American Politics Hournal -- Nixon Heirs Caught in Net of Their Own Making



Home • Latest • Archive • Search

The Banshee Screams Yet Again:
Nixon Heirs Caught in Net of Their Own Making
by Tamara Baker

Monday, Dec. 20, 1999 -- ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJNS) -- I'm typing this with a sore throat, an aching body, and a throbbing head, all from a skirmish with the first big flu bug of the season. By all rights I should be in bed with a hot pad on my lower lumbar.

Yet none of that matters right now.

At long last, thanks to the diligence of Maryland State Prosecutor Stephen Montanarelli, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy is about to receive its comeuppance.

And I feel GOOD.

Those tin-horn strutting monsters, slowly but surely, are being exposed conclusively as the rotten law-breaking scum we all knew they were.

Make no mistake here: Linda Tripp is small fry. But the mere act of bringing the illegal-taping case to trial has already exposed several frayed threads in the VRWC's sweater, threads that will be yanked on, HARD, by folks like Norma Holloway Johnson and Susan Webber Wright:

It has already been established that, contrary to Starr's statements, the OIC clearly intended to pass the tapes on to Newsweek.
It has already been established that, contrary to Starr's protestations to Janet Reno, that the OIC had been in close -- and highly illegal -- contact with the Paula Jones legal team. This is shown by the presence of Paula Jones lawyer-- and Federalist Society member -- George T. Conway III at the infamous "midnight rendezvous" at the HoJo where the tapes were passed on. (Note again how the Federalist Society always turns up in this saga: Starr's a member. So are his Appeals Court buddies Sentelle and Silberman. So are Ted and Barbara Olson, he of the Scaife-funded American Spectator, she of the Scaife-funded Independent Women's Forum.)
It has already been established that Michael Isikoff, for some strange reason (which looks suspiciously like he was trying to bolster Tripp's testimony) changed the time of the Howard Johnson meeting when he wrote about it in his book Uncovering Clinton. The galleys show the correct time, but the published version states, incorrectly, that the meeting took place in the "late afternoon" of the following day.

Which reminds me: Notice how nervous Ann Coulter's been looking on Rivera Live lately?

Would this have anything to do with the fact that, as reported in the Hartford Courant earlier this year, the Tripp lawyers (and possibly other VRWC "elves") had also on that fateful night gone over to Coulter's place to "listen" to the Tripp tapes on Coulter's expensive stereo rig? (Coulter, remember, is a Deadhead, and Deadheads are noted for tape-making and tape-trading.)

Could it be that, in addition to listening to the tapes, the elves also copied them using Coulter's high-buck stereo system?

Could it be that this self-styled "constitutional scholar" is about to see her skinny, leather-skirt-covered heinie fall into the blades?

Could it be that I am channeling the spirit of the Good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson?

It certainly sounds like it, doesn't it?

I haven't felt this good since the fall of 1973, when it was becoming apparent to all but the most blockheaded that Richard Milhous Nixon's perfidy was going to be not only revealed, but punished, and in the most painful way possible.

Indeed, these last few years have seemed like a Watergate replay -- except that this time, Nixon's heirs, the real lawbreakers of the last decade, were trashing the law of the land every which way in an illegal and illegitimate revenge-plot to bring down a man of the same party that brought down Tricky Dick lo these many years ago.

But Nixon's spiritual children, just like the man himself, wrought their own doom.

They were so arrogant in their contempt for the law -- in their leakings to the press, in their close consortings with their elf-kin on the Paula Jones team (Starr in fact had written a "friend of the court" brief for the Paula Jones team before he was tapped to succeed Fiske as head of the OIC probe, which if he were a just man would have enough to make him recuse himself from taking the OIC gig in the first place), in their attempts to destroy basic legal rights such as attorney-client privilege and the right to privacy-- that they forgot they could ever risk getting caught.

But they were wrong. Oh, boy, were they wrong.

And that shrieking sound you hear, emanating from Woody Creek, Colorado, and Saint Paul, Minnesota, is the beginnings of the wail of the Banshee, returning after a quarter-century's absence, to finish the job she started in 1973.