Stop what you are doing immediately! Click here and (assuming you have Real Player) watch ABC News’ April 23 follow-up to Ron Rosenbaum’s New York Observer piece on Skull & Bones’ initiation rites. World News Tonight aired excerpts from Rosenbaum’s secret video of the Bones’ carryings-on, and ABCNews.com has lovingly preserved this historic moment for you. Apparently Fox News aired the footage, too (though Chatterbox couldn’t find it on Fox’s Web site), and Inside Edition will be following suit shortly. True, the footage is dark and blurry, and it doesn’t include any of the really stupid or offensive stuff Rosenbaum reported on in his story (“Kiss my bumhole,” a guy impersonating Bonesman George W. Bush telling an initiate that “I’m gonna ream you like I reamed Al Gore,” Abner Louima plunger jokes). But still. It’s Skull & Bones, captured on broadcast television for the first time! Remember, as you watch, that Jane Mayer reported in the April 23 New Yorker: “[O]ne of the first social gatherings Bush held as President was a reunion of the brothers from his Yale secret society, Skull & Bones, according to talk among the Bonesmen.”
Meanwhile, if you haven’t clicked through on Tim Francis-Wright’s intriguing Fray comment (now appended to Chatterbox’s earlier item on Rosenbaum’s piece) to his Bones piece on the Bear Left Web site, you may want to do so now. Francis-Wright goes a little further than Rosenbaum in questioning Skull & Bones filings with the Internal Revenue Service. Chatterbox has no opinion because he is not an accountant. But you can eyeball Skull & Bones’ IRS filings (click here for FY 1998 and here for FY 1999) and make up your own mind! Is this a great Internet, or what?
[Update, 4/25: In a March 25 Yale Daily News article by Allison Phinney, Bones alum Steve McDonald, Yale ‘73, says that what Rosenbaum saw probably wasn’t an initiation, and suggests that “someone has been duped.” But that’s just what a Bonesman would say, isn’t it?]
