American Politics Journal -- Much Ado About Toobin / Dollar Bill Botches Attempt at Failed FauxGate Revival



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Much Ado About Toobin:
Unindicted Co-Conspirator Media Elves Scurry to Do a "Hatfield" on Vast Conspiracy's Author
plus Dollar Bill Botches Attempt at Failed FauxGate Revival:
Bradley's Own 1996 Words Come Back to Haunt Him

by Tamara Baker

Jan. 17, 2000 -- ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) -- Gee, you'd think that Jeffrey Toobin had knocked over a bank or something.

Or tried to kill a former boss.

Even though Toobin leavens his new book Vast Conspiracy with the requisite amount of Clinton-bashing prescribed by the Hill-and-Bill-haters populating the Beltway Celebrity Press Corps -- and even though he doesn't go far enough in connecting the dots, despite laying out the evidence necessary to do so -- he still is trashed as a pro-Clinton "partisan" by people like The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani.

Yessiree Bob: Even at this late date, CelebCorps is still trying to pretend its collective crap doesn't stink, though they are in dire danger of being smothered by the mound of lies created by their own collusions and incompetence.

Mr. Toobin should have realized that this would happen, no matter how much CYA he did. Any attempt to report and aspect of CoupGate truthfully, no matter how mildly and tentatively, will automatically result in the anathematic thunderings of the Beltway press establishment, which has many, many years of rotten reporting to buttress.

I mean, he is on the staff at the Washington Post, home to Starr Stenographer Susan Schmidt and the former home of Starr's favorite tool, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff. The WP has been buddies with Ken Starr ever since he saved the paper's butt from a multi-million-dollar libel lawsuit in 1988; he's a Washington insider, one of their own, buddies with fellow Clinton-haters Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn.

It doesn't matter how abjectly Toobin grovels before the famously bad liar Paula Jones on Larry King Live. He will never be forgiven. No more hobnobbing with the Beltway elite for him. No more invites to any of Sally Quinn's booze-laden parties. No more chance to ride the fast track at the old WP. His career is toast.

Toobin should recognize this.

He should also acquire a spine. As well hang for a sheep as a lamb, old boy!

Meanwhile, he has blown a big hole in the Beltway consensus-trance illusion, a hole that will only grow in size as Joe Conason and Gene Lyons follow with their soon-to-be-released book, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This latter book is already at #280 on Amazon.com, and it won't be released yet for another couple weeks!

Again, Toobin's book may not be perfect. But it's good enough to put the fear of God into the lily-livered pack of incompetent partisans known as the Beltway Media Establishment.

And the best is yet to come.

I've been wondering for months now whether Bill Bradley is actually in league with the GOP, or whether he just thinks he can use them -- and their money, and their media kiss-ups -- for his own purposes.

I haven't quite made up my mind yet on that score, but every week now, the man who chums around with Republican supply-side proponent Jack Kemp has been doing yet another move that could well have scripted out by Republican National Committee Chair Jim Nicholson himself.

The latest Bradley dirty trick involves his bizarre revival of a particularly Gingrichian piece of projection: the claim that Al Gore, not the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater, first used Willie Horton to slime Michael Dukakis in the 1988 Presidential campaign.

The evidence for this claim is minimal to nonexistent.

What the Republicans, and now Bradley, did, was this: They took a brief, in-passing statement of Gore's referring to Dukakis' Masschusetts prisoner furlough program (a statement in which NO prisoners were mentioned by name), and conflate that into Bush campaign man Lee Atwater's finding Willie Horton and making him the centerpiece of a multi-million-dollar ad campaign directed against Dukakis.

The Republicans, of course, are having a field day: their message-board operatives are trumpeting Bradley's backstabbing like it was a Maidenform captured in a panty raid. And, of course, they certainly intend to use it against Gore in the general election.

However, the importance of Dollar Bill's knifing has declined somewhat over the past few days, thanks to a bit of detective work on the part of the Gore campaign. Gore's people found a passage in Bradley's book, Time Present, Time Past, in which the New Jersey senator wrote in 1996 that Gore had been careful as a 1988 candidate to discuss the Willie Horton case "without racializing it.''

Quite a different tune from the one Bradley's singing today. The difference: he wasn't running for President back then.

But Bradley got it wrong, even in 1996. Gore never did discuss the Willie Horton case, period.

Gore was the first candidate to mention Dukakis's furlough program, but only briefly. And he never named names.

He didn't keep harping on it, as did Lee Atwater. Nor did he hunt up furloughed prisoners who had committed crimes and turn them into media bogymen, as did Lee Atwater.

Lee Atwater is now dead, the victim of cancer. But Michael Dukakis, the other chief protagonist in the Willie Horton smear saga, is still alive and kicking.

Mr. Dukakis responded to Bradley trying to pin responsibility for the Horton smear onto Vice President Gore by promptly declaring his support for Big Al's candidacy. In fact, The Dukester is going to be actively campaigning for Gore.

He wouldn't be doing that if he really thought that Al Gore was the moral equivalent of Lee Atwater.