Editorial

...Any historian researching the origins of late Twentieth Century politics will have to mine those volumes...

...Is Mike Wallace really that nice a man...

...Attorney's office in Little Rock that raise further questions of obstruction of justice...

...become absorbed with the public policy debates of the period...

...And we meet Patsy Thomasson, Lasater's aide to whom he gave power of attorney before heading for the hoosegow...

...I respectfully disagree...

...Appearing in our June 1994 issue "The Travelgate Cover-Up" demonstrated that the Clintons had brought the corruptions of Arkansas machine politics to Washington and in a matter of months were trampling the rights of private citizens, at first the rights of non-political employees at the White House Travel office, eventually the rights of some goo former government appointees...

...Am I really that much a fool...

...Through the years The American Spectator— originally called The Alternative —has also served another useful purpose...

...In Danny Wattenberg's Trooper-gate II piece his Arkansas machine hands out "get out the vote money" to minority political potentates and engages in extensive state-wide graft...

...The importance of this piece will be demonstrated by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in due course...

...They were the prodigies of their unique generation, and they now are contributing to what David PryceJones in the keystone piece of this, our Thirtieth Anniversary Issue, foresees as a threat equally as dangerous to democracy in the future as Fascism and Communism were to democracy in the past...

...Agreed, and please note that he populated his administration with like minds from the 1960's 2 Z 16 December r997 • The American Spectator who shared his, I believe they call it, moral compass...

...Moreover, the Clintons did not have to lie about Hillary's role, and she did not have to lie about it to Congress...

...Later pieces by our writers gave more examples of this brutish politicizing such as Byron York's "Big Al's Big Scam" in our February 1996 issue...

...In 1980, conservative policies—both domestic and foreign—having been pretty much settled by the debates of the 1970's, The American Spectator commenced to whoop it up for the incoming Reagan administration...

...and "The Case Against Hillary," which Adams and I collaborated on...

...We are persuaded that she guaranteed this loan and was desperate to get her name off it as bank auditors were closing in...

...Adams also revealed the extent to which these Indonesians had penetrated the government of the United States through the tentacles of Riady's son, James, and John Huang cleverly working the Clinton administration...

...Well before the rest of the press reported it, this piece revealed the Clintons' misuse The American Spectator • December 1997 17 of the FBI and IRS in harassing innocent citizens— a practice that the Clintons have continued...

...What we revealed here remains ahead of the press and possibly even ahead of the Independent Counsel...

...Through the writing of such foreign policy sages as Peter Rodman and Carl Gershman we set the record straight on the Vietnam war and how best to proceed with the Cold War...

...Governor Clinton and his wife had to get Hillary off a loan from Stephens Security Bank...

...There is something unsettling about the Clintons' brutish reliance on political intrigue...

...In "The Travelgate Cover-Up" our readers saw the Clintons transform the Travel Office—theretofore a nonpolitical operation—into a source of boodle for Arkansas cronies...

...Could she some day move on to become White House Drug Czarina...

...Read RE' L, editorials CN Crlweek...

...For instance, the December 1979 Washington Monthly exposed presidential candidate Edward Kennedy's shameless philandering without incurring the displeasure that the Spectator incurred for publishing pieces that were much better sourced...

...After all, they did not have to resort to the police powers of the state to remove the Travel Office employees, who serve at the president's pleasure and can be relieved of their positions anytime...

...Anyone looking for a preview of the Independent Counsel's indictment of members of the Clinton administration will find these pieces useful along with our later piece "The Case Against Hillary...

...Another instance of the Clintons' corruption of a federal agency was reported by James Ring Adams in his "April and Webb and Jean and Jack," published in our October 1994 issue...

...Begun off campus at Indiana University in 1967 by my jovial band of conservative students, the magazine then was roaring and hissing about student protest and the youth rebellion...

...At the end of thirty years of journalism, I am ready for thirty more...

...The threat about which he writes is the globalization of governmental corruption...

...The theme endured into the 1970's when the last rebellious youths were returning from detox, adapting to adulthood, or accepting holy orders from some skinny swami wearing a dirty turban and sunning his scrawny bones atop the hood of one of his corporate-owned Rolls Royces...

...The incoming president had enlisted the services of some forty of our writers along with such advisers as Bill Casey, my pro-bono lawyer...

...From the Johnson administration to the Clinton disadministration our pursuit has been resolute...

...Another critically important piece in our investigative series was David Brock's Travelgate piece...

...N ext in our list of critically important pieces comes Adams's "What's Up in Jakarta...

...Not only did they break news stories long before the mainstream press got wind of them, but each story drew the veil away from a particular category of Clinton vice whose lurid consequences were to be made manifest in his presidency...

...Through all the carefully contrived balderdash that the Clintons have manufactured about themselves, it was apparent to us, their amused peers, that they were what was called, in the decade of student protest, Coat and Tie Radicals—a more universal term is hypocrite...

...Bruno comes off as a Lady Macbeth, but Bill is more interesting...

...The American Spectator has been about the most abundant source in American journalism of facts relating to the Clintons' misdeeds...

...If Pryce-Jones is right it is a citizen's duty to expose this corruption if he hopes to enjoy the liberties of democratic society in the future...

...By trying to make Hale the fall guy President Clinton may have committed two impeachable acts, manipulation of a Justice Department investigation and thwarting of a U. S. Attorney's investigation...

...The American Spectator stories that I have in mind are the Troopergate pieces (I and II), my Mena Airport piece, David Brock's Travelgate piece, James Ring Adams's "April and Webb and Jean and Jack," his "What's Up In Jakarta...

...Such opportunities cannot be ducked...

...Later pieces have shed still more light on the Clintons' obstructive efforts...

...The piece shows that early in the administration Webb Hubbell had friends in position to frustrate the Resolution Trust Corporation's Whitewater investigation...

...The piece showed the administration's readiness to lie and dissemble with astounding conspicuousness...

...The sexual harassment suit, the foreign campaign contributors, the influence peddling, the conflicts of interest, the abuse of power, the obstruction of justice, and all the other infamies that constitute the triumph and glory of the Clinton Administration, often had their debut in one of these American Spectator stories...

...It has continued to badger an expiring liberalism through every stage of its macabre degeneration—cruel sport, that, but vastly amusing...

...11 investigative writers have adduced more instances of Clinton's misbehavior, but the seven pieces mentioned above previewed the major Clinton scandals that were to follow...

...Now their moralistic cant having corrupted them, we took a more sober interest in them and set ourselves to the task of exposing their malfeasance and deriding their gruesome manners...

...Incidentally politicizing banking is still a danger under Clinton as Byron York demonstrated in his recent "The Clintons' Brewing Micro-Scandal...

...The piece also reveals the possible grounds for indicting Hillary (and possibly her husband—about this constitutional experts differ) on conspiracy to obstruct justice and commit bank fraud...

...It shows why David Hale's illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal was so important...

...Both this book and this magazine are gaining a wide audience in the country while other publications wither...

...Thomasson is another of the dubious figures who followed the Clintons to the White House where she became director of the Office of Administration...

...By the mid-1970's The American Spectator had RET's most recent book, co-authored with "Anonymous," is The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton (Regnery...

...Back then my conservative friends had guffawed at the Coat and Tie Radicals' moralistic cant, though it was then corrupting politics and the university...

...Most of the popular themes of the past thirty years can also be found in these thirty volumes...

...It was certainly a news story, but then after Troopergate the rest of the press almost never reported American Spectator scoops...

...Here we see such witnesses as bodyguards and nannies revealing Bill and Bruno as energetic members of Arkansas' New Age vulgaratti...

...Here we see the Arkansas Governor, despite his draft-dodging, war-protesting youth, cornplicitous in a covert CIA operation, which skirted Congress's various Boland Amendments...

...Had the press followed this story when it was published journalists may not have been so surprised by the subsequent revelations of foreign money entering the 1996 presidential campaign...

...Troopergate revealed the Clintons' weakness for abuse of power, misuse of government usufructs, and the low life...

...When Tom Wolfe compared our investigative pursuit of the Clinton administration with the work of that muckraking reformer Lincoln Steffens, perhaps he had a point...

...It should come as no surprise that after publishing all these pieces I felt I had sufficient evidence to write The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton...

...By the late 1980's the magazine was moving into investigative journalism, exposing the hollow antics of such a pompous Bushite as James Baker as he labored to transcend the embarrassing good sense of Reaganism...

...Possibly some of the randier escapades attested to by his troopers and his Biblical ruminations on fellatio should have come under the Spectator's editorial scalpel...

...Under the headline "Impeach" Mark Helprin recently notified readers of the Wall Street Journal that that Coat and Tie Radical from yesteryear, Bill Clinton, has matured into possibly "the most corrupt, fraudulent, and dishonest president we ever have known...

...Yet in recent years when similar revelations were published about various Kennedys few sophisticates were put off...

...Visit T 1S Online ;It N .spectil r.org 18 December 1997 • The American Spectator...

...She is lying still as Becky Borders reveals in her interviews with David Watkins, "Hell to Pay" in our January 1997 issue...

...Filling the Blanks" by Adams and Becky Borders in our March 1996 issue outlined the44 Next on our list of critically important pieces comes Adams's 'What's Up in Jakarta?' 17 maneuvers at the Justice Department and the leaks from the U.S...

...Which puts me in mind of "6o Minutes...

...Admittedly, our whoops had suffered a temporary cough and sputter...

...For a magazine founded by conservative students of the 1960's generation, the 199o's presidency of this student government whiz kid has proved to be one of history's ironies...

...The real Glory Days of our investigative journalism, however, lay ahead with the election of the most eminently investigable president since Warren Gamaliel Harding, Bill Clinton, a kind of Velcro strip for scandal...

...Significant wrongdoing is exposed in these pieces, and after all these months of public scrutiny not one matter of fact, not even a minor matter of fact, has been disproved...

...Adams and York have been indefatigable in their investigative work, and itwas stimulating and instructive for me to work with Adams on that other critically important piece, "The Case Against Hillary," published in our February 1996 issue...

...After the first Troopergate story Mike Wallace and others from the show approached me suggesting that we arrange to tip them off to forthcoming exposes, and they would fully credit The American Spectator...

...This theme of obstruction of justice that Adams picked up on is far from exhausted and ought to lead to further indictments...

...Our work may be jeered at by the pack, but it has yet to be refuted...

...I n reviewing the scores of investigative pieces that The American Spectator has published since Boy Clinton rolled up to the White House with his lovely wife, Bruno, several pieces strike me as being of critical importance...

...Any objective reader who has reviewed the aforementioned pieces, to say nothing of the lesser pieces in the magazine, has to note that the issues raised are serious...

...The Monthly's piece even ventured the judgment thatserial adultery indicated character flaws that might disqualify one from such leadership roles as the presidency., C ) Fourteen years later when the .--- Spectator's Troopergate pieces --- repeated this self-evident truth we were booed for our fuddy-duddyism...

...Other American Spectator pieces by some very good44 The real glory days of our investigative journalism, however, lay ahead...

...Historians will not make this mistake as our hundreds of thousands of contented subscribers will some day duly note...

...In the Mena piece we became acquainted with such felonious campaign supporters as Clinton's friend Dan Lasater (convicted on drug charges along with his employee, Roger Clinton...

...That his coming forth in our pages was never reported in the mainstream press is amazing...

...My Mena Airport piece, published in our August 1995 issue, demonstrated how low that low life might become with the Boy Governor prowling the world of drug dealers, gun runners, and money launderers...

...A full year before the rest of the press got at least part of the story, Adams in our September 1995 issue demonstrated the extent to which the Clintons had become beholden to Mochtar Riady, the Jakarta bicycle repairman turned billionaire, and Indonesia's clique of ethnic Chinese billionaires, a group that dominates commerce in south Asia...

...These thirty volumes exhibit two historic trends: conservatism's (and The American Spectator's) growth towards strength and maturity and liberalism's amazing descent into decadence and the land of fla fla...

...Perhaps, as my colleague Terry Eastland suspects, this scabrous stuff rendered the pieces less persuasive to readers of a delicate disposition...

...The first of these pieces were the two Troopergate stories...

...And it revealed Hillary Rod-ham Clinton as a rather stupid schemer, working incessantly behind the arras at manipulating events and destroying imagined enemies and allies alike, for instance, her loyal lieutenant, David Watkins...

...Still some critics now call these investigative pieces "Clinton-obsessive stuff...

...Finally Mena left readers pondering the possibility that the Rabelaisian governor who corrupted his own state police might also allow the corruption of a CIA operation...

...He lunges not only at edibles and the fair sex, but also at the perks of office, flash entertainments, and quick fix campaign contributors for his next political campaign...

...High seas may rise ahead, but behind me in those thirty volumes are sealed all the intellectual disputes and literary fashions of a growing conservative movement...

...In short order oncoming indictments will show the relevance of the facts that we have unearthed...

...The piece reveals Hillary engaged in a bare bones bank fraud...

...Finally—and a point the press has yet to grasp—Adams revealed how Clinton had endangered pension funds of state employees to get financial juice for his presidential campaign...

...As he gulps down food and vibrates over womanhood, he emerges as a Rabelaisian creature of gargantuan appetites...