In light of how various conservatives and their media accomplices are trying to conceal their roles in enabling the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (actions which cost between 100 and 400 Iraqi lives for every American life lost), we see many of the same figures from the 1990s reviving the lies they told about Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton, as part of the attempt to engineer a right-wing coup (hence the term "CoupGate"). Furthermore, I anticipate that many figures who made their bones writing anti-Clinton hit pieces will soon try for another shot at monetizing Clinton hatred.
The purpose of this diary series is to serve as a repository for the materials needed to fight the revived smears, and to if possible forestall the revival of those smears still dormant.
Follow me below the orange Arkansas Project cartouche for the first installment.
One of the more nominally reputable persons caught up in CoupGate (besides of course NYT big dog Howell Raines, whose weird hate-on for the Clintons caused him to eagerly promote most every wacked-out anti-Clinton mudball fed him by the Arkansas Project via Jeff Gerth et al) is a fellow named James B. Stewart, who currently holds down a gig at (where else?) the Clinton-hating New York Times.
Mr. Stewart, whose many career accomplishments include winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1988, has written a number of books over the past three decades. One of his most famous - or rather, infamous - books is a tome called Blood Sport, which relies heavily on the questionable word of James McDougal, a former friend of the Clintons who talked them into investing nearly everything they had at the time into his doomed "Whitewater" land deal, and who was known to have serious mental issues for which Ken Starr denied him his necessary medication.
McDougal was so ill, both physically and mentally (he eventually died of heart disease in a jail cell), that he was never called to testify before a grand jury as even Ken Starr knew that a rambling, incoherent McDougal on the stand would fatally undermine the OIC's already-weak case. But that didn't stop James B. Stewart from using McDougal's bipolar-fueled bursts of bitter word salad as the basis for his depiction of Hillary Clinton. Here's how Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, in their book The Hunting of the President (which is, along with Fools for Scandal, essential reading for those who want to know the truth about the US press corps in the 1990s), describe their take on Stewart's take on page 209 (hardcover edition):
Stewart's worst blunders appear to stem from his decision to accept Jim McDougal's word as truth and his disinclination to offend any important Washington reporter. Thus a Pulitzer-Prize-winning financial journalist whose previous book had pilloried junk-bond savant Michael Milken somehow failed to see any problems in McDougal's handling of Whitewater. He ignored the Pillsbury Report's findings altogether, along with McDougal's secretive sale of Whitewater's assets for pennies on the dollar, his elaborate fiscal juggling act, his misleading letters and deceptive assurances to the Clintons.
Stewart's determination to be like the Kewl Kidz tearing into the Clintons led him to make even bigger boners -- boners that the documentation in his own book revealed to be such. Again, here's Conason and Lyons (emphases mine):
Stewart began his whirlwind publicity tour telling interviewers that his book hadn't uncovered any actual crimes by the president and his wife, merely bad character and political opportunism. But surely, Ted Koppel pressed during Stewart's March 11, 1996 appearance on Nightline, there was some problem that "will still come back to haunt the Clintons." Stewart affirmed that there was indeed, though the charge wouldn't be murder, perjury, fraud, or obstruction of justice. What Stewart had discovered at the root of Whitewater was "the Clintons' refusal to abide by financial requirements in obtaining mortgage loans." He told Koppel that in filling out a personal financial statement for a 1997 Whitewater loan, Hillary Rodham Clinton had "vastly inflated" the value of the property. "It is a crime," he added gravely, "to submit a false loan document." The first lady's guilt was "a question for a prosecutor and a jury to decide."
Again Stewart was badly mistaken. Down at the bottom of the allegedly felonious loan document, thoughtfully reproduced in Blood Sport's appendix, was the following warning, which Stewart apparently hadn't noticed: ("BOTH SIDES OF THIS DOCUMENT MUST BE COMPLETED.") And on the document's reverse side, available from the first lady's private attorney, was all the information the author had accused Hillary of omitting, written in her own quite legible hand. Stewart had simply failed to notice that his set of papers was missing that second page.
Oops.