From a comment at this post about the JFK assassination, which has drifted far off topic because an anonymous moron came in and asked if I thought that Clinton was involved with it (for the record, as far as I know, JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, unassisted).
Rand, it was clear from even a quick google search that everything you said about Newsweek, Isakoff, and Drudge were true, and I’m not disputing them. What I couldn’t figure out, from admittedly just a quick search, was _why_ Newsweek “spiked” the story, I assume by “spiked” you mean “suppressed”.
I saw lots of sources that suggested that they did because they were still building the story.
The bigger more interesting picture: I’m just a vanilla Hillary-Supporter, and my support Hillary is probably only of interest to you in that I’m similar to the vast majority of voters who simply aren’t knowledgeable about this stuff. Maybe unlike most voters, I read the NYT every day, and lately I’ve been reading politico.com obsessively. But I never hear about this stuff. I respect your opinion (this blog isn’t in the rat’s nest), and when you have time and interest, I would like to hear more about a) the worst things you suspect eithor of the Clintons did and why, and b) why in the world the NYT and the Washington Post (and Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, etc), don’t cover the evidence for these deeds. No hurry, although I hope you write about it (or link to it) before I vote on Feb 5th.
That was suggested by many (lots of things were always suggested by many to deny the press bias in favor of the Clintons in the nineties), but my understanding is that Isikoff thought it was ready to go, and expected it to, and it was spiked at the last minute.
As to why they did it, the media was always reluctant to print negative things about the Clintons, and when they did, they always gave prominence to their spinmasters to minimize the damage. Don Hewitt claimed credit for saving Clinton’s candidacy with the Sixty-Minutes puff piece on the “problems with their marriage” after the Gennifer Flowers audio tapes surfaced. In one particularly shameful episode, when Gary Aldrich came out with a damaging book about them
My explanation for why Matthews/Russert et al don’t cover them now is that they consider them old news, and if they did, they’d have to explain why they didn’t cover them then. They didn’t cover them then because they didn’t want to. As I said, they’re Democrats, and they (inexplicably, to me) loved the Clintons.
Among the worst things that I suspect (but can’t prove) the Clintons of are selling technology to the Chinese for campaign donations, and having associates who were willing to kill people that they found inconvenient to them, even if they themselves maintained plausible deniability.
For example, I don’t believe that Vince Foster died in Fort Marcy Park, and if he killed himself, that’s not where it happened. But if it didn’t happen there, there’s no reason to believe that he killed himself at all. Vince Foster was convicted of murdering Vince Foster with a botched investigation, and no trial. There’s an abundance of evidence that he didn’t die in Fort Marcy Park, in the Starr Report itself, particularly the Knowlton appendix, which no one in the press mentions, or read. I have no idea who killed him, or why he was killed, but I think that the Clintons know, particularly given all their suspicious behavior in the aftermath, moving files out of his office, the mysterious “finding” of the torn-up “suicide” note, etc.
I also believe them both guilty of multiple cases of obstruction of justice, in Whitewater and other matters. This was proven in the Lewinsky case, in which Bill himself intimidated and bribed witnesses, and suborned perjury. I believe them guilty of having the FBI prosecute innocent people simply so that they could give their own cronies their jobs (Travelgate). I suspect that they had the IRS go after their political enemies, as Nixon was accused of attempting to do. I don’t think that the FBI files were simply a mistake.
I believe that Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick (and suspect that he has raped others), and that Hillary knows that, and helped to intimidate her from coming forward at the time, just as she was behind the “nuts and sluts” attacks on Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey and Dollie Kyle Browning, and Monica Lewinsky, and any other woman who potentially had damaging information about him.
There has been a lot written about this, both in dead tree, and on the web, but most people simply dismiss it as “Clinton hatred.”
Oh, and before the usual idiots chime in saying that they are “innocent until proven guilty,” that is a standard that applies only in a court of law, not the court of public opinion. I have much more than adequate evidence (though no “proof,” partly because they were so good at destroying evidence and intimidating/bribing witnesses) for all of my suspicions. If they are never held to account for them, that will be an injustice, but it won’t change my opinion.
And for “Hillary Supporter,” who asked the question, I don’t have time to go over all this again, but there are excellent books out there on the subject, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
If you think that having information like this is important as to how you vote in the Democratic primary, then I suggest that you check it out. One of the reasons that I am not a Democrat is that most Democrats don’t want to know, and if they do know, they don’t care.