PUBLIC NUISANCES: Their Seven Deadly Sins/Missing Scandals
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
9 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Their Seven Deadly Sins WASHINGTON N OCTOBER IT WAS REPORTED in the authoritative Capitol Hill newspaper, The Hill, that Don Van Natta...
...He noted how arrogant the liberal media have always been and mentioned their “lies and deceits...
...3) Rumors of Sen...
...Okay, okay, each of these revered institutions of the liberal orthodoxy has had its embarrassing pratfalls into plagiarism and bogus news stories, but how about us conservatives, El Rushbo...
...P U B L I C N U I S A N C E S 94 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Journalists of the liberal persuasion (or should I say faith) have informed me over the years that because of my conservative point of view I cannot really be considered a journalist...
...New York Times columnist Bob Herbert affirmed that “Bill Clinton has been a disaster for the Democratic Party...
...Are you referring to such revered institutions as the New York Times or the New Republic...
...In the summer of 2003 the Villager, a small newspaper in Greenwich Village, charged the Times with basing stories for three years on Villager stories and even using the same people the Villager used in their stories...
...And now there is the New Republic’s discredited “Baghdad Diarist,” one Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who fabricated tales of American military misconduct in the Iraq War and whose fabrications the editors of the New Republic hope will disappear behind the smog of their pious pifflings...
...Robert Reich opined that “Clinton is utterly disgraced...
...Yet why not remind readers of Dan Rather’s aspersions on President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas National Guard...
...Such venality by a retired president is unprecedented, and his encroachments on campaign finance regulations have been numerous...
...Journalists should be particularly interested, as well as Democrats intent on avoiding a repeat of the Clinton 1990s...
...Or maybe they will get worse...
...Have you no respect for CNN, CBS, NBC, or the Boston Globe...
...The Clintons dismiss all this as “old news,” but that is only because they are what law enforcement officials call “repeat offenders...
...Perhaps some journalist statute of limitations had passed...
...2) For years the Clintons have bullied the press, political opponents, prosecutors, and those women who caught Bill’s eye...
...A president of NBC News resigned after admitting in 1993 that his Dateline NBC report of an exploding General Motors truck was a hoax, and four years later a Pulitzer was conferred on him for, of all things, editorial writing...
...In fact, conservatives have had no Jayson Blairs or Stephen Glasses...
...9 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Their Seven Deadly Sins WASHINGTON N OCTOBER IT WAS REPORTED in the authoritative Capitol Hill newspaper, The Hill, that Don Van Natta Jr...
...Hillary has repeatedly been in rows with agents whom she importuned to carry her bags despite Secret Service regulations against the practice...
...5) The Clintons have, to use the words of President Harry Truman—who while president scrupulously insulated the White House from fundraising and in retirement refused speakers’ fees—“commercialized the presidency...
...She has repeatedly characterized simple two-party partisanship as the consequence of secretive conspiratorial maneuverings...
...Rather’s evidence was obviously faked, yet Rather is still claiming some sort of Higher Accuracy...
...Just as the Clintons abused the presidential pardon power when they left the White House and took property that was not their own, so did they abuse the pardon power and pilfer from the Governor’s Mansion upon leaving it in 1981...
...Let us call that a hoax heaped upon a hoax...
...Al Gore’s campaign manager, Donna Brazile, wrote in the New York Times that “It’s time to let Bill Clinton go—go on and live the rest of his life and allow a new generation of Democratic leaders to renew their fight on behalf of working families in America...
...Even Hillary’s health-care fiasco of 1993-94 had a precedent in her statewide education reform in Arkansas that left Arkansas still at the bottom of the heap in national education ratings...
...And just weeks after Blair’s departure the Times’s Rick Bragg, another Pulitzer winner, left after being suspended for using another reporter’s work as his own...
...Now are the Democrats really going ahead with a Hillary nomination...
...Just as they have been caught taking money from the shadowy Norman Hsu this year and from other dubious Asian figures in the 1990s, so too were their 1980s campaigns marked by financial irregularities...
...Clinton’s closest associates and supporters are acknowledging what his enemies have argued for years—the man is so thoroughly corrupt it is frightening...
...The New York Times, however, deserves special mention for the likes of Jayson Blair, who both plagiarized and fabricated a whole string of stories before being fired in 2003 along with two editors...
...and Jeff Gerth included some unsavory news about Sen...
...I shall not remind readers of the identity of one of my favorite plagiarists, a New York Times writer (a Pulitzer Prize-winner) whose report on an alleged plagiarism in Boston contained…yes, you guessed it, plagiarism...
...After the Clintons and their siblings were caught in the 42nd president’s last-minute pardon scandal, Jimmy Carter called them “disgraceful...
...7) The press has been lax in reporting the Clintons’ unprecedented record of ethical failings and outright corruption...
...That R . E M M E T T T Y R R E L L , J R . DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 3 After the Clintons and their siblings were caught in the 42nd president’s last-minute pardon scandal, Jimmy Carter called them “disgraceful...
...1) Every Clinton scandal of the 1990s had a precedent in the Clinton governorship of the 1980s...
...They used the White House, most notably the Lincoln Bedroom, to reward donors...
...for the millions in his daily radio audience, he is El Rushbo...
...6) Very little of this has escaped the notice of journalists and of Democratic leaders...
...The Hill’s report moves me now to list seven issues every American should know about the Clintons before 2008...
...forces used nerve gas in Laos...
...Bill Clinton himself has earned over $43 million in speakers’ fees since leaving the White House, including millions from the Red Chinese and the United Arab Emirates...
...In 2001 the Riadys paid over $8 million in FEC fines for their munificence in the 1990s...
...Who do you think you are talking about, Dan Rather, the heir to Walter Cronkite’s ermine robes...
...That Washington Post writer from the early 1980s who copped a Pulitzer for a bogus story—let us forget his/her name too...
...In fact, journalists of the liberal persuasion (or should I say faith) have informed me over the years that because of my conservative point of view I cannot really be considered a journalist...
...Perhaps as conservatives continue to break the liberal monopoly the liberals will raise their journalistic standards...
...Al Hunt called Clinton the “albatross” of his party who should “drop dead...
...Hsu’s donations are of a piece with what might be called the Clintons’ “Chop Suey Connection...
...Since the 1980s the Clintons have employed private investigators, for instance, Terry Lenzner, Jack Palladino, and Anthony Pellicano, the last of whom is a convicted felon...
...Washington observers appeared shocked...
...Hang on, Rush...
...The first Asian donors entered their political lives in 1986 with the Indonesian Chinese Riady family...
...Rush recalled the liberal media monopoly that existed in the late 1960s and that now is sorely pressed by the emergence of talk radio, of various conservative journals and newspapers, and by the rise of Fox News...
...While First Lady, Hillary threw a book at the back of an agent’s head, as reported to me by White House military personnel...
...A year earlier the paper had to fire a New York Times Magazine writer after the magazine published his phony story...
...would be Rush Limbaugh for the benighted...
...Hillary, during the 1992 presidential campaign, “listened to a secretly recorded audiotape of a phone conversation of Clinton critics...
...Most of the aforementioned plagiarisms and hokedup stories took place in recent years...
...Missing Scandals WASHINGTON THE OTHER DAY WHILE LAYING DOWNmy thoughts on the 40 years of conservative journalism that I have undergone so painlessly since perpetrating my first published wisecrack in the autumn of 1967, I rang up El Rushbo for his collaboration...
...And I do not want to identify the famed columnists who have been caught making up stories...
...4) She is given to what the historian Richard Hofstadter termed “The Paranoid Style in American Politics...
...No modern American politician so high in American politics has so frequently manifested the paranoid style, a style Hofstadter associated generally with political extremists, generally extremists on the far right...
...Editorially, in February 2001, the New York Times asserted that “the former president… seemed to make a redoubled effort in the last moments of his presidency to plunge further and further beneath the already low expectations of his most cynical critics and most of his world-weary friends...
...Here are some flavorous reminders...
...Or how about the CNNTime story from the late 1990s claiming on doubtful evidence that U.S...
...Well, call me unfashionable, but I find the Clinton record alarming...
...Precisely what they mean by that I cannot tell you...
...Most glaringly, even the conservative columnists remain inert...
...Hillary Rodham Clinton in Her Way, their recent book on her...
...Their successful efforts to suppress the recent GQ story by Josh Green show that their bullying continues...
...Those are some of the unlovely things said about the Clintons by their friends...
...In 1998 she famously claimed that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” had mobilized against her and her husband...
...She has repeatedly thrown temper tantrums in front of staff, used foul language, and hit her husband, as reported by security and other staff members...
...The conservatives have adopted the position that all of the above is passé and to dwell on it is unseemly and awkward...
...Hillary’s temper is even more widely documented, by disaffected Secret Service agents, military aides, Arkansas state troopers, and others...
...It’s time for the Democratic Party to wise up...
...Mein Gott, where have they been all these years...
...John McCain’s temper have P U B L I C N U I S A N C E S I R . E m m e t t Ty r r e l l , J r . haunted his campaign...
...Ostracism would be a good first step...
...Actually, in looking back over the past 40 years of conservative journalism, no similar scandals shimmy and strut before my mind’s eye...
...some of Mr...
...Since the late 1980s I have kept a file on the frauds committed by journalists at major media organizations, and it makes grisly reading...
...In my recent book, The Clinton Crack-Up, I report that at least one Independent Counsel in the 1990s took to carrying a gun after being harassed on Washington streets...
...Bill Clinton should be cut completely loose...
...They have moved on in life...
...THE FAULT OF CONSERVATIVE JOURNALISTS IS, if you listen to our critics, that we have political opinions of a conservative nature...
...All of which brings me back to El Rushbo and his observance of the passing liberal monopoly in media...
...The Clintons have engaged in brute behavior for decades, much of it a matter of record...
...Send him packing...
...The New York Observer assessed Hillary’s election to the Senate “a terrible mistake,” adding that “Hillary Rodham Clinton is unfit for elective office...
...Though now after reviewing the comparative innocence of conservative journalism these past four decades as compared with the scores of blemishes on mainstream media’s record, I guess it could mean that I have not plagiarized or written bogus stories...
...The harassment was very similar to harassment my reporters experienced in Little Rock in the mid1990s...
...Yet, after every scandal, they forget their public denunciations of the Clintons...
...In fact, in reading over my files on plagiarism and fraud, both by journalists and by scholars, I felt a pang of sadness for some of the perpetrators—an unusual emotion for me, I admit, but there you have it...
...Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky, and Kathleen Willey are but the most famous of the many women who have been harassed by the Clintons’ private detectives...
...And the newspaper lamented that it might “never understand the process by which a departing president and his wife come to put sofas and flatware ahead of the acute sense of propriety that ought to go with high office...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
