You can’t not be wary of being accused of paranoia, of being one of “them”– the conspiracy theorists. But you can’t not be aware, as well, of the fact that the people responsible or not for the conspiracy would be fully cognizant of the fact that people can be persuaded to label people who understand what is going on as “paranoid”. As I have noted before, the best friend any Kennedy assassination conspirator might have had would have been Kennedy assassination conspiracy buffs, like David Lifton, who posited that Kennedy’s body had been surreptitiously stolen from Air Force One and surgically altered to cover up the fact that shots came from the front (wouldn’t it have been easier to just shoot him in the back?).
If I had been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, I would not have had some stooge write a book asserting that there was no conspiracy– I would have a stooge write a book asserting a conspiracy, and let slip that aliens might have abducted the brain. Far more effective at manipulating public perception: it’s not cool to believe in conspiracy. Coolness is always more important than veracity.
And so to Clinton. Looking back, fifteen years later. To the impeachment scandal. You have to think about what happened to Julie Hiatt Steele.
Follow me:
Suppose it was a conspiracy of sorts– and I don’t mean a deep, dark, coordinated effort master-minded by some evil genius from within his impervious bunker. Keep the straw men out of it. I mean a group of powerful financiers including Richard Mellon Scaife, and group of complicit Republican politicians who probably were not fully aware of how things were being managed for them. Why would they be? What advantage would it be for Scaife if Asa Hutchinson or Henry Hyde knew that this was all a plan? They didn’t need to know. They just needed to know that Clinton could be harmed and they just needed to tools provided by one means or another. Scaife probably started the process, but Kenneth Starr and his cronies managed it quite well within their own fraudulent agenda.
Anyway, we have Starr struggling– unsuccessfully– to convince America that Clinton, like Nixon, had to go. The Republicans were not averse to voting for impeachment without public support, but the decisive votes would have to come from across the aisle, and the only way to get them was to persuade the Democrats to cut Clinton loose and vote for impeachment.
It was a strange situation. Several Republicans on the impeachment parade had themselves cheated on their wives. Newt Gingrich carried on an affair with a staff member while his wife was in the hospital being treated for cancer. The public didn’t think the issue was big enough to impeach a popular president. So Kenneth Starr was struggling.
Kenneth Starr looked like a less sophisticated version of John Roberts, current chief justice of the Supreme Court. Like Roberts, Starr was good at pretending to examine all the facts carefully as if he actually had an objective opinion on anything, and then, shockingly, arrive at the conclusion he always wanted: impeachment.
So Starr is struggling. The evidence was not as strong as he had liked. He tried to nail the Clintons for Whitewater by bullying Susan MacDougal into corroborating the allegations but she wouldn’t do it. So here’s what he did: he charged her with obstruction of justice. The “obstruction” was her failure to bend to his will and lie about the Clintons’ involvement with a illegal or inappropriate $300,000 loan. The other witness had really done something illegal and had agreed to testify against Clinton in exchange for a plea bargain. That’s how American criminal justice works. Only in the movies and TV are actual evidence and guilt involved in the equation.
So along comes Kathleen Wiley. Wiley had a history of prevarication and wasn’t a very good, credible witness, and she had openly flirted with Clinton and tried to arrange a tryst, to no avail. Then she went to Kenneth Starr and accused Clinton of groping her. On the day her husband, who was himself charged with misappropriating client’s funds from an investment scheme, shot himself to death in his car on a side-road somewhere.
Wiley claimed that a woman named Julie Hiatt Steele, who does appear to have been a sensible, rational person, also admitted to her that Clinton had groped her, and could testify that Wiley had told her about the groping long before the scandal broke (implying, of course, that she was jumping on a bandwagon). Wiley also had Michael Isikoff from Newsweek in her bag, and a book deal. The only thing she lacked, in fact, was credibility.
Did I mention the book deal? The profit center? The money, which should always be followed?
Yes, complicated. Let’s say for a moment that Kathleen Wiley’s story was completely untrue. Does it take a genius to conceive of the idea of her making it up? Maybe not out of whole cloth… maybe yes, out of thin air. Julie Hiatt Steele naturally denies the story. Kenneth Starr subpoenas her to testify. When she denies the story, as any perfectly truthful person would do, she is charged with Obstruction of Justice, which carries a potential sentence of 40 years.
Kenneth Starr, obviously out to prove that some tiny portion of the $50 million his investigation cost actually produced something, simply chose to punish the witnesses who refused to bend their testimony to his will by using his extraordinary powers to indict them for “obstruction of justice”, a term that meant whatever he wanted it to mean, Alice.
Then he leaked portions of their grand jury testimonies– a serious criminal offense, by the way– to the media, knowing full well that most news organizations wouldn’t bother to either fact check, or hold the leakers accountable for suggestive and inaccurate details.
Kind of whacky, isn’t it? But if this was the actual result, it is easily possible to imagine that someone planned this outcome, very carefully. Steele must have been enormously tempted to give in and corroborate Wiley– she was threatened with all kinds of dire consequences, her apartment searched, friends and relatives intimidated– if she did not cooperate, and all kinds of sweetness and light if she did.
It will be more difficult for them to employ this strategy against Obama, but I don’t doubt for a second that they will try. Wait for it. It’s coming. Remember, it will structured in such a way to permit Republican leaders to seem uninvolved in revelations, the leaks, the rumours, and then weep crocodile tears about doing their “duty” to investigate.
A carefully developed account of how the scandal was manipulated by Kenneth Starr, Lucianne Goldberg, and Linda Tripp.
Am I paranoid? Or not. If I am right about the Clinton impeachment, I might be right to anticipate that some kind of similar effort will be made against Obama at some point, especially if the Republicans gain a majority in the House (allowing them to hold inquisitions). Suppose Richard Mellon Scaife or the Koch brothers are out there right now with millions of dollars available to bring down the president, through whatever means possible, and without the slightest constraint of ethics or morals? How could they do it?
Well, the myth of the Tea Party is a start. The Tea Party does not exist, as the media would have you believe, in the sense of a powerful, influential, successful political force. Check the real poll numbers: the Tea Party is utterly impotent, in terms of real influence. There is not a single Republican candidate in any district who is winning because he or she is a “Tea Party” candidate, but there are least 16 who are losing, for that reason.
And it is beyond nauseating when establishment Republicans like John Boehner now strut around claiming that they have always represented the unsullied puritan ethos of those saintly tea party activists with their lovely racists signs and posters.
Most Americans– and I mean MOST, as in about 70%– shrug them off as inconsequential and embarrassing. Have you checked Sarah Palin’s numbers lately? The Democrats can only dream that she will be the Republican nominee for president in 2012. John McCain must weep at night knowing what he will now be remembered for.
In terms of fake influence, however, the Tea Party soars. In terms of “perception”, the news media, including the alleged liberal media, give it far more prominence than it deserves. Why? Because the Wall Street Journal and Fox News have ordained that the Tea Party is BIG NEWS. Because they believe that if they shout it out loud and often enough, people will actually begin to believe that America is embracing the political ideology of these idiots. Because they are funny and scary and outrageous. I believe their own insignificance will become apparent to them by January when Trent Lott’s dictum becomes true: “we need to co-opt them”. They will not resist, though, in some ways, I wish they would.
Anyway, Scaife and others would never do anything that would conspicuously link them directly to any of the more insalubrious efforts against Obama, including the pseudo-racist rumours about Islamic beliefs or Kenyan culture. They would merely fund groups who do, researchers, investigators, people like Linda Tripp who are willing to do the dirty work on behalf Mitch McConnell and the like.