When
Hillary Clinton, then “first lady,” complained about a “vast right-wing
conspiracy” against her husband Bill, who was about to be impeached on charges
of perjury and obstruction of justice, probably most people laughed or reacted
with scorn.
I didn’t,
because I knew it to be true. For that reason I don’t take seriously the notion
that she, now running for president in her own right, is singularly corrupt.
At the height of the “Vince-Foster-may-have-been-murdered”
controversy in 1995, CBS’s ”60 Minutes” did its own investigation and found
that Christopher Ruddy, then a reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, had
done a politically motivated hatchet job in trying to prove that Foster hadn’t
actually committed suicide.
Soon after that, Frank Rich and Howard Kuntz both
published pieces in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal respectively
about the involvement of Richard Mellon Scaife, the late billionaire
and publisher of the Trib who had bankrolled numerous conservative causes,
including media committed to getting out the “truth” about the Clintons.
Later that year I wrote a
piece for The Pitt News, for which I was a columnist, in which I used the word “conspiracy.”
Because it sure seemed that way to me.
It wasn’t until 2002, when
the book “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative” was
published, that I understood fully about the conspiracy. Author David Brock, formerly
a reporter for the right-wing American Spectator, wrote that Scaife had given
the magazine $2 million to dig up dirt on the Clintons in what became known as the “Arkansas Project” (it
turned out that making up stuff about public officials in that state was somewhat
of a tradition in that state).
Brock would write a piece about Bill Clinton
using state troopers to get women, for which he was praised in conservative
circles, James Dobson even saying that Brock was doing “God’s work.” (Which turned out to
be ironic, since Brock later came out as gay.) He also wrote a book “The Real
Anita Hill,” which slammed the accuser of Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas, who in 1991 was in the midst of hearing amidst accusations of sexual
harassment.
Brock wrote a biography, “The
Seduction of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” that was published just before Bill’s
1996 reelection campaign and in which he told the truth about her — but since
it contained little if any red meat he ended up being kicked out of the
conservative movement.
Anyway, with the impeachment
pending he decided to come clean as to what he knew, first to Clinton aide
Sidney Blumenthal, and then later to numerous media as to what really was
happening. (And of course, the impeachment failed.) Brock, who founded the left-leaning watchdog Media Matters for America, is now a Hillary supporter.
Something that Brock brought
out that I didn’t realize: The strategy on the part of conservative media was
to spread unsubstantiated rumors to get the mainstream media to investigate. I
suspect this was done for two reasons: 1) The conservative media’s ratings and
circulation would, and did, increase: and 2) The mainstream media would be, and
still are to this day being, accused of “protecting” the Clintons for not finding
anything (which in fact there was essentially nothing to find).
That’s the context to what we’re
seeing today with the opposition to Hillary’s campaign.
I’ve always believed that the
Clintons were indeed singular political figures in that they had the power to
cause major political change — which represented a major threat to the power of
the people who hated them for whatever reason. Bill would have done so had he
been able to keep his pants on, and Hillary might finish the job because she has
coattails that no other candidate does.
So if you’re trying to
convince me that she’s so horrible, save it. It just isn’t true.
