The Clinton administration figured out how the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer worked at least eight years (pdf) before I did. They obviously had a greater need to know. I had no idea that bullshit that was unfit to print was first laundered through the British tabloid press, then to the American right-wing press, then to the mainstream American press, and finally to the congressional committees responsible for government oversight.
I discovered that this was going on in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I first wrote about here in 2005, shortly after I launched this blog. But it was something that had been established in Clinton’s first term, even before the launch of Fox News. In fact, the existence of Fox News basically eliminated the need for this tactic, but that doesn’t mean that it went away. It was still a major tool in the pro-invasion toolbox in the 2002-3 period, and it probably is still utilized from time to time.
Also of interest is that the same people behind the Obama birth certificate insanity were behind the Vince Foster conspiracies.
Even in 2003, this was hardly news. The British stovepipe was covered at length in Conason and Lyons, The Hunting of the President, had this down cold in 2001, and the authors’ web and magazine works (New York Observer, Salon, Arkansas Times…) for five, six years before that.
I had read that Lyons/Conason book and recommended it to others, but I didn’t (and don’t) remember the British connection. I think it was hardly common knowledge.
I”ve been noticing the British thing without knowing that’s what it is, in stories surfacing first in the Daily Mail or Mail on Sunday on how Obama and Lugar plotted to disarm Ukraine in 2005, or Costco classifies the Bible as fiction. Pretty weird.
Since this will continue if Hillary is the next president, what happens then? Is she going to chase the mythical bipartisanship nonsense? Will Sean Insanity and BillO the Clown be arrested and put in the stockade so we can throw tomatoes and eggs at them? Given what you write just gives us more questions than answers. Given the above, who did Clinton think he was impressing with “welfare reform” and the Sister Souljah crap?
Who did he think he was impressing? Well, I am going to take a wild guess and say that the answer starts with white and ends with people.
In Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia.
The Clinton ’08 campaign didn’t grasp that voting demographics (and electoral college geography) had shifted, and were still playing Democratic plantation politics of the post VRA era. Right up until Bill’s disastrous South Carolina visit.
You’d hope they’d learn something from it, but I fear they’re hopelessly stuck in a electoral orthodoxy twenty years past relevance.
Well, one thing that’s happened in the meanwhile is Barack Obama. I’m curious to see what kind of role he takes after his presidency, but one way or another his influence will be immense. And one effect of that influence would be to make it impossible for any Democratic candidate to try to pander to white xenophobes.
The role of advertisers’ support for Right wing radio hosts has fled and the hole in finances plugged by the Koch brothers. Will that mean a more direct line for the conspiracy spin machine or will the FEC step up to the plate and recognize the conflict of interest?
It’s been pointed out that Beck has been protecting his empire by calling out the violence at Bundy’s BLM standoff. But then again the Blaze is hedging this by giving voice to Dana Loesch to exercise her conspiracy gin up.
If at this point the FEC disappeared would anyone notice?
Interesting that Beck has gone CYA on the Bundy issue considering that they share a religion.
A reason why Beck might be seeking some distance from Bundy (ya know just in case things violent)
Bundy has been waving around a NCCS published copy of the Constitution.
It’s on the radar of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I thought Skousen was Beck’s hero. Or am I getting the various wingnuts, and their heroes, mixed up?
That’s why it’s interesting to see him back off from rabid support of Bundy.
How interesting that they mention Richard Mellon Scaife as part of the chain. One of the reasons I did not vote for Hillary in 2008 was her courting of Scaife and other conservatives during her primary campaign. There’s a certain logic to her toadying given what they knew about him. However, it makes me even more leery of any 2016 HC candidacy.
I can’t even believe it took you that long to figure it out.
Sigh.
Sorta disappointed in you BooMan.
I figured out something was fishy when the Paula Jones story went mainstream outside of an election year. Genifer Flowers was a transparent election stunt that failed to suppress the Clinton vote enough.
When they then rolled out Travelgate, you suspected there was a rat and then Gingich started mouthing off and you knew it. And then came Whitewater and the first independent counsel found nothing there and the GOP found a way to get a second independent counsel Ken Starr appointed. And the leaks to the Wall Street Journal and the pressure no doubt got to Vince Foster; little did he know that there was a snitch in his very own office.
From the slightly redacted Wikipedia entry:
Her job by the way was in the administrative staff of the White House Counsel.
Were there more than Republicans going after Clinton?
The Vince Foster story was just looney and continued to be pushed by the mainstream media. And then it was going nowhere.
So you have the lesbian dominatrix Hillary and the Clinton sex parties blasted across the web and through the supermarket tabloids.
So naive Monica Lewinsky arrives in July 1995, and Linda Tripp with the help of Lucianne Goldberg sets Lewinsky up to be a honeypot sting. It takes only to November for Linda Tripp to get Lewinsky and Clinton going. And then she conveniently gets Lewinsky to wear a wire and not wash a soiled dress.
Yep, it was a set-up all the way including the right-wing Wurlitzer framing of what absent it people would have seen through as dirty politics aiming to revenge Nixon’s forced resignation from office.
And if unredacted and unshredded documents from the George H. W. Bush library are ever found, they would likely show that the entire operation was coordinated by a very sore loser.
What blows my mind is how relentlessly Hillary was mocked for discussing the “vast right-wing conspiracy” – when it was actually the exact literal truth. And even thought the Republicans now admit they’re running a vast right-wing conspiracy, I still occasionally see Hillary get mocked for saying it. Another case of being punished for being prematurely correct, I guess.