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Spin Control
Responding to an Anti-Clinton Letter
by Tamara Baker

One of my favorite "Friends of Bill" sent out a "support our troops" letter to another Internet mailing list.

She got back a response from a man who claimed to be a criminal defense attorney in Dallas, Texas. His e-mail address was redacted from the forwarded copies of his message that she sent us. She wanted to know whether she should respond to him.

Here's what I wrote back. Mr. Dallas Lawyer's original text is in blue; mine is left unbracketed.

No problem!

I honorably served in the USMC under a President named Reagan.

Who was a draft dodger who never fired a gun in the military, much less in anger overseas. (That didn't keep him from lying like a rug about it: During a speech he once gave, he described an incredibly vivid aerial combat scene as if he had been a participant; turns out he was reciting nearly verbatim one of the climatic scenes in the WWII movie "Wing and a Prayer".)

Fact is, quite a few of the ultra-hawkish GOPers are themselves "chicken hawks" who supported the Vietnam War so long as they didn't have to walk point in it:

Dan Quayle (who admitted that "phone calls were made" to keep him out of 'Nam and guarding the sand dunes of Indiana instead)
Pat Buchanan (4F in 'Nam due to an alleged bad knee which hasn't kept him from jogging 3 miles/day)
Newt Gingrich (who now claims to regret actively avoiding serving in Vietnam)
Rush Limbaugh (who claims 4F status - either his knee or a "pilodnial cyst", he can't decide which -although he never took a draft physical)
Tom DeLay (who claimed - seriously! - that the ranks of the military were so swollen with black people that there wasn't any room for him)
etc., etc., etc.

And many of my superiors had served under LBJ and Nixon during the Vietnam debacle. And I will just never understand it how the "Woodstock" hippie generation has the gall to ask for support for the "troops" when they spit on them, burned the flag, etc.

Funny: I didn't see Bill Clinton spitting on you. He was too busy studying in England.

Clinton is conducting this war to divert attention away from his own problems. No other reason, period.

If that was the reason, it sure isn't working. It didn't work in Iraq - where he had to clean up the mess that his predecessor George Bush left behind - and it sure didn't work now.

Actually, Clinton has been wanting to get involved in the Balkans for many years - and almost did so during the Srebenica massacre in 1995. But he was stopped from doing so on the advice of persons who told him that the Balkans were unsolvable. But Milosevic's recent maneuverings - and his intimate knowledge of the US, which convinced him that while hawkish US conservatives would support fighting for cheap oil (Iraq) or access to rubber plantations (Vietnam), they would not be as likely to support humanitarian missions to prevent ethnic cleansing - were too great a provocation to be ignored.

The timing argument also fails another way: The Kosovo action is giving Big Media - which, in exchange for juicy (if not always truthful) "scoops", sold its collective souls to Ken Starr and doesn't want to admit it got hosed for it - an excellent excuse to deep-six press coverage of Starr's slow and deserved downfall.

Susan McDougal's victory over her tormentor Ken Starr not only has crippled his power to harrass her, it has also weakened - if not scuttled - his cases against Julie Hiatt Steele and Webb Hubbell. Furthermore, the man upon whom Starr's whole flimsy Whitewater house of cards was built, David Hale, is currently under investigation for having taken money and legal support from Starr's patron Richard Mellon Scaife via his buddies at the American Spectator. In addition, the local Washington, DC Office of Bar Counsel is looking into Starr's gross violations of grand jury secrecy and other rules as they pertain to DC. And guess what: their rules on the subject are far more stringent, and have far less wiggle room, than Federal Rule 6(e); even if Norma doesn't get him on the 24 prima-facie leaking instances she's documented, the DC boys will take up the slack.

Make a "war hero" out of a draft dodger

Like Reagan, DeLay, Gingrich, Gramm, Quayle, Buchanan, Limbaugh, and the other right-wing chicken hawks?

a perjurer

You mean like Bob Barr, who lied under oath about his affair with the woman would become his third wife, as well as about whether he forced his second wife to get an abortion?

Or do you mean like Ken Starr, who shamelessly lied under oath before the House Judiciary Committee at least a half-dozen times? (My own personal favorite Ken Starr lie came when he denied several times, under questioning from David Kendall, that his OIC office ever tried to compel Monica Lewinsky to wear a wire. Kendall then pulled out the FBI Form 302 that proved Starr was lying. Oops.)

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, not only did NOT commit perjury, he didn't even lie.

Let's tackle the perjury accusation first.

As you well know - but, like a true Republican, wish to camouflage in the hopes of baffling the general non-legally-educated public - a statement must meet five criteria before it can be considered perjury under Federal law:

1) The statement must be made under oath.
2) The statement must be material to the case at hand.
3) The statement must be known by its maker to be false.
4) The statement must be demonstrably false.
5) The statement must have been made with an intent to mislead.

If the statement in question fails to meet ANY of these five criteria, it isn't perjury. Pure and simple. You know that, but you were apparently hoping my friend, (name withheld), didn't.

First off, the testimony solicited by the Jones team (working in illicit collusion with Ken Starr's OIC in direct violation of Judge Susan Webber Wright's gag order, as well as local grand jury secrecy laws) from both President Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky was ruled immaterial by the judge a week after it was given. (If she had truly been smart, she wouldn't have allowed it to be given in the first place; it took her a whole week to figure out she'd been bamboozled for the purpose of creating a perjury trap.)

Second off, as Monica herself said, unaware that she was being tape-recorded, to Linda Tripp, "We didn't have sex, Linda!.... We just fooled around." According to a 1991 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association recently, over 60% of college students would agree with Monica and the President. This shows that both Monica and Bill Clinton sincerely believed they were telling the strict truth; thus, their statements have now failed to meet at least two of the five criteria for perjury, and in fact aren't even lies.

Third off, Judge Webber Wright herself said, whilst listening to the Jones team's lengthy and bizarre attempts to craft what later was shown to be a perjury trap, that not only did she not understand the strange definition of sex they wanted to be used in the case, but that she also doubted the President could understand it, either. (The videotape capturing this dramatic moment was shown by Abbe Lowell before the House Judiciary Committee.) Again, in order to lie, much less commit perjury, you have to KNOW you are lying - and how can you if you don't know what the hell you're supposed to be lying about?

a rapist

You mean like Ronald Reagan?

Back in 1991, Selene Walters accused Ronald Reagan of raping her back in the 1950's when he was President of the Screen Actors Guild. Ms. Walters' account is somewhat more credible than Mrs. Hickey-Broaddrick's, in that she doesn't have an ex-husband around to contradict the most important parts of her story. The same right-wingers that avidly push the Broaddrick bilge now had nothing but harsh words for Ms. Walters in 1991. Talk about your double standards!

an obstructor of justice

Since when is using standard legal procedures "obstructing justice"? For an alleged lawyer, you're pretty ignorant - or disingenuous - since all you do is spout the party line as handed down by Mark Levin (aka Scaife's favorite gunsel) and popped into Henry "Homewrecker" Hyde's mouth.

Why aren't you as concerned about Ken Starr's boys holding Monica hostage for hours, keeping her from contacting her lawyer Frank Carter (who they forced her to dump later on), who would have then stopped her affidavit from being filed in the first place and thus foiled the illicitly-created Starr-Jones perjury trap?

The members of my friend's mailing list - many of which are themselves involved in the legal profession - await your answer.

Sincerely,

Tamara Baker