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by Tamara Baker

Sept. 27, 1999--SAINT PAUL, MINN.--That hollow thudding sound you hear is that of Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson and the other GOP spinners of the "Wednesday Group" banging their collective heads against the wall.

Every single one of the anti-Clinton-and-Gore FauxGates that GOP politicians have put into play in the past few weeks has been discredited in record time--and worse yet, the most recent wave have begun to backfire on the Republican Party.

ITEM: Last Tuesday, September 21, the latest FauxGate was unveiled.

It was based on the fact that President Clinton, in order to help establish and maintain peace in places like Ireland, the Middle East and Africa, has traveled to nearly 60 countries during his time of office to date.

Such travel is expensive, of course, but the cost of all of Clinton's travels--over $75 million, if you believe the GOP-run Congressional Budget Office--pales in comparison with the cost of practically any military campaign you could name.

Nevertheless, that didn't stop Congressman Jeff Sessions (R-AL) from haranguing the President on the floor of the House over the cost of his travels.

The GOP, speaking in typical subtle racist code, took particular exception to Clinton's Africa trips of last year--a gaffe that prominent American blacks immediately picked up on, as CBS noted in a report on the Sept. 21st CBS Evening News.

They weren't the only ones to note Republican racism embedded in this FauxGate. The Palm Beach Post published a scathing editorial on the subject in their Sept. 24th edition:

"Republican criticism of President Clinton's 1998 trip to Africa isn't just bad foreign policy. It's bigoted politics. The not-too-subtle message is that Africa isn't worth a president's time and attention. That view ignores America's racial divide -- or, perhaps, attempts to exploit it."

Since that revelation, no other mainstream news outlet has to my knowledge bothered with the story.

Gee, I wonder why.

ITEM: In their attempts to smear the unsmearable Al Gore as the Antichrist (and also to distract from the many legitimate scandals surrounding George DumbBellYou Bush), the GOP have decided to try and link him somehow to alleged Russian money-laundering that took place in several East Coast banks, most notably the Bank of New York.

However, according to our friends over at the Consortiumnews.com web site, it seems that the Russian money-laundering is much more readily linked to the CIA--and one Bruce Rappaport.  Rappaport is a Swiss financier who is one of the Bank of New York's owners and has worked on several Reagan-Bush covert ops, including an Iraqi pipeline deal, the Iran-contra affair, U.S. Customs stings, the BCCI scandal (which the GOP tried unsuccessful to paint as a Democrat scandal), the October Surprise case, and a mysterious shipment of Israeli weapons to Colombian drug kingpins.

According to The Consortium, Mr. Rappaport was known as one of CIA director William Casey's favorite golf partners. Yet, when The New York Times profiled Rappaport and his hand in the Bank of New York's Russian financial deals, Rappaport's U.S. intelligence connections somehow got left out of the article!

Combined cover-ups and attempts to deflect wrongdoing onto one's political foes are old GOP and CIA "oppo research" tricks. Whitewater, as Mollie Dickenson has so ably pointed out both for the Consortium and Salon, was the result of the GOP wanting to cover up major-league S&L sins on the part of Republicans by focusing press attention on the comparatively minor and/or imaginary transgressions of Democrats. The nonsense spewed by the tinfoil-hat right-wing crowd about Mena airport is another example.

These tricks worked relatively well for many years.  But thanks to the Internet, even small outfits like Salon and the Consortium can find and disseminate the truth with lightning speed, faster than it can be covered up and twisted around.

ITEM: As reported in this space last week, our Republican friends are trying to use the FALN clemency issue as a big stick with which Rudy Giuliani can beat up on Hillary Clinton.

For those who came late, a recap: After months of deliberation, and after hearing from thousands of honorable and prominent persons and groups such as Pope John Paul II, John Cardinal O'Connor of New York, Jimmy Carter, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Amnesty International, President Clinton decided to grant clemency to several FALN members who had been imprisoned for over 20 years, yet had no role in any of the bombings committed by the pro-Puerto-Rican-independence group. In fact, most of the bombings occurred after most of these persons had been imprisoned.

The First Lady, after first agreeing with her husband's clemency offer, changed her stance as the GOP started accusing the President of offering the clemency in order to win the support of the Puerto Rican community for his wife in her Senatorial campaign against the Dark Lord of the Sith, Rudy Giuliani--who, of course, was staunchly against any sort of clemency for these vile terrorists.

Or, at least he is now.

It seems that Lars-Erik Nelson, in a Sept. 24th column for the New York Daily News, remembers Rudy proudly marching as recently as three months ago in a parade held in support of the very FALN clemency he is now opposing:

"Our own law-and-order Mayor Giuliani, who sharply criticized Clinton's action, marched in June in a Puerto Rican Day Parade specifically dedicated to freeing 15 of the imprisoned nationalists. It probably seemed like a good vote-getting idea at the time. Now he's opposed."

Just in time, too--because the Republicans were also hoping to use these FauxGates as a smokescreen to cover the fact that as of this writing, they have only passed three of the bills needed to keep the Federal Government running for another year. One wonders if they'd be dumb enough to risk their political capital--every bit of which they need to get the dumb-as-a-post Dubya safely through the nomination process--on yet another government shutdown.

We're about to find out.