Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Read online

  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

  García Márquez was just one of Clinton’s “highbrow” defenders recruited by Blumenthal. Another was Alan Dershowitz, who wrote an entire book defending Clinton, entitled Sexual McCarthyism. On NBC, he said, “Remember, it was sexual McCarthyism that J. Edgar Hoover used to try to get Martin Luther King.” William Styron, author of Sophie’s Choice, focused on the sophisticated European reaction to the Lewinsky scandal: “I have been very intent on the reaction of Europeans, and they are almost uniformly devastated by this. They realize how deadly serious it is.” Jack Lang, former French minister of culture, joined the club: “Tyranny begins when one power, one church, one party introduces itself into the private life of its citizens.”16

  The coincidence of messaging was too perfect not to be orchestrated from the top. This had been a story about Clinton lying to the American people, forcing witnesses into silence, and breaking faith with the constitutional order. Now it was a story about evil Republican oppressors with secret sexual issues trying to drag Bill Clinton’s open-minded sex life out of the closet and thrust it upon the American people. Suddenly, Clinton was a hero, and the Republicans trying to impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors were the villains. It was brilliant.

  To this point, the media were doing what they had always done. Though left of center historically, they did have some boundaries of civility. But now, in 1998, the Clinton administration, through its attempts to save a presidency at any and all costs, experimented with the New Media, particularly the well-funded, San Francisco–based upstart Salon.com. There, government and a publication with nothing to lose—and an ideological kinship—conspired to do things that were previously considered off-limits.

  It started with the Clinton apparatchiks hiring private detectives to dig up information about their political enemies. In February 1998, private detective Terry Lenzner, along with Blumenthal, was subpoenaed before a federal grand jury for trying to find damaging material on Kenneth Starr’s prosecutors. Clinton’s attorneys acknowledged that Lenzner was on their payroll. In Washington, he was called the head of “Bill Clinton’s private CIA.”17 Kenneth Starr, who stayed admirably quiet during the entire Clinton investigation, released a statement: “This office has received repeated press inquiries indicating that misinformation is being spread about personnel involved in this investigation. We are using traditional and appropriate techniques to find out who is responsible and whether their actions are intended to intimidate prosecutors and investigators, impede the work of the grand jury, or otherwise obstruct justice.”

  Naturally, Lenzner played victim, and the White House, according to the New York Times, “denounced the questioning of Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Lenzner as a vindictive campaign by Mr. Starr and his deputies to intimidate the President’s aides and associates and to chill the White House’s relations with the press. White House officials assailed Mr. Starr’s efforts to force Mr. Blumenthal to reveal his contacts with reporters as an assault on the Constitution.” Rahm Emanuel—yes, that Rahm Emanuel—came to the defense of All the President’s Thugs, jabbering, “There is no legal right he will not trample on in his partisan political pursuit of the President. When we have seen this abuse of power in other countries, we have been outraged. When you see it at home, you are left speechless. It is brazen abuse.”18 Nobody in the media thought to ask whether it was brazen abuse to hire detectives to pressure prosecuting attorneys.

  This, of course, was common practice for the Clintons. The Clintons had at one time or another hired Terry Lenzner, private eye Jack Palladino, and private eye Anthony Pellicano to do this kind of dirty work. Pellicano had allegedly been hired by Hillary in 1992 to discredit Gennifer Flowers. Palladino had been used to silence women during the campaign; the Clinton election committee paid him $93,000 to “investigate” the women. According to Betsey Wright, one of Clinton’s aides, Palladino even went so far as to create “an affidavit or two” linking Flowers to a conservative conspiracy.19

  It wasn’t surprising that the Clintons were able to come up with mud on their political opponents. Blumenthal then disseminated that information through his Rolodex as fast as he possibly could. Once they got to the bottom of the barrel in terms of mud, though—once they got to the material that no responsible editor could ever justify as mildly relevant to anything, the material that they couldn’t go to the Washington Post or the New York Times with—the Clintons went to their alternative medium.

  That alternative medium was Salon.com. The same Salon.com that is based in San Francisco, the Salon.com where all the editors knew the strategies of the alt weeklies I had read back in Venice—the “outing” and the politics of personal destruction. They knew those strategies because they were those strategies.

  It was Salon.com that first reported on August 5, 1998, that the Clinton administration was going to employ a “sexual scorched-earth plan…. Die-hard Clinton loyalists are spreading the word that a long-ignored but fearsome tactic has now resurfaced as an element in the President’s survival strategy: The threat of exposing the sexual improprieties of Republican critics, both in Congress and beyond, should they demand impeachment hearings in the House. ‘We’re talking about the Doomsday Machine here,’ one close ally of the President told Salon, alluding to the unstoppable chain of retaliatory nuclear strikes in the movie Dr. Strangelove. ‘Once the Doomsday Machine is set in motion, there will be no stopping it. The Republicans with skeletons in their closets must assume everything is known and will come out. So the question is: Do they really want to go there?’ ”20

  On September 16, 1998, David Talbot, a Hollywood kid (his father, Lyle, headed up the Screen Actors Guild) and San Francisco journalist, ran a story on Salon.com about Rep. Henry Hyde, head of the House Judiciary Committee. The story had nothing to do with Hyde’s qualifications. It had to do with an affair Hyde had had thirty years before with Cherie Snodgrass. Talbot made clear that Hyde was being “outed” as a decades-old adulterer because “Hyde’s committee will decide whether the adulterous affair President Clinton carried on with a White House intern, and his efforts to keep it hidden, should be referred to the House of Representatives for impeachment proceedings.” Hyde admitted the 1965–1969 affair to Salon.com, but pointed out how irrelevant the story was to anything at issue in the Clinton investigation: “The statute of limitations has long since passed on my youthful indiscretions…. The only purpose for this being dredged up now is an obvious attempt to intimidate me and it won’t work.” Salon.com even tracked down Cherie’s adult daughter, who made clear that she was speaking out because of Hyde’s role in the Clinton impeachment: “My mother originally didn’t want me to say anything to the press. But she’s just so fed up with [Hyde], with how two-faced he is…. She hates his anti-abortion stuff, and all the family values stuff. She thinks he’s bad for the country, he’s too powerful and he’s hypocritical.”21

  The editors at Salon.com knew that the Hyde story was totally extraneous to the Clinton situation, and that it was a gratuitous smear designed to get Hyde and the rest of the constitutionally mandated impeachment managers to back off Clinton and, more important, to intimidate others from pursuing an honest outcome. Because Salon.com was flacking for the Clinton White House and appeared to be getting their scoops from them, they felt it necessary to disassociate themselves so that Clinton wouldn’t feel the blowback: “The White House had nothing whatsoever to do with any asp
ect of this story. We did not receive it from anyone in the White House or in Clinton’s political or legal camps, nor did we communicate with them about it.” Sure.

  The truly incredible part of the Salon.com editorial was its explanation of why it would release the information. Where the mainstream media had turned it down flat—even they wouldn’t stoop this low, at least not yet—Norm Sommer, the supposed source of the scoop, had tried to pitch the story to the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Miami Herald—Salon ran with it. The question, again, was why. “In a different and better world, we would not have released this story. Throughout the tragic farce of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, we have strongly argued that the private lives of all Americans, whether they are public figures or not, should remain sacrosanct…. But Clinton’s enemies have changed the rules. In the brave new world that has been created by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the private lives of public figures are no longer off limits,” the editors wrote. This was patent nonsense, of course. If Salon wanted the private lives of public figures to remain private, the worst way to achieve that was by releasing the private details of Henry Hyde’s thirty-years-past sexual liaisons.

  The real reason was easy: Salon released the information in order to decimate Clinton’s detractors. Salon’s editors explained on the site: “Aren’t we fighting fire with fire, descending to the gutter tactics of those we deplore? Frankly, yes. But ugly times call for ugly tactics. When a pack of sanctimonious thugs beats you and your country upside the head with a tire-iron, you can withdraw to the sideline and meditate, or you can grab it out of their hands and fight back.”22

  With Salon.com tearing the lid off of a can of Ebola bacteria, the Hustler publisher Larry Flynt got busy, too. The year before, Hollywood had produced an ode to Flynt starring Woody Harrelson, The People vs. Larry Flynt, which had antihero Woody telling America, “I think the real obscenity comes from raising our youth to believe that sex is bad and ugly and dirty. And yet it is heroic to go spill guts and blood in the most ghastly manner in the name of humanity. With all the taboos attached to sex, it’s no wonder we have the problems we have. It’s no wonder we’re angry and violent and genocidal.”

  So Larry Flynt, now somehow a First Amendment icon getting a pass from the ladies of NOW, decided on October 4, 1998, to offer $1 million to anyone who would reveal damaging sexual information about congressional Republicans in an ad in the Washington Post. His purpose was to defend Clinton, just like his friends and allies at Salon.com. “No matter what channel I turned the television to, it was Bash Clinton Night,” Flynt wrote in his autobiography, Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth. “Everybody wanted his head on a platter and I thought it was grossly unfair. He hadn’t robbed the country’s treasury. He hadn’t committed treason. At worst, he got a blow job in the Oval Office, and like any married man caught under those circumstances, he lied to cover his ass.”23

  Larry, in full political operative mode, went on: “We received some very colorful leads that we ended up not pursuing,” he wrote in 2004, “because our interest was exclusively in finding and exposing the hypocrites. I wasn’t interested in trashing somebody’s sex life just because they were having an affair or they were into something kinky. I only wanted to expose people who were… crucifying Clinton for doing the same thing they were.”24

  The first person Flynt exposed was presumptive Speaker of the House Bob Livingston (R-LA), who Flynt revealed had serially cheated on his wife. Roll Call (the Capitol Hill newspaper) picked up the story right away.

  Next was Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA). Flynt said that Barr had paid for his wife’s abortion and committed adultery. Barr had never denied committing adultery, but he did deny that he had encouraged his wife to have an abortion. Flynt said that Barr had committed perjury, too—except that Barr had refused to answer questions, which is not the same as committing perjury. Barr’s scandal was covered everywhere.

  As this tactic gained momentum, the mainstream media finally decided it was safe to get on board. Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-ID) admitted to the Idaho Statesman that she had had a longtime sexual relationship with an associate named Vernon Ravenscroft. For being totally unjustifiable as a news story, this was probably the most egregious of these so-called exposés. Chenoweth was single and she wasn’t a member of Congress when she had the sexual liaison. Salon.com chortled, “To her regret, she discovered that making your private morality a story by questioning the President’s is a really bad campaign idea.”25

  Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) outed himself—he had fathered an illegitimate kid in the 1980s—in order to avoid being targeted by Vanity Fair. As Salon.com triumphantly wrote, “Unnerved by the thoroughness with which independent journalist Russ Baker and others have been probing his apparently active life, Burton outed himself. Believing Baker’s piece was going to be in the upcoming Vanity Fair, Burton decided to cryptically pseudo-confess a slew of past sins with a kind of preemptive strike.”26

  Americans thought all this was disgusting, just like I did. A poll in the Washington Post showed that only 40 percent of Americans approved of Flynt’s mission to reveal “extramarital affairs by Republicans.” Fifty-seven percent disapproved. Only 46 percent of Americans said the mainstream media should report such scandals, with 52 percent saying no.27

  For the Complex, this campaign was the John Philip Sousa “Stars and Stripes Forever”—the end of the fireworks display on the Fourth of July, when you hear pop! pop! pop!… except that when you looked around, you saw bodies strewn all over the place, the bodies of conservatives, and every one of their closeted peccadilloes smeared across their corpses. I looked around and said to myself, What the hell just happened?

  The Republican Party itself refused to acknowledge that it was happening. While the countermedia—the Drudge Report and Lucianne Goldberg and Rush Limbaugh—were leading the charge against the campaign, the Republicans, except for those few people who went about their business pursuing the articles of impeachment, ran for the hills. The institutionalized conservative movement and specifically Newt Gingrich were conspicuously silent. They knew they were in no position to be going after Clinton for impeachment, even though it was on legal grounds, because they had allowed the left to turn the media narrative into one of sexual inquisition. They didn’t want to put themselves in harm’s way. The people pushing for impeachment were like today’s Tea Partiers, men and women who were pushing their representatives, telling them over and over again, “No, you guys have to have courage, and if you’re going to be in the battle, you have to know you’re going to take bullets, too.”

  It was watching the Republican Party run from their responsibility to their constituents in order to save themselves that caused me to cultivate a more limited respect for them. I looked at the one guy who stood up, knowing he’d be isolated, Rep. Jim Rogan (R-CA), and they decimated him even as Republicans fled around him. Rogan was the American dream—a guy who had spent time on welfare, who raised himself up and eventually ended up in Congress—and they destroyed him unmercifully. The Clintonistas, as they are commonly referred to for their revolutionary media battle tactics, put a hit out on Rogan, using outsized resources to target him in his next election. The payback is not just payback—again, it is a warning to anyone else that politics to these people is a blood sport and if you cross them, you will pay dearly. This was when I recognized that the next Republican president was going to be isolated for attack. The message was that the Complex still controlled the big guns, and if you punched them, they’d punch back twice as hard. George W. Bush’s fate was preordained.

  To the nation, the media’s Clinton-created response to the Lewinsky scandal was a turning point. They had been the Edward R. Murrow wannabes, the guys who idolized Woodward and Bernstein. Now they were open partisan hacks digging up as much dirt as possible, whenever possible.

  That became even more clear to me two years later, when, absent the “ugly times require ugly measures” excuse, Salon.com ran a piece by Dan Savage, the radi
cal gay-left columnist from the Pacific Northwest. Savage infiltrated then–presidential candidate Gary Bauer’s Iowa campaign at the caucus level and, under the guise of being a conservative Christian, got a job for one month to help out.

  Savage described how, sick in bed watching television, he’d devised his plan. Watching Bauer on MSNBC, he saw Bauer state, “Our society will be destroyed if we say it’s okay for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman.” It isn’t exactly news to those of us who have lived outside San Francisco that religious conservatives feel this way.

  But it was news to Savage:

  In my Sudafed-induced delirium I decided that if it’s terrorism Bauer wants, then it’s terrorism Bauer is going to get—and I’m just the man to terrorize him. Naked, feverish and higher than a kite on codeine aspirin, I called the Bauer campaign and volunteered. My plan? Get close enough to Bauer to give him the flu, which, if I am successful, will lay him flat just before the New Hampshire primary. I would go to Bauer’s campaign office and cough on everything—phones and pens, staplers and staffers. I even hatched a plan to infect the candidate himself…. My plan was a little malicious—even a little mean-spirited—but those same words describe the tactics used by Bauer and the rest of the religious right against gays and lesbians.

  He spent the rest of the piece describing with glee how he applied his bodily fluids to the entire office—he licked “the front door, office doors, even a bathroom door… the staplers, phones and computer keyboards… the rims of all the clean coffee cups drying in the rack.” Then he chewed on a pen and handed it to Bauer.28

  This is not journalism. It’s not even the third-grade ramblings of a snot-nosed booger eater. It’s the vicious actions of a perverse, degraded, and disgusting human being. And Salon ran it without question. Why? “It was savage (no pun intended), powerful writing, Swiftian in its desperate, satiric outrage at anti-gay discrimination.”29 In other words, the ends justify the means.