Good heavens! Our nice friends over at the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune are trying to gouge each other’s eyes out. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
They’ve been so well-behaved all these years, and now suddenly like warring gangs they’re making drive-by shootings at each other in the headlines. Such horrible behavior! How uncivilized! Downright rude! It would be utterly disgusting, if it weren’t so much darn fun. Now that’s entertainment!
The brethren at the evening paper want their product to be delivered in the morning. Their partners at the Trib weren’t hot on the idea. And that’s where the intrigue begins. Tribune managers say the brethren went behind their backs to get the morning paper away from them. But the brethren say the Trib folks have lost their minds.
“The Tribune’s ugly tantrum is really over competition,” screamed a recent D-News editorial headline. The piece goes on to say that Tribune managers are acting strangely. “Tribune managers totally lost their cool [they actually said that; we here at Smartbomb are not making this up!] seeing conspiracy behind every bush.”
The Tribune had earlier written that the brethren entered into an unholy alliance with AT&T (which now owns the Trib but promised to sell it back to the original owners) and that mean Dean Singleton, who owns 48 daily newspapers and about 100 other publications. Tribune management says the LDS church is trying to stifle Salt Lake’s non-LDS voice.
Oh boy, did that make everybody mad! No surprise, the whole thing has wound up in court. That part wasn’t much of a surprise. Almost everything in this country ends up in court—even the presidential election.
The presidential election is a metaphor for the new millennium in this country. Maybe we should have seen it coming with the Whitewater investigation and the subsequent impeachment of Bubba. If the ’80s were the “Me Decade” and the ’90s were the “Stock Option Decade,” then maybe we’re into the “See-You-In-Court Decade.”
Or maybe we’ve been there all along.
We’re not alone in this age of litigation. Germany’s federal appeals court ruled in 1995 that clothing manufacturer Benetton could not use ads focusing on AIDS, child labor or ecological disasters, because that violates the principles of fair competition by using compassion for commercial purposes. And you thought all the capitalist pigs resided in the United States.
Linda Tripp, the woman we love to hate, is back in the news. Good ol’ Linda, you’ll recall, advised The Monica to save the semen-stained dress just in case. Linda then informed Kenneth Starr’s inquisition that the prez was foolin’ around in the Oval Office even after he denied such allegations during the sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones.
“I have absolutely no regrets about what I did,” Tripp told George magazine.
Like Paula Jones, Linda has had a recent Hollywood-style makeover. We have to wonder if she’ll follow in Paula’s footsteps with a spread in Penthouse. Heaven forbid!
