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Bianca Jagger's U.N. charity persona caps a tabloid life
| Coming August 19 |
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AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney should raise his own dough for overseas union organizing and leave the taxpayers in peace. Taxpayers also don't need a new Cabinet-level Department of Peace to rival the departments of State and Defense. Read about it in Sunday's ``Dateline D.C.'' column, a Tribune-Review exclusive. |
It was as if Chicken Little was right when he said that the sky was falling in! Dozens sought to become Bianca's newest white knight and came charging to rescue the lady from this evil dragon of a columnist. Too bad, guys! We just have to look harder at the life and times of your heroine.
The life of Bianca Jagger has been one of a rise from poverty to the demimonde to using in her middle age her notoriety to campaign for various liberal causes. For a time, according to a defector from the Sandinista intelligence service, she was the mistress and operative of the odious Moscow-trained secret police chief Tomas Borge. Then she left Managua straight for the left-liberal political circles of Washington, and her activities bear a lot of scrutiny.
Bianca Jagger was born in Managua on July 25, 1945. Her original name was Blanca Perez, and by some reports her mother was a ``backstreet woman'' kept by an army officer.
Bianca and her younger sister grew up in poverty, but when Blanca developed into a beauty, somehow the money was found to send her to Paris.
Even her most devoted fans have noted that she lived an ostentatious lifestyle, but had no job and no visible means of support.
In 1971, Bianca, as she called herself, met Rolling Stones lead Mick Jagger. They married that same year shortly before their daughter Jade was born. One wonders if the parents were aware that the second meaning of ``jade'' is that of a disreputable woman exhausted by overuse or debauchery.
The marriage was lived in tabloid headlines, with massive public quarrels and ostentatious infidelities on both sides. By the time they officially divorced in 1980, they had been leading separate lives for several years.
During the 1970s, Bianca had minor success as a model and much more success in staying in the gossip columns as a ``regular'' in the cocaine-riddled scene at the Studio 54 nightclub.
After the Sandinistas took control of Nicaragua in 1979 and set about establishing a communist bastion with the advice and support of Moscow and Havana, Bianca returned to Managua, checking up on Mama, and quickly was brought before the toad-like Borge. There was an instant meeting of the minds - or whatever.
As detailed by a high-level former aide to Borge and Lenin Cerna, his spy chief, Bianca became the very best of friends to Borge. She shortly decamped for Washington, a city never known for its nightclubs and discos, where as the ``Pasionara'' of the Sandinista revolution she quickly joined forces with the radical chic supporters of communist revolutionary groups in Central America, such as the leftist Institute for Policy Studies, for whom she was the headliner attraction at its 20th anniversary celebration that year.
Her paramour in those days was Sen. Chris Dodd, who then spearheaded the Democratic Party's left in its knee-jerk opposition to all of Ronald Reagan's Latin American policies. Dodd was one of the Senate sponsors of IPS' big 20th party, whose luminaries also included former Sen. George McGovern, Ralph Nader, Harry Belafonte, Rep. Ronald Dellums, and Cora Weiss, IPS' flaming financial angel.
Nothing lasts forever. Popular rebellion forced the Nicaraguan Marxists to accept internationally supervised elections in which they overwhelmingly were voted out of power. Bianca went on to be linked to Actor Warren Beatty, Jack Ford, Bob Torricelli and Mortimer Benjamin Zuckerman. Morty, the newspaper and overall magnate, was a very, very rich publisher. He was recently divorced from his longtime wife, Marla, perhaps an indication that Bianca is here to stay!
Now, at age 56, Bianca runs around collecting awards from the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the Rainforest Alliance, War Child, USA and the United Nations. Her presence at benefits guarantees publicity for campaigns and even more money being poured into lost causes. Bianca will publicize everything from IPS to the Democratic Party together with rape and other war crimes in the Balkans to AIDS in Africa.
A new hyena is howling in the Senate over her first kill. The beast in question is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who arranged the killing of Mary Gall's nomination for chair of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
In a strictly party-line vote last Thursday, all 12 Democrats on the 23-member Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee voted against her nomination and not to send Gall's nomination to the floor of the Senate.
Hillary had decided to exert her new power as a U.S. senator back in April by cutting Gall from the herd of Bush administration nominees. Sen. Clinton already had started garnering political influence the old-fashioned way - buying it through her political action committee, HILLPAC. In a mere six months, HILLPAC raised $660,000 and has been parceling out the spoils to her fellow Democrats while cultivating her old ties to Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, so generous with his donations to the Clinton mansion.
Hillary's strategy is truly Clintonian - ``resist and resist on every point of George Bush's policies and nominees.'' But first, she had to convince the Democrats in control of the Senate that the American public would tolerate and even approve of their obstructionism.
Several polls last month showed that a majority of Americans agree that President Bush, despite his increased popularity polls, is controlled by business interests and that business has way too much influence. That signaled the gathering of a hyena pack around Hillary!
Quickly, Hillary signaled her pack to kill Gall's nomination and burnish the career among Democrats of her old friend, the current commission chair, Ann Brown. Sen. Clinton ranted against Gall's nomination at two separate Senate Democratic Caucus luncheons and arranged for an attack press conference on Gall in the Senate headlined by Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro and assorted Naderites.
Gall and Brown were on good personal terms, but the two battled over policy. Brown is one of Hillary's school, justifying increased government regulation, especially if it could be rationalized as being ``for the children.'' Gall is clearheaded, pointing out that the product at issue, infant bath seats, are not playpens and when about one kid a year drowns in one, it's because the adult responsible left the kid in the seat and went off to talk on the telephone, do housework or some other chore. This was intolerable to Hillary's pack. Brown brought out her dagger, saying she thought Gall ``would put children and families in danger.''
And California's Sen. Barbara Boxer, in a table-pounding finger-pointing exercise in demagoguery, shouted, ``I shudder to think the chilling effect that you being confirmed as chairman would have.'' Boxer went on to accuse Gall's views of killing 57 children!
After the vote, the smell of blood brought in North Carolina's Sen. John Edwards, a potential Democratic presidential candidate for 2004, who said Gall was unfit because ``she had a consistent habit of blaming parents and caregivers for defective products.''
Thanks to Sen. Hillary, who like her husband was born without the gene for shame, the Democrats are out gunning for more Bush nominees who fail the liberal/progressive political correctness test. Having mobilized women politicians to lead the attack on Mary Gall, black Democrats are being mobilized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to kill the expected nomination of the capable Gerald Reynolds, a native of Missouri, to run the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education.
While Bush takes the month off at his Texas ranch to prepare for new Capitol Hill battles, his enemies, led by NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, are sharpening their knives against Reynolds, former president of the Center for New Black Leadership.
Reynolds' so-called ``crime'' is that he opposes racial double standards required by the quota system. Bond calls Reynolds ``an opponent of fairness programs,'' when in fact he seeks true fairness, based on abilities not skin color.
The Senate's bloated closet-socialist Teddy Kennedy, chairman of the Labor and Education Committee, already has signaled there will be a fight to block Reynolds. Kennedy pontificated that he had ``serious concerns'' about Reynolds' fitness because ``many civil rights groups and education groups have raised questions about his serious lack of education policy experience, as well as his views on affirmative action.'' Oh, so Kennedy intends to let the professional victim and union groups select the head of the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights!
Reynolds' professional degree is in law, not teaching, which is no disqualification for anything. The issue is his affiliation with think tanks that oppose racial quotas, as do most Americans. He is no ``extremist zealot.'' But inactivity by the White House during the August recess will enable these professional whiners to consolidate their positions. Maybe something will happen!
``Dateline D.C.'' is written by a Washington, D.C.-based British journalist and political observer.
