Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
There is a right-wing conspiracy to bring down the president.
Mar 19, 1998 | No matter the eventual outcome of the attempted putsch against a duly elected president of the United States, its backers and financiers are certainly getting value for their money and efforts.
The fruit of their labors was evident in Saturday's New York Times, which devoted a three-column all-caps headline and five full pages inside to the groundless lawsuit filed by one of the Clinton haters' chief puppets, Paula Corbin Jones. There, and all over the mainstream media, popped up the same discredited figures -- from Gennifer Flowers to Dolly Kyle Browning (many of whom the coup plotters have been promoting for years) -- all dressed up in the formal clothing of legal depositions. More ammunition for independent counsel Kenneth Starr, the pundits sagely agreed.
The plotters ought to be equally pleased with Starr, their front man, whose chair at Pepperdine University, funded by arch-conspirator Richard Mellon Scaife, still awaits the independent counsel's comfortable posterior once the coup is complete. What other truly "independent" prosecutor would still be pursuing, at taxpayers' expense, a 20-year-old land deal that investigation after investigation has conclusively shown involved no criminal misconduct, or even impropriety, by the president or his wife? Who else but Ken Starr would be relying on a convicted scam artist, David Hale, whom the late James McDougal once laughingly described as a "recreational liar," and who, too, has been a beneficiary of the plotters' financial largess?
As Salon has detailed in a series of investigative reports by correspondents Murray Waas and Jonathan Broder, the money spigot is open for any opportunist or mud-slinger who has a Clinton smear to sell. Billionaire reactionary Scaife has pumped nearly $2.5 million into a sleazy propaganda campaign called "the Arkansas Project" aimed at sabotaging the Clinton presidency. Substantial amounts of this Scaife loot ended up in the hands of Hale, who is Starr's primary Whitewater witness. Meanwhile, the chief attorney for Scaife's Arkansas Project was lavishing $50,000 on Paula Jones. And a shadowy group connected to the Rev. Jerry Falwell was secretly paying more than $200,000 to another rogues' gallery of Clinton defamers, who accused the president of everything from murdering Vincent Foster to protecting an Arkansas drug smuggling racket.
The American Spectator, whose 1992 "Troopergate" story has since been repudiated by its author, David Brock, turns out to have been a virtual washing machine for money paid to liars and convicted felons whose stories found their way -- often unchecked -- into the dockets of the independent counsel. So disturbed was the Spectator's longtime publisher about these financial shenanigans that he demanded they be stopped -- whereupon he was fired by the magazine's editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell.
And how relieved -- perhaps amused is a better description -- the conspirators must be that Congress, the judiciary and the media establishment continue to ignore what is going on right under their noses. While obsessively chattering about every Ken Starr and Paula Jones maneuver, the esteemed members of the press elite have not exhibited the slightest curiosity about the motives and backgrounds of Clinton's enemies.
"Conspiracy" may be the wrong word, redolent as it is of some sort of "X-Files" cabal of plotters, manipulating the levers on all aspects of a grand design. But as the work of Salon's reporters -- and a few others like the New York Observer's Joe Conason and the Arkansas Press Democrat's Gene Lyons -- is beginning to demonstrate, there does exist, in a broader sense, a community of interests within which informational and financial transactions are being conducted and alliances are being struck. It may not be as "vast" and tightly woven as the first lady has suggested, but it does have a common goal: the bringing down of the president of the United States.
We should say here, as we have said before, that Salon is not, despite what ABC's "Nightline" spuriously suggested, a part of some sort of White House "damage control" operation. We have, at best, mixed feelings about President Clinton's performance in office, and might have been devoting much more space to criticisms of his policies -- or lack thereof -- had these largely manufactured scandals not blotted everything else out. Salon columns by Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz have been among the most bitterly condemning of Clinton's alleged activities; Salon will continue to run their disparaging views. In Newsreal commentaries, we have expressed deep concerns about the Clintons' myopic stonewalling in the Whitewater investigation and even deeper concerns about some of the allegations in the Monica Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey affairs. In our Mothers Who Think section today, we air feminist Barbara Ehrenreich's savage denunciation of the president.
If Clinton blatantly lied to the American people about the Lewinsky affair and urged others to lie on his behalf, this editor has written, he should resign. And if the president does fall, we still believe, it won't be at the hands of the conspirators, though their celebrations will be long and loud. It will have been by his own hand.
But the investigation into Clinton's private affairs reeks so strongly of partisanship that the American people remain properly skeptical, continuing to award the president with record-high poll numbers. The public knows what the press refuses to acknowledge: Starr's investigative juggernaut, veering from musty real-estate deals to crackpot theories about Vince Foster's suicide to the Paula Jones civil suit, is obviously political. Extreme right-wing Republicans like Sens. Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth, at whose behest Starr was appointed independent counsel by a highly conservative three-judge panel, didn't choose him for his judicious temperament. They knew he'd be more a conservative hunting dog than his respected predecessor, Robert Fiske.
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