Tuesday, June 7, 2005

Hillary and the Wingnuts

The residents of FoxWorld and OxyContinLand are already starting to froth at the mouth over a possible run for President by Hillary Clinton: First detail on new anti-Hillary book is a lie Media Matters for America 06/06/05.

According to the June 5 edition of "Insider Report," NewsMax's e-mail-only newsletter, "NewsMax pundit" John LeBoutillier, a former Republican congressman, recently interviewed author Ed Klein about his book, The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President, which is excerpted in the July issue of Vanity Fair and is to be published by Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Putnam, June 21.

Michael Tomasky talks about author Ed Klein in this article - Michael Tomasky, "Reliving History", The American Prospect Online, Jun 6, 2005 - which is critical of the mainstream press (not just FOX!) in a way that even earned the praise of Bob "The Daily Howler" Somersby.   And that's not easy to do.

Who is John LeBoutillier, the interviewer?  Well, for one thing he's a NewsMax.com columnist.  And he's a former New York Congressman.

Jerry Lembcke in his book CNN's Tailwind Tale (2003) mentions LeBoutillier in passing as he is describing the "intimacy with the hard right" of Adm. Thomas Moorer, formerly head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. LeBoutillier obviously enjoys a similar kind of intimacy.

In June 1999 Moorer became a board member of NewsMax.com, an avowedly ultra-rightist Internet newsportal. From tht position, Moorer broadcast the John Birch Society's warning that the pending turnover of the Panama Canal to Panama in 2000 would open the way for communist China to gain influence in the Americas. In February 2000, Moorer was joined on the board by former New York congressman John LeBoutillier who NewsMax.com said atthe time "currently runs Sky Hook II, dedicated to recovering living American POWs in Southeast Asia." In a January 2001 editorial on NewsMax.com, LeBoutillier wrote that 1,200 U.S. POWs "have been relegated to serving as slaves to Hanoi and sacrificial lambs for the preservation of political careers back here in Washington." He went on to say, "America as a nation and as a people will not be whole until we go back to Vietnam and bring each and every surviving POW home - no matter the financial cost."

From [Thomas Moorer's] early connection to George Wallace ... through years of organizational involvements with the John Birch Society, collaboration with Nazi groups and a collegial relationship with John LeBoutillier, Moorer's biography intertwines again and again with the most paranoid and conspiratorial elements in American politics.

The article quoted is The Most Shameful Act of Betrayal in American History by John LeBoutillier, Newsmax.com 01/06/01

It's no surprise that "the most paranoid and conspiratorial elements in American politics" are already foaming at the mouth with Hillary-bashing, looking toward her possible presidential run in 2008. But, as David Neiwert has been pointing out, far-right extremism is increasingly being mainstreamed into the Republican Party. And the transmission belt is partly through outfits like NewsMax and characters like LeBoutillier. Until it starts showing up in Republicans' speeches and campaign commercials, and our sad excuse for a press corps then even-handedly and fairly report the controversy between bogus claims from "the most paranoid and conspiratorial elements in American politics," on the one hand, and the objection that they're baseless, on the other.  Without bothering to point out to the readers that the reporters themselves can't find any proof for the baseless claims, leaving it a "he said, she said" story.

How close is LeBoutillier to mainstream Republicanism, and vice versa? Out of curiousity, I looked up one of his early reactions to the 9/11 attacks: Only Way to Win the War by John LeBoutillier 09/16/01 (emphasis in original).

Just five days after the attacks, he was very confident of the action that needed to be taken:

Such intelligence and spying has all the earmarks of a state intelligence service. The Iraqis, for example, are known to have just such spies here in the U.S. operating under cover and from their U.N. Embassy.

Saddam  uses bin Laden as his "cut-out" - to provide deniability. ...

We need to remove Saddam Hussein and his Bath [sic] Party from power in Baghdad. We - the alliesincluding England, Canada, Japan and Jordan - then need to administer Iraq until a democratic government is elected there by the Iraqi people free of the fear and intimidation of Saddam and his henchmen.

Such an action is a huge undertaking - bigger even than the 1990-1991 Desert Shield/Desert Storm activation - but it is the only way to wipe the evil of terrorism from the earth.

Didn't take too long for that one to become Bush administration policy. He was right that it was going to be a "huge undertaking," though. Whether it wipes the evil of terrorism from the earth remains to be seen.

Who else is getting hives over a Hillary for President run? We'll look at one of them in the next Chuckie Watch.

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