PRESSWATCH: Vast Company
Taranto, James
P R e s s w a T c H Vast Company report of March 13, 2007: by James Taranto Early last year, when Hillary Clinton was the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee, she reprised her...
...Clinton and this magazine: The Clinton campaign is distributing an article in the American Spectator (!) about Obama foreign policy adviser Merrill McPeak and his penchant for… well, the article accuses him of being an anti-Semite and a drunk...
...The same day, Marc Ambinder, a blogger from the Atlantic, noted another connection between Mrs...
...To the New Hampshire Democratic party’s credit, they sued and the trail led all the way to the Republican National Committee,” Clinton said...
...Politics make strange bedfellows, and I’m not referring to that 5 2 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R J u n e 2 0 0 8 woman, Miss Lewinsky...
...Clinton would “dignify” the Spectator, as James Fallows puts it: If, as I assume is true based on Marc Ambinder’s report, the Hillary Clinton campaign is circulating a hit job from The American Spectator, this is simply disgusting.… That the Clinton family would dignify The American Spectator, of all publications, is astonishing to anyone who was alive in the 1990s.… I can easily believe that the Spectator would publish such an article...
...Clinton over Obama: “Agree with her or not, you at least know where she stands instead of being forced to wonder...
...Politics make strange bedfellows, and I’m not referring to that woman, Miss Lewinsky...
...Principally, the author takes McPeak to task for supporting a Middle East map that would require Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 border...
...That the Clinton team would circulate it I’m still trying to deal with...
...Clinton was trying to pull a vast one...
...the early ’90s investigating the Clintons for the Spectator, then contracted to write a biography of Mrs...
...So if anybody tells you there is no vast rightwing conspiracy, tell them that New Hampshire has proven it in court,” she said...
...In this picture, she is seen talking to none other than Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the paper and the man who once said that the death of Vincent Foster was the “Rosetta stone” of the Bill Clinton administration...
...Brock jumped ship and became a liberal Democrat...
...The article, by Robert M. Goldberg, had appeared the previous day on the Spectator’s website...
...How about a picnic along the railroad tracks leading to the Mena airport...
...They had their magazine, we had ours...
...Clinton was the Democratic underdog, chasing Barack Obama’s car...
...Perhaps because Tyrrell never saw the Spectator solely as a journalistic enterprise...
...Years later his letters to Ronald Reagan (“we shall continue the good fight with you”) suggested that his views had not changed...
...On March 25, Byron York of National Review noted on The Corner, an NR blog, that Mrs...
...As is National Review, which is generally considered part of the “conservative movement,” and which now employs the author of the Atlantic article on the Spectator— Byron York, a former Spectator staffer...
...A few days after meeting Mrs...
...She asserted the conspiracy is alive and well, and cited as proof the Election Day 2002 case of phone jamming in New Hampshire, a case in which two Republican operatives pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and a third was convicted...
...He also funded the so-called “Arkansas Project” at 5 0 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R J u n e 2 0 0 8 The American Spectator...
...into its sights...
...And if Obama was in the fast lane, Mrs...
...Clinton, calling her meeting with Scaife “utterly, hopelessly moronic”: Why not just schedule a photo op with Hillary leaning on a cannon in Fort Marcy Park...
...A few weeks later the Tribune-Review endorsed Mrs...
...Technically three men are enough to make a conspiracy, but still, Mrs...
...Still more years later, as he began the Arkansas Project, he felt the same way...
...Deja Reviews.pdf 1 2/4/08 1:41:58 PM J u n e 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 5 1 P R e s s w a T c H Tganging up on the Spectator, has a longtime left-wing group headed by David Brock, who spen e h t s i t a h . n w o d e m o c d l u o w g r o s r t t a M a i d Me w o n e r s r e g g o l e h t n A t o h ut ings he get tla even ic , m w ore o s co b nvolute d w . e It turns this Conspiracy e bu . ffs wondered on which T side of al t l rivalry with this magazine...
...It also makes the case that McPeak supports the WaltMearsheimer view of the influence of the Israeli lobby on foreign policy...
...This is known as “blogrolling...
...Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s “spiritual mentor...
...P R e s s w a T c H Vast Company report of March 13, 2007: by James Taranto Early last year, when Hillary Clinton was the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee, she reprised her decade-old theme of the “vast rightwing conspiracy...
...The online blurb reads, “The conservative magazine survived and prospered for twenty-five years before Bill Clinton came Reports of the Spectator’s death turned out to be exaggerated, but it is fair to say that in 2001 the magazine had fallen on hard times, in part as a result of a fruitless Clinton administration grand jury probe...
...By March 2008, things had changed...
...Well, this is an opinion magazine...
...Clinton, Scaife penned a column titled “Hillary, Reassessed,” in which he praised her “courage and confidence” as well as her “impressive command of many of today’s most pressing domestic and international issues...
...Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan, a selfdescribed “Clinton hater” who seems to be in love with Barack Obama, piled on, quoting Atlantic blogger James Fallows as calling the Clinton campaign’s distribution of the Spectator piece “simply disgusting,” although Sullivan added no commentary of his own...
...Since the early days in Bloom ington, Tyrrell had envisioned The Alterna tive as an adjunct to a political movement...
...In 2001 the Atlantic published an article titled “The Life and Death of The American Spectator...
...That’s right, Hillary Clinton had joined the right-wing conspiracy...
...on the other, Hillary Clinton, Dick Scaife, and The American Spectator...
...Clinton had shifted to the vast lane...
...James Taranto, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com...
...Brock was silent, but MediaMatters contributor Charles Pierce blasted Mrs...
...The book sold poorly...
...The Atlantic article also attributed the Spectator’s difficulties to the Arkansas Project: Why couldn’t [editor R. Emmett] Tyrrell see that the project—which involved nonjournalists and a private detective funded by a third party— was an extraordinarily dangerous proposition for any journalistic enterprise...
...Reports of the Spectator’s death turned out to be exaggerated, but it is fair to say that in 2001 the magazine had fallen on hard times, in part as a result of a fruitless Clinton administration grand jury probe...
...Clinton and produced a surprisingly sympathetic account...
...Pierce referred to the Rev...
...As everyone knows by now, Wright is an exponent of crackpot anti-American views...
...But many Demo crats have since insisted that [Mrs.] Clinton was correct, pointing to the well- documented efforts by conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife to fund a network of anti-Clinton investigations...
...As evidence of the affair eventually came to light, the comment was ridiculed...
...The 2008 race for the Democratic nomination produced quite a realignment...
...J a M e s T a R a n T o That wasn’t all...
...On one side we have Barack Obama, MediaMatters.org, the Atlantic, its bloggers, and Byron York...
...In this space (see Presswatch, TAS, May 2007), I quoted an Associated Press Clinton was first lady when she famously charged allegations of an affair between her then- president husband Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky were the result of a conservative conspiracy...
...Now the former President is rich and smiling, and the Spectator is dead...
...They had their party, we had ours...
...Here I should disclose that the Spectator is a member of the OpinionJournal Federation and that I considered reprinting the article in question as a Federation Feature on WSJ.com, but the tone was a bit harsh for my taste...
...Clinton had been sighted with one of the key conspirators: Here is a photo from Hillary Clinton’s visit today to the editorial board of the Pittsburgh TribuneReview...
...One man with courage makes a majority,” Andrew Jackson supposedly said...
...The Atlantic’s liberal bloggers were puffed up with outrage that Mrs...
...Maybe raise some money with a Find The Black Love Child contest?… I believe firmly that this was about injecting the Wright story more deeply into the sewers of the public dialogue through which Dickie Scaife has been spelunking for almost 20 years...
Vol. 41 • June 2008 • No. 5
