Strain at a Gnat...

"I know that my husband is a serial child molester and ax murderer, but he's so handy around the house I'm going to stick by him."

 

That's what I think of when I see all these defenders on the Internet of The Washington Times.  It talks a good conservative game and is quite good at pointing out the lesser crimes of Bill Clinton.   And now they’re even praising the deplorable, long-time-Clinton-protecting Washington Post because it seems to have decided to bring the first philanderer down over the Lewinsky matter. These are precisely the same people who would have us believe that they have bought credibility for themselves by conceding the obvious, that there is a major cover-up going on over the death of Vincent Foster, a cover-up for which Bill Clinton is ultimately responsible.

How untenable is such a position is illustrated one more time by the lead editorial in today's Washington Times. It is about how the White House, in order to better defend Bill Clinton in his myriad scandals, has beefed up the West Wing counsel's office from 4 to 34 employees. The $2.36 million in salaries that they cost now makes up almost 10 percent of the $24.3 million budget for White House salaries. It is a deplorable use of taxpayer money, indeed, but speaking of deplorable, consider their third paragraph:

The misuse of the White House counsel began from the very beginning, under Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, when former Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster spent his time at the White House working on the Clintons' taxes and on Whitewater issues. It continued when Mr. Nussbaum made its first order of business to run interference for the Clintons with law enforcement officials looking into Mr. Foster's July 1993 suicide. Mr. Nussbaum accompanied Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Margaret Williams, to Mr. Foster's office the night he killed himself—the same night a Secret Service officer saw Mrs. Williams carrying papers from the office. Mr. Nussbaum subsequently refused to allow high ranking Justice Department officials to participate in going through other papers Mr. Foster left behind at the White House.

There you have further proof that The Washington Times is as much a participant in the cover-up of the murder of Vincent Foster as is Bill Clinton, and yet those who wear their Clinton opposition on their sleeves relentlessly attack me because I attack The Washington Times.

I am reminded of the penultimate paragraph in Dorothy Gallagher's book All the Right Enemies, the Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca (an important 1943 assassination in New York City with many of the same suspects as in the murder of JFK):

"(Gaetano) Salvemini returned to Italy after the war, as Tresca had hoped to do. There he denounced both the United States and the Soviet Union for cooperating in policies that, he said, were designed to keep Italians "obedient" to the many "stupidities" of their past. People complained that Salvemini did not understand Italy any longer, that he had been too long in exile, that he expected too much. To these criticisms he replied, ‘My only rule is to behave so that I don't have to spit at myself when I shave in the morning.'"

Were they to adhere to the Salvemini standard, there would have to be a lot of foul, dripping bathroom mirrors at the homes of many regular posters on alt.current-events.Clinton.Whitewater.

David Martin

March 12, 1998

 

 

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