Amid all the dotty non sequiturs in Dorothy Rabinowitz’s Wall Street Journal piece about Juanita Broaddrick’s 30 cows and her “effervescent dog called Wally” and Wally’s “three-legged companion, Pearl,” she neglected to mention a fact well worth knowing about Broaddrick’s friend Norma Kelsey, the nurse who partially corroborates Broaddrick’s account that Bill Clinton raped her. (See “Proving Rape.”) According to today’s Washington Post, Norma Kelsey’s father, Ray Trentham, was killed by a man named Guy Kuehn during a robbery. In 1980, Kuehn’s life sentence was commuted by … Gov. Bill Clinton.
Chatterbox is going to assume that Rabinowitz didn’t know this (“I am not a hard-news reporter,” she told the Post’s Howie Kurtz). But Chatterbox, who is a former reporter in the Journal’s Washington bureau, can assure you that if he had written Rabinowitz’s story, and had neglected to find out and include that little detail, he would have gotten a severe dressing-down from his editors. Somehow, Chatterbox doesn’t think Rabinowitz will get a severe dressing-down from her superiors. Which is why the Journal’s editorial page should leave “hard-news” reporting to people who enforce basic standards of fairness.
–Timothy Noah
