Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [55]
When readers threatened to tire of seemingly endless Agatha Christie–style discussions of the Foster case, the Journal ran a lurid account of the elimination of two Arkansas teens using that efficient murder weapon favored by Snidely Whiplash: a train. The Journal marshaled these facts: Two teenagers were killed by a train. The train was traveling through Arkansas. Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas. Ergo, Bill Clinton murdered the boys with the train.2 The Journal ran a series of pieces on the boys’ deaths, and featured the story in their February 12, 1998, editorial “Obstruction and Abuse: A Pattern.”
The Journal also used its blood-soaked editorial page to publish the 800 number for ordering The Clinton Chronicles, a piece-of-shit video that linked the Clintons to dozens of murders. The Clinton Chronicles sold over one hundred thousand copies, thanks in large part to the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who cofinanced, publicized, and distributed the video through an organization called Citizens for Honest Government (not to be confused with actual citizens who genuinely support honesty in government).
The tape casts the deaths of the two teenagers in a larger and more sinister context.
NARRATOR: A number of people approached the police about Don and Kevin’s murders and were subsequently murdered themselves.
Meanwhile, over at the Washington Times, a dedicated band of courageous journalists dared to expose the slaughter in Arkansas, heedless of the inevitable lethal consequences for themselves and their families. Their editor in chief, Wesley Pruden, led the charge. Pruden’s September 18, 1998, editorial reads like a Bill O’Reilly suspense novel.
Jane Parks was the wife then of Jerry Parks, who was the security chief of the Clinton-Gore campaign in Arkansas in 1992. His son, Gary, told Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Sunday Telegraph that he was watching a TV newscast with his father when Vince Foster’s death was announced. The father went pale. “I’m a dead man,” he told the son. “They’re cleaning house.” He told his wife Jane that he would be next. A few months later he was cut down in a volley of automatic-weapons fire on a Little Rock street corner.
And what would an O’Reilly-esque thriller be without some blow and a few underage babes?
Jane Parks, the manager of a Little Rock apartment house, told the London Sunday Telegraph that Roger Clinton, the President’s bad-boy brother, turned Apartment B-107 into a drug pad in the summer of ’84, where it snowed every night and young girls, some of them still in high school, were the bunnies who served themselves with the salad. The governor was a frequent visitor, so her story goes, and the rutting and snorting noises that drifted up through the vents occasionally got so loud she had to leave.
After Vince Foster, probably the most notorious of the Clinton murders was his airborne rubout of Commerce Secretary and longtime friend Ron Brown. Appearing on Hannity and Colmes, Christopher Ruddy, author of the delightful The Strange Death of Vince Foster and a reporter for the Scaife fishwrapper the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, advanced the theory that Brown had been shot in the back of his head before his plane crashed in Croatia, killing all thirty-five aboard.
HANNITY: Chris, welcome back. Let’s—you know, by the way, Chris, you know that Mike McCurry, in a recent interview, singled you out as one of the people that—the haters of Bill Clinton, if you will. You have this report about Ron Brown that you’ve been going for ward with. Medical examiners, including Lieutenant Colonel Cogswell, that he may have been shot. You’re just reporting these things. Why would the spokesperson for the President single you out as—quote—one of those “haters”?
RUDDY: Well, I think it’s a great honor to be declared an enemy.
Hannity failed to point out that Colonel William T. Gormley, the Air Force pathologist who (unlike Cogswell) had actually examined Brown’s