Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (8 page)

The Clinton-defending carried over the next morning on ABC’s
This Week
with Sam Donaldson.
Weekly Standard
editor Bill Kristol brought up the story on the panel, freaking out everybody else there: “The story in Washington this morning is that
Newsweek
magazine was going to go with a big story based on tape-recorded conversations, which a woman who was a summer intern at the White House, an intern of Leon Panetta’s—”
²

Immediately, ABC commentator and former Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos jumped in, stating that the Drudge Report
had been “discredited.” This was a position crafted by the Clinton White House—Stephanopoulos had in fact called up the White House that morning and spoken with John Podesta, Clinton’s chief of staff, who told him, “The only way you can respond to it is to say, ‘This is Drudge, he’s a rumormonger… and you can’t believe what you read in the
Drudge Report
.”
³

Kristol responded, “No, no, no! They had screaming arguments in
Newsweek
magazine yesterday. They finally didn’t go with the story. It’s going to be a question of whether the media is now going to report what are pretty well-validated charges of presidential behavior in the White House—” At which point Sam Donaldson intervened and said that he didn’t think anyone should comment on the Drudge Report story until
Newsweek
had a chance to explain why it killed the story.
⁴

It was typical baffling-with-bullshit from the Democrat-Media Complex. Stephanopoulos, by the way, has now been rewarded by ABC News, his employer, with the false label of a neutral, objective reporter—not once, but twice—for thwarting legitimate stories. Early in the 1990s, Stephanopoulos acted to prevent the #1
New York Times
bestselling author Gary Aldrich from talking about what life was like coordinating FBI efforts to vet employees under Clinton. (Aldrich basically said it was like trying to vet a druggie fraternity house—a test I would have failed, but then, no sane person would have nominated me.) Sam Donaldson was saying it wasn’t even worth discussing until
Newsweek
got a chance to explain itself. The Democrat-Media Complex protects its own—and in the case of Stephanopoulos, it rewards former political hacks with journalistic firewall status. They get to pretend to be independent-minded people while actually acting as barbed-wire fences protecting their masters from insurgent campaigns from the right.

With
This Week
, the blackout had begun. Doyle McManus,
Washington bureau chief of the
Los Angeles Times
, said, “I looked at [the Drudge Report] and thought, ‘If Isikoff wants to pursue that story, he’s welcome to it.’ ”
⁵
On CBS’s
Face the Nation
and NBC’s
Meet the Press
, lawyers appeared to talk about Paula Jones’s legal strategy—and nobody mentioned the Drudge story. Tim Russert refused to touch it because, “There’s not enough there.” He asked James Carville, Clinton’s attack dog, whether there was “a pattern of behavior that those who support President Clinton are worried about?” then allowed Carville to respond, without rebuttal, “The president denies it, and… frankly, I know the president’s telling the truth.” That evening on CNN, the lead story was Clinton sexually harassing… Kathleen Willey, a story that was six months old. Carole Simpson on ABC’s
World News Tonight
led off with the story that Paula Jones was skipping out of DC. Sam Donaldson, the Clinton defender, spun the Clinton deposition as a Clinton win, somberly intoning, “Behind the scenes, the spinning of the story continued. Paula Jones and her group dined Saturday night with champagne, professing to be pleased with the way things had gone. Friends of the President one-upped that by telling
Time
magazine the Clinton camp is ecstatic about the way the deposition went.”
⁶

The media ran from the story in one mass stampede.

And the next night, at 11:52, Drudge released Lewinsky’s name.

And for the next day and a half, the media maintained their silence. Finally, on Wednesday morning, perhaps sensing that with the name out there the dam would burst soon, the
Washington Post
ran a story. The
Los Angeles Times
followed suit. At 8 p.m. on Wednesday night, Michael Isikoff’s four-thousand-word piece on the Lewinsky scandal posted at
Newsweek
’s website—or rather, at the AOL website, since
Newsweek
still didn’t have its own website.
⁷

By the time the media finally broke their blackout, it had been all day Sunday, all day Monday, and all day Tuesday. That was
four
days
of the story existing in the undermedia—the Internet and talk radio—and Drudge reporting on the story one bit at a time, giving more and more evidence, messaging, “We’ve got the goods.” Even as the media were finally starting to recognize the story, Drudge was breaking new ground. That Wednesday, he ran a headline: REPORT: LEWINSKY OFFERED U.N. JOB; INVESTIGATORS: DNA TRAIL MAY EXIST. And just to stick the knife in, he added the notation, CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS. The report revealed that “investigators have become convinced that there may be a DNA trail that could confirm President Clinton’s sexual involvement with Lewinsky…. Tripp has shared with investigators a conversation where Lewinsky allegedly confided that she kept a garment with Clinton’s dried semen on it—a garment she said she would never wash!”
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It was a media frenzy by now. Four days after the story broke, and after thinking the story had been killed by George Stephanopoulos, Hillary Clinton had to appear with Matt Lauer on the
Today
show to try to put the scandal to rest. On January 27, 1998, an unnaturally balanced Matt Lauer grilled Hillary Clinton over her husband’s reported indiscretions. First she blamed the “vast right-wing conspiracy” to get her husband. Lauer asked her whether the charges “came as big a shock to you as anyone.” The rest was history:

But there wasn’t just smoke. There
was
fire. It wasn’t just a triumph for Drudge. It was a triumph for the truth-seeker seeking to challenge the insurmountably complex media behemoth that, over time, had tried to kill a legitimate story for political purposes. Drudge leaked it little by little by little. And when they started to attack him over the course of the next few months, that was when Drudge dropped the cigar story as a “fuck you” to the Democrat-Media Complex. On August 22, 1998, Drudge bombshelled, SHE HAD SEX WITH CIGAR: MEDIA STRUGGLES WITH SHOCKING NEW DETAILS OF WHITE HOUSE AFFAIR. Again, he headlined that the story contained graphic descriptions. “In a bizarre daytime sex session, that occurred just off the Oval Office in the White House, President Clinton watched as intern Monica Lewinsky allegedly masturbated with his cigar. It has been learned that several major news organizations have confirmed the shocking episode and are now struggling to find ways to report the full Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton grossout.”
¹⁰

Clinton’s carefully crafted media defense was going down, and Drudge was dismantling it as brilliantly as anyone in media history.

But the Democrat-Media Complex isn’t enormously powerful because they give up easily. Over the course of the next eight months, they took an open-and-shut case of sexual harassment, of perjury, of intimidation of witnesses—they took that epic slam-dunk
and used a coordinated media propaganda campaign of monumental proportions to split the country apart. They went after all their political enemies to try to draw blood regardless of what the infraction was; they used the media, a critical part of the Complex, to legitimate it. Over the next eight months, I learned all I needed to know about the ethics of journalism. The rules were created by the left to be applied exclusively as a weapon against the right.

For the next eight months, the Clinton administration and their media parrots devised a strategy that assessed, through polling, every possible aspect of the story.

They asked the American people: “What do you feel about the intimidation of Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp not to testify truthfully in the Paula Jones civil trial?”

“We don’t like that.”

“What do you think about the president lying under oath?”

“We don’t like that.”

“What do you think about the president lying to Donna Shalala and the rest of his cabinet?”

“We don’t like that.”

“What do you think about the exploration of the president’s sex life?”

“We don’t like that.”

“Aaaaah,” said the Democrat-Media Complex. “Good! There’s our wedge.”

They crafted a wedge from Clinton’s sex life and they went to their messengers in the intellectual circles to shove that wedge between Americans’ shoulder blades. They knew that most Americans still thought that Clinton was a liar and a sexual predator, but they knew that if they could only convince Americans that “everybody lies about sex,” everything would turn out fine for their man, no matter how hypocritical and manipulative they were being to save him.

They started with the classic leftist tactic: the politics of personal destruction applied to Lewinsky. This effort was spearheaded by Sidney Blumenthal, a former mainstream media journalist. According to Christopher Hitchens, who testified before Congress in 1999, Blumenthal attended a Washington luncheon soon after the revelations broke, at which “Mr. Blumenthal stated that… the President was ‘the victim’ of a predatory and unstable sexually demanding young woman.” In other words, Blumenthal used his Rolodex to distribute the dirt that the reason Bill Clinton was in the proximity of Monica, with whom he “did not have sexual relations,” was because she was a stalker.
¹¹
In fact, Blumenthal used the word
stalker
several times during a March 19, 1998, luncheon at the Occidental restaurant in Washington, DC, explaining that “this version of the facts was not generally understood.”
¹²

Blumenthal later blamed Lewinsky herself for this version of the story; in his book
The Clinton Wars
, he stated, “Beginning with Isikoff’s publication of the Talking Points on January 21, in which Lewinsky called herself a ‘stalker,’ newspapers around the country and all the television networks and cable stations expanded upon the stalker theme.”
¹³
Except that only Blumenthal took that claim seriously enough to actually label Lewinsky a stalker in the menacing rather than colloquial sense. According to Hitchens, Blumenthal told Hitchens’s wife that he only gave credence to the “stalker” account because “the President told me.” He then followed up that stunning admission with an even worse admission: “I could go to jail for what I’m doing now.”
¹⁴
Apostates like Hitchens are given the most egregious treatment by the Complex; the Clintonistas labeled him a drunk and a traitor to the cause.

The next step was for Blumenthal to recruit some of his intellectual friends to write that the Republicans were somehow engaging in a “sexual inquisition,” despite the fact that it was Clinton
who had made the details of his sexual peccadilloes relevant by committing perjury about them. Blumenthal instructed friends of Clinton’s to write long pieces that all had the same meme: that the repressed conservatives were obsessed with a president who had a “European” view of sex. These pieces opened the door for the academic and pop-cultural worlds to begin echoing the slogan: “It’s just about the sex.”

One of Blumenthal’s buddies was Colombian Nobel Prize–winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez. On January 30, 1999, García Márquez penned a piece for the UK
Guardian
defending Clinton. The title of the piece: “Why My Friend Bill Had to Lie.” García Márquez began by discussing Clinton’s magnetism, then his status as a cultural icon: “At 49, he was a glorious survivor of the generation of ’68, someone who had smoked dope and sung along to the Beatles, someone who had taken to the streets in protest at the Vietnam war.” What any of this had to do with Clinton ejaculating his DNA into and onto a White House intern was left unspoken.

At last, García Márquez tackled the question of the hour: why did Clinton have to lie? Clinton had to lie, García Márquez said, because, as Clinton himself told García Márquez, “My only enemy is right-wing religious fundamentalism.” Then García Márquez got into full bore: “Is it right that this exceptional human man should have his place in history distorted because he couldn’t find a secluded spot in which to make love?… The President only wanted to do what the common man has done behind his wife’s back since the world began. Puritan stupidity did not only refuse him that, it withheld his right to deny it.” But what of his perjury? García Márquez dismissed it out of hand: “Surely it is more dignified to perjure yourself in defence of carnal desire, than to condemn love altogether?”

Clinton was innocent, said García Márquez. The right wing was to blame, “because Puritanism is an insatiable vice that feeds off its own shit. The entire impeachment process has been a sinister plot by fanatics for the personal destruction of a political adversary whose grandeur they could not bear.” According to García Márquez, Clinton’s enemies were straight from Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
. And not only that—they were secret racists! “Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize winner and one of the greatest writers of this dying century, sums it up in one inspired flourish. ‘They have treated Clinton as if he was a black president.’ ”
¹⁵