Double talk.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Humor - Nuts to Newt - Column

The photos one Sunday in The New York Times of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich as young boys in their Western wear confirmed my suspicion that they had been separated at birth. In their side-by-saddle photo, Bill and Newt are seated even then on their high horses, in full cowboy drag, mouths shut for once, squinting, early Eastwood, into the sun.

The only difference in these otherwise homogeneous hopalongs was that Bill was wearing a white hat and little Newtie was wearing, what else, a black hat and packing the largest six-shooter, larger than Uma Thurmond's thumb, aimed at his crotch. You can almost hear Bill's mom, Virginia Kelley, putting the kibosh on little Bill's pistol packing, while Newt's crusty military stepfather informs Kathleen, "My son will have a gun, damn it!"

I confess to experiencing frequent episodes of involuntary morphing whenever I look at Bill or Newt. Maybe it's an after-effect of the infection I got from spending thirty days in a ditch. If I look long enough, Bill blends to Newt and back to Bill and then to Newt again in a dizzying sort of MTV Grecian Formula 44 commercial.

Perhaps because I have an older brother named Bill Clinton, I do take all this shape-shifting quite personally. I even dreamed recently that I was Newt's lesbian sister. I had a better haircut--more Dorothy Hamill than Prince Val.

It was a photo-odd Sunday in The Times--that article on the Ivy League bobbitized posture photos was something. See, the privileged are victims, too. Is it my imagination, or has The New York Times slipped even more since Governor George Pataki was elected? With the exception of Frank Rich, it seems that everyone is writing his own A.M. Rosenthal Out of My Mind column. (And what is a Pataki anyway, if not some mind-altering mushroom grown in the wet and damp upstate muck of Cuomophobia? It must be one of those hallucinogenic mushrooms that makes you think you can cut taxes and cut the deficit, all at the same time, dude.)

TV's not much better. Last winter's interminably televised Winter Olympics have been replaced this winter by marathon broadcasting of This Old House, with the Newt Gingrich Deconstruction Company. See Newt take a lead pipe to the back of Bill's legs. And just as Connie stalked Tonya last winter, she's out stalking the truth again, this time with the Gingriches.

The bizarre thing about that interview with Mrs. Gingrich was the heavily mediated shift in focus from the fact that Newt called Hillary a...