Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Right wing conspirators vastly promoted

Move along people! No history here! Sean Wilentz has some new perspectives on Blumenthal's book in (do the clickthrough) Salon:

Now an extraordinary thing has happened. Journalists from across the political spectrum are finally acknowledging that impeachment was mostly a partisan crusade on trumped-up charges to bring down a popular president. "From the viewpoint of history," the conservative Andrew Sullivan wrote recently in the New York Observer, "it's going to seem deranged." They have conceded that numerous allegations noisily leveled against Clinton and repeated endlessly in the news media of which they are a part have turned out to be bogus. [But]Even as journalists admit that Blumenthal has the goods to prove what a right-wing circus impeachment really was, they dismiss his revelations as score-settling, and worse -- as "history."

"History," forsooth? These crooks all got promotions and now they're running the country!

Four examples: One of the chief members of the "cabal of right-wing fanatics" was Theodore Olson, who, as counsel to the rabidly right-wing American Spectator, oversaw the notorious Arkansas Project that spread some of the most vicious lies about Clinton. (Olson was also one of the supposedly impartial "experts" who signed the petition attacking the historians in 1998.) In testimony before the Senate, Olson denied any involvement in the Project -- but that testimony was later fully documented as false. Yet Olson is now solicitor general of the United States ... Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas did more than any House Republican to coerce his colleagues into supporting impeachment. In 1998, Bret Kavanaugh ... coauthored the salacious so-called Starr Report .... Today, Bret Kavanaugh is deputy legal counsel at the Bush White House. In 1995, Michael Chertoff was chief counsel for Sen. Alphonse D'Amato's Senate Whitewater Committee that churned endless baseless allegations against the Clintons. Since then, he has ...been nominated by George W. Bush to the federal bench.

Gosh, wonder if our gutless Beltway Dems are filibustering Chertoff?