YANKEE DOODLE PADDY

Well, there s another Paddy s Day gone, and good riddance. What an embarrassment. Even a stroll around town with a hand-spray of weed-killer for squirting on shamrock didn t ease my sense of mortification.
A tuneless youth leading the Dublin parade is OK by me anything to keep the god-squad at bay. But here in the North, Paddy s Day has become an annual occasion for showing obedience towards the USA.
Come March, they all wanna be in America. The UDP and PUP in America. Sinn Fein and the SDLP in America. Two governments and the UUP in Amer-i-ca.
I understand that the International Aviation Authority has just declared the air corridor from Aldergrove to Washington DC a traditional Marching route.
A green-edged (literally!) invite to the White House hooley has become a prized ticket to political respectability. Bill Clinton has become the main arbiter of good behaviour in public life here. The pudgy fraudster who can t keep his zipper done and who was planning last month to make rubble of the Iraqi equivalents of Portadown, Moira and Poyntzpass marked St. Patrick s Day by sitting in judgment on the moral credentials of Irish political parties. And not even the Women s Coalition dared tell him that they had better locations in which to celebrate the occasion than at his place.
Norman Mailer has said that what makes Clinton particularly dangerous is that he has no bottom line. There are no limits of political behaviour which he will not exceed, no core of principle which he won t allow traduced, no moral boundaries beyond which he will not be pushed.
This, let us remember, is the guy who sent a mentally disabled black man to the gas chamber poor Ricky Ray Rector, half his brain blown away, who ordered dessert for his last meal and then didn t eat it, saying he wanted to save it for later in order to garner the votes of the hang-the-blacks brigade in the 1992 Democratic primaries.
He s also the guy who on the advice of the low-life aide Dick Morris who continued screwing a hooker as he allowed her to listen in on a telephone conversation with the White House cut welfare payments to millions of poor people, most notably single mothers because they weren t leading sufficiently moral lives.
The mind boggles. The stomach churns.
Clinton will have appreciated the company of the Sinn Feiners, the breath-of-fresh-air Loyalists, the Orange and Green Tories and the rest of that crew. He enjoys people on their knees before him, sucking up.