Authors: Ann Coulter
Guilty (31 page)
Or here's a proposal: Maybe we could cancel just one major motion picture, prime-time special, PBS documentary, play, dramatization, rally, parade, staged reading, Broadway musical, evening of interpretive dance, opera, feature film, or seminar about the Jim Crow era each week and replace it with one about 9/11. In 2007, the year the
Times
was complaining about having to commemorate a terrorist attack on U.S. soil that happened only six years earlier, the
Times
reminded its readers of the 1965 Civil Rights March in Selma more than a dozen times and Jim Crow five dozen times. Even the liberal Kausfiles blog noted a new feature at NPR in 2007: “Pointless Stories from the Civil Rights Era.”
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Mind you, we 9/11 hobbyists want only one substitution per week. Would that be a fair compromise? Or, even better, maybe they could keep all the Jim Crow remembrance specials and give us a substitution for one Hollywood blacklist movie per week.
The only other subject the media were ever this irritated about having to cover was the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Two weeks after the Lewinsky story broke, before the evidence on the blue dress was even dry,
Times
columnist Frank Rich huffily reported that “75 percent of the public tells ABC pollsters that there's too much media coverage of the scandal.”
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That was the same public that produced record-breaking Nielsen ratings for TV shows covering the Monica Lewinsky scandal for the rest of the year.
A decade later,
Times
columnists were still complaining that the Clinton scandals had gotten too much attention. Paul Krugman attributed the hype to “the right-wing noise machine.”
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Is that the “noise machine” that controls the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
the
Los Angeles Times,
and indeed nearly every newspaper in America, every major news network, CNN, MSNBC,
Saturday Night Live, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Time, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, Rolling Stone, Vibe,
the entire movie industry, the Oscars, and the Emmys? That right-wing noise machine? Or is it the right-wing noise machine that's limited to niche outlets on the radio, the Internet, and a few hours a day on Fox News, between Greta Van Susteren, Shep Smith, and Geraldo Rivera?
Krugman dismissed the Clinton scandals as “pseudoscandal[s]” and bitterly remonstrated about the “headlines, air time and finger-wagging from the talking heads” over nothingness. And yet he claimed that the “eventual discovery in each case that there was no there there, if reported at all, received far less attention.” Fully determined to earn his presidential knee pads, Krugman said, “The effect was to make an administration that was, in fact, pretty honest and well runâespecially compared with its successorâseem mired in scandal.”
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According to Krugman, the “fake scandals” from the Clinton years were “Whitewater, Troopergate, Travelgate, Filegate, Christmas-card-gate. At the end, there were false claims that Clinton staff members trashed the White House on their way out.” Each one of these was not only a far more serious scandal than anything the media ever managed to produce against the Bush administration, but none could be described as having received overwhelming media attention.
The “pseudoscandal” of Whitewater, for example, produced more
than a dozen felony convictions againstâamong othersâthe sitting governor of Arkansas, Jim Guy Tucker; former Arkansas municipal judge David Hale; Clinton's associate attorney general, Webster L. Hubbell; and Clinton's former business partners Susan McDougal and the late Jim McDougal.
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Not bad for a “pseudoscandal.”
In eight years, with several thousand political employees circulating in and out of the executive branch, only five felonies came out of the entire Bush administration. That's a crime rate at least 1,000 percent less than in the population at large.
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Lewis Libby was the only perpetrator Bush likely had ever met and is certainly the only one the public had ever heard of. The others were obscure employees in the far reaches of the executive branch, such as a homeland security deputy press secretary and a chief of staff of the General Services Administration. But just among Clinton's friends and associates from Arkansas, the Whitewater investigation produced more than a dozen felony convictions. Ken Starr had a more significant effect on reducing crime in the 1990s than Clinton's crime bill.
Krugman would no doubt argue that the true scandal of the Bush administration was that “Mr. Bush has no empathy for people less fortunate than himself”âactually, he did write that.
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Although Bush had nothing to do with it, many people did lose their homes and life's savings in dirty deals. One company offered homes for “sale,” the purchase price to be paid in installments. But if a purchaser defaulted on a single monthly payment, there would be no foreclosure proceeding or short sale: The purchaser would automatically lose everything he had invested in the propertyâthe house, the equity, and all prior payments. The small print of the contract said that if a monthly payment was not made within thirty days, all prior “payments made by the purchaser shall be considered as rent for the use of the premises”ânot a mortgage payment, not a down payment on a house.
This is what happened to some of the people who fell behind on their payments:
Clyde Soapes was a grain-elevator operator from Texas who heard about the lots in early 1980 and jumped at the chance to invest. He
put $3,000 down and began making payments of $244.69 per month. He made thirty-five payments in allâtotaling $11,564.15, just short of the $14,000 price for the lot. Then he suddenly fell ill with diabetes and missed a payment, then two. The [corporation] informed him that he had lost the land and all of his money. There was no court proceeding or compensation. Months later they resold his property to a couple from Nevada for $16,500. After they too missed a payment, the [corporation] resold it yet again.
Soapes and the couple from Nevada were not alone. More than half of the people who bought lots [in the development]âteachers, farmers, laborers, and retireesâmade payments, missed one or two, and then lost their land without getting a dime of their equity back. According to records, at least sixteen different buyers paid more than $50,000 and never received a property deed.
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Who were these unscrupulous businessmen? Jack Abramoff? No, Abramoff went to prison for scamming rich Indian tribes. Vietnam ace and former Republican congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham? No, he sits in prison for taking bribes from well-heeled defense contractors. Indeed, when has a Republican ever been accused of ripping off the less fortunate?
The business plan described above was, of course, the Clintons' Whitewater Development Corporation. And that was the legal part. Although many states made such contracts illegal on the sensible grounds that it involves scamming the poor and gullible, Arkansas was not among them. I'm sure the technical legality of Whitewater provided great consolation to all the people who lost their homes when Hillary Clinton enforced the small print.
The Clintons always loudly boasted that they didn't put any money into Whitewater, as if that fact proved they had clean hands. But Hillary Clinton created the Whitewater Development Corporation, wrote the fine print, and ran it out of the Rose Law Firm, with purchasers' checks sent to: Whitewater Corporation, c/o Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm. As Peter Schweizer says, “Hillary herself sold a home to Hillman Logan, who went bankrupt and then died. She took possession of the home and
resold it to another buyer for $20,000. No one was compensated (and she didn't report the sale on her tax return).”
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The Clintons' involvement with Whitewater continued right up until the 1992 election.
Forget the multiple felony convictions growing out of Krugman's “pseudoscandal.” Would even the legal aspects of Whitewater constitute a scandal if George Bush had done it? How about Mitt Romney or Cindy McCain? But for Paul Krugman, liberal troubadour of the poor, a barely legal scheme to rip off the least fortunate Americansâwhich also happened to yield a dozen felony convictions, taking down the sitting governor of Arkansasâis a “fake scandal.”
“Troopergate” led to the Paula Jones lawsuit, which in turn led to the Monica Lewinsky scandal when Jones's attorneys subpoenaed Lewinsky. Unable to avoid answering Jones's charges in court, Clinton eventually was forced to pay her $800,000 to settle the case. What Krugman called a “pseudoscandal” created many new legal rulings, including the Supreme Court's august decision holding that a sitting president
can
be sued for flashing a female employee when he was a governor.
The “pseudoscandal” of Travelgate consisted of the Clintons' using the full resources of the federal government in an attempt to destroy career employees of the White House, in order to turn over operation of the White House travel office to a Clinton contributor out of Hollywood. To make the travel office firings look like something other than rank cronyism, the Clinton White House publicly accused the fired employees of criminal acts and ordered the FBI and IRS to investigate. Unfortunately for the Clintons, the travel office employees were innocent of any wrongdoing.
Travel Office Director Billy Dale was criminally investigated by the FBI for two years, but the jury took less than two hours to acquit him of the embezzlement and conversion charges. The end result of the IRS investigation was that the IRS owed the head of the travel office's partner airline about $5,000.
Admittedly, a president's misuse of the IRS and the FBI to harass American citizens whose jobs he wants for Hollywood friends may not constitute a “scandal” on the order of cutting the capital gains tax in Paul Krugman's book. But for most people, that's a scandal.
Filegate was the discovery that the Clinton White House had
collected more than 900 secret FBI files on individual American citizens, including hundreds and hundreds of files of Republicans who had worked in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Luckily for Clinton, he was only caught perusing classified FBI files of his enemies and not Muslim terrorists. Who knows what the ACLU would have done had the White House been caught with files on Mohammed Atta or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed! Even the Clinton administration gave up trying to defend its possession of the files, eventually simply denying any knowledge of who hired the White House employee who was pawing through themâformer bar bouncer Craig Livingstone.
If that's a pseudoscandal, someone owes Nixon aide Charles Col-son three years of his life back. The
New York Times
article on Charles Colson's guilty plea for possessing a single FBI file in the Nixon White House was languorously reported under a headline spanning several columns on the front page:
COLSON PLEADS GUILTY TO CHARGE IN ELLSBERG CASE
AND IS EXPECTED TO AID JAWORSKI AND RODINO PANEL
MOVE IS SURPRISE
Watergate Prosecutor to Seek Dismissal of Other Counts
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When Clinton White House employee Livingstone was caught with 900 confidential FBI files the
New York Times
headline was rather more low-key: “White House Announces Leave for Official Who Collected Files.”
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This would be like an article on American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the Pentagon headlined: “California-Bound Plane Fails to Reach Destination.”
When Senator Bob Dole merely mentioned the White House's collection of 900 confidential FBI files, NBC anchor Brian Williams virtually accused him of committing a hate crime: “The politics of Campaign '96 are getting very ugly, very early. Today Bob Dole accused the White House of using the FBI to wage war against its political enemies, and if that sounds like another political scandal, that's the point.”
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Williams must be part of the “right-wing noise machine” that overreacted to the “pseudoscandal” of Filegate.
I gather that by “Christmas-card-gate,” Krugman is referring to a sleazy excuse the Clinton administration used for its violation of the campaign finance lawsâheretofore considered by the
Times
to be the most sacred laws of the republic. It appears to be the only scandal involving Christmas cards. When Clinton was caught doling out Lincoln bedroom sleepovers, White House coffees, and dinners to big campaign contributors based on lists of political donors on file at the Democratic National Committee,
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the Clinton White House denied that the database was being used for campaign purposes, explaining that it was the president's Christmas card list. It was an odd Christmas card list, inasmuch as it included notations recording the amount each donor had contributed.
In any event, the Christmas cards weren't part of the accusation, they were the Clintonian justification for a violation of the campaign finance laws more serious than anything Tom DeLay has even been accused of. To describe this scandal as “Christmas-card-gate” would be like calling the O.J. Simpson murder trial “ugly-ass-shoe-gate” because O.J. denied that his shoes left bloody footprints at the scene of the crime by claiming that he would never wear “ugly-ass” Bruno Magli shoes. (The O.J. Simpson case provides many helpful parallels to the Clinton White House.)
As for Krugman's final accusation that “there were false claims that Clinton staff members trashed the White House on their way out,” those claims were not false. Apparently, like the Willie Horton ad, we're going to have to keep citing the facts on this incident until liberals stop lying about it. Although there was never any formal complaint from the Bush White House, the story broke in the first days of the Bush administration, when anonymous Republican White House staffers were quoted in news reports accusing Clinton administration staff of doing “a lot more vandalism to the White House and other offices than just yanking âWs' off typewriters,” mostly in the vice president's offices, including “cut cables, phone lines and electric cords, plus a mess of rubbish.”
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