Food Fight!
By Eric Blair (3/05/98)
Three in the morning on the Pacific Coast. Mr. Williams
and Ms. Chang, being important television news show hosts, are discussing
the battle between Special Prosecutor Ken Starr and The White House.
Their ABC report represents the story as something of a food fight between
badly behaved children. (An approach based on the liberal "everybody
does it" defense.) ABC’s report illustrates this "both sides are equally
guilty" analysis by running a series of instances from the battlefield.
The viewers see Susan McDougal, a convicted felon, in chains. The
voice-over says The White House and McDougal are both claiming that she
is in those chains because she won’t agree to testify against Clinton.
This, as is partially admitted later in the
report, is a pack of baloney. Starr hasn’t the power to put anybody,
repeat anybody, in chains for refusing to testify, or for any other reason.
Only a judge, repeat, A JUDGE, can do something like that. And that’s
just what one will do to McDougal, just as soon as she finishes serving
the sentence she got for her felony conviction.
Following this piece of bad reporting, Mezzrs.
Williams and Chang’s flack lackey report went on to point out that The
White House claims Starr is a right wing radical pursuing outrageous claims
in a vicious, partisan manner. The evidence they presented for this
was a segment showing The White House apologist, James Carvill, calling
Starr everything except a human while Starr just sat there silently
This is a strange food fight, don’t you think?
Do you remember when The Apologists for The
White House recently attacked Starr’s group for using leaks to the press
to intimidate people? Do you recall that during that media event,
a White House attorney held a news conference where he angrily denounced
Starr for wanting to know the names of the news people he had been talking
to? Don’t those two items strike you as somewhat contradictory?
I’ll do it once more for clarity. All
the news coming from the Starr hearings is in the form of "informed
sources close to the investigation." Testimony leaks from Starr’s
group is against the law. In spite of all the accusations, not even
one such event has been documented.
(The mainstream media, the recipients of such leaks,
have nothing to say about the matter. They claim they are protecting
First Amendment rights, but could easily say that not one of their sources
comes from Starr's group. Even if that is the case, as I strongly
believe, they will continue to hide the truth because it does not serve
their agenda.)
Leaks from defense attorneys or even those who testified
are completely legal. ABC, should it wish to, could document dozens
of them. Defense attorneys and witnesses can say any damned thing
they want to say to the press, and Starr cannot by law say a damned thing!
That is how you end up with this media theater of
the absurd where a White House attorney attacks Starr (who The White House
has been blaming for leaks) for wanting to know the names of the reporters
he (The White House lawyer) has been leaking to!
Then, ABC’s segment went on to show an angry
Hillary Clinton returning from a grilling about Whitewater. We found
out that Hillary had offered to have a private conversation with Starr
in The White House, and that she and Bill had been angered by Starr’s unreasonable
use of a subpoena when it wasn’t in their opinion, necessary. This
was all about Whitewater related Rose Law firm papers that Starr had asked
for two years earlier, and which had suddenly, mysteriously, reappeared
in a section of The White House where Hillary often spends time.
Two years of White House stalling, and Starr
is the villain!
ABC's report didn't mention anything about
the "testimony" the noble Hillary gave under oath.
"I’m sorry, I can’t recall. No, I don’t
remember. No, that doesn’t ring a bell. No, I have no recollection
of that. It doesn’t sound familiar to me. Listen, I have cookies
in the oven, and I have never even heard of a place named Arkansas.
Is it a nice place? I like nice places."
(Hillary, when she was an assistant at the Nixon
Watergate hearings, would have gone ballistic if a witness from the White
House has attempted something like that!)
Finally, after completing their list of gripes
by The White House in this food fight, the ABC report got around to the
obviously equally nasty Ken Starr. On top of the previously mentioned
evil silence of Starr on a split screen next to a lunatic, raving, frothing
Carvill, viewers were now treated to Starr outside his home one day, saying
that his group had been assaulted by an "avalanche of lies."
Talk about vicious!
It’s a pretty one sided food fight, isn’t
it?
This is a perfect example as to how the liberal
mainstream media has been presenting the situation all along. ABC’s
Mezzrs. Williams and Chang are either flacks for the White House, or complete
idiots. All you have to do to see that is to study this one "news"
segment to understand why. And, once understanding that, you can
see why Starr’s popularity ratings in recent polls is down around eleven
percent. The Devil has a better rating.
Newt Gingrich, who was viciously attacked
for years by the mainstream media, including a national magazine cover
depicting him as the "Gingrich Who Stole Christmas," has to be shaking
his head. He has seen it all personally. He knows what this
pack of liberal media piranhas are capable of; and he knows just how this
kind of reporting shapes the polls.
In spite of it all, I would bet that both Gingrich
and Starr still have an abiding faith in the people of this country.
It is in their nature to believe in the goodness of Americans. I
have no such burden. As far as I am concerned, if the polls are accurate,
the American people are a pack of brainless boobs.
To them, as it is to Mezzrs. Williams and Chang,
and the award winning news crew at ABC, when the White House is throwing
food, Starr is the one who’s guilty.
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