veterans will at last see their triumphant legacy enshrined in a major national event."

On Sunday, the History Channel did a four-hour special on the opening of the D-Day museum. Stephen Ambrose, founder and president of the museum and perhaps America's best known WW II historian, broke down at one point when he was describing the feelings of the working men and women in America who had built the boats and ships, assembled the aircraft, manufactured everything from heavy machine guns to the helmets the soldiers would wear, and grew and packaged the food they would eat.

The point at which Dr. Ambrose's eyes filled occurred as he described the prayer on the lips of every one of those people, when they heard about the invasion, for every piece of equipment they had sent over: "Please, God. Let it work."

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