It is important who he is. George W. Bush is an American of the big and real America. He believes in it all--in the vision of the founders, in the meaning of freedom, in the founding and enduring ideas of our country. He believes in America's historic insistence on humanity and not inhumanity in war, and he appears to have internalized the old saying that "one man with courage is a majority."

I used to wonder if George W. Bush's biography didn't suggest a kind of reverse Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was born in low circumstances and rose with superior gifts. Mr. Bush was born in superior circumstances and rose with average gifts. And yet when you look at Mr. Bush now I think you have to admit--I think even clever people who talk loudly in restaurants have to admit--that he has shown himself not to be a man of average gifts. Backbone is not an average gift. Guts are not an average gift. The willingness to take pain and give pain to make progress in human life is not an average gift.

All in all these are amazing qualities in a political figure, and in a president. There's a headline for you: America appears to have a president worthy of its people.

Ginsburg has long been on record as wanting cases to be decided on her version of what she calls "the equality principle" (rather than on the Constitution). Her "equality" notions include the right to abortion at taxpayers' expense (which the Supreme Court rejected in 1980), and a mindless gender neutrality that would include eliminating the concept of "breadwinning husband" and "dependent, homemaking wife."

The influence of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is clearly seen in another 2003 decision that shocked observers, Nevada Dept. of Human Resources v. Hibbs. The court's tirade against "stereotypes" (a word used 19 times) which supposedly "forced women to continue to assume the role of primary family caregiver" was based on feminist fantasies about a gender-neutral society, not on the U.S. Constitution.

on the Web, he had achieved something akin to celebrity. An entity calling itself the Robert F. Kennedy Democrats honored Kangas' "Liberalism Resurgent" page with its 1997 "Excelsior Award" for websites that "communicate the highest progressive ideals."

On his website, Kangas warned leftwing activists that their efforts would be wasted, "if they are not directed at the heart of the problem. It is absolutely critical to identify what the true core problem is, because all other problems in society stem from it." Evidently, Kangas had decided that Scaife was the "core problem." But why Scaife?

he set out to prove that Hillary was right, that there was indeed a vast and sinister conspiracy bent on toppling the Clintons. Like Hillary, Kangas painted the various Clinton scandals as frame-ups, funded by shadowy, rightwing moneymen. In his view – as in the view of many mainstream media commentators – the most prominent of the anti-Clinton moneymen was Richard Mellon Scaife. "Scaife is undoubtedly the most important figure behind the Clinton scandals," he writes. Nearly 60 percent of Kangas' 2,059-word text focuses on Scaife.

Significantly, Kangas charges that "Scaife is obsessed with proving that Vince Foster's suicide was actually a murder. He goes so far as to call his death 'the Rosetta Stone of the Clinton administration.'" Kangas also notes that Scaife had assigned a full-time reporter named Christopher Ruddy to investigate Foster's death.

We may never know for sure why Kangas took a gun to Scaife's office, nor why he decided, at the last minute, to shoot himself instead. We do know one thing, however. In the tortured recesses of Kangas' mind, the figure of Hillary loomed large. Kangas studied Hillary's words with care. He believed her story. He felt her pain. Kangas made Hillary's enemies his. In the final analysis, he may have died for her – shedding his blood to guard the secret of the Rosetta Stone.

Richard Nixon fell from power largely due to his role in covering up the burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. But when burglars invaded the offices of Joseph Farah's Western Journalism Center in 1994, no national scandal ensued.

In order to raise funds for Ruddy's investigation, Farah had taken out full-page advertisements, first in the Washington Times, then subsequently in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Farah's ads laid out the evidence of a cover-up and appealed for donations to keep the probe going.

Burglars entered Farah's office in Fair Oaks, Calif., soon after. Farah says:

"Nothing was stolen. They broke in through the roof of the building, entered into an adjacent office, turned the place upside down, stole nothing from any of the offices, and then exited through the locked front door by smashing the glass and going out. We had just gone very high-profile by taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times just the week before … so it was extremely coincidental."

Two years later, after Farah moved to new offices, burglars entered again. "Out of probably 20 offices in this larger complex, only our office was broken into, and again nothing was stolen," Farah recalls. In addition, he says, "Our mailbox in the post office was broken into. … I thought that was very suspicious. All in the same time period. … It just seemed like a lot of amazing coincidences."

The Troopergate burglaries

Farah was not the only Clinton critic to experience burglaries. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.'s American Spectator magazine also suffered break-ins during its reporting of the so-called "Troopergate" scandal. According to London Sunday Telegraph correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the American Spectator "suffered these mysterious burglaries of its offices just at the time the [Troopergate] article was nearing completion."

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On the second such mission, Brown saw what was in the duffel bags. They were filled with one-kilo bricks of cocaine, in what he called "waxene-wrapped" packages. Frightened and angry, Brown went to Gov. Clinton and asked him point-blank if the CIA was running cocaine from Central America. "Oh no," Clinton reportedly said. "That's Lasater's deal."

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Several authors have explored the guns-for-drugs operation that allegedly ran out of Mena airport during Clinton's governorship. One such author – Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter Gary Webb, formerly of the San Jose Mercury News – was found dead in his home on Dec. 10, 2004, with a bullet wound in the head. His death was ruled a suicide.

The late Mr. Webb wrote of the Mena operation from a leftwing perspective. Others, such as American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., have written about Mena from a conservative perspective.

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Richard Mellon Scaife was not far off the mark when he called the Foster case "the Rosetta Stone to the Clinton administration." Foster's ghost seems to haunt virtually every Clinton cover-up of any significance. The Troopergate burglaries are no exception.

On Feb. 19, 2001 – shortly after the Clintons left office – Lord William Rees-Mogg wrote a scathing commentary about the Mena scandal in the Times of London, in which he plainly implied that Foster's death was connected to the drug-smuggling operations at Mena.

Rees-Mogg is a prominent and respected journalist, having served as editor of the Times for 14 years and subsequently as vice chairman of the BBC. Today he is chairman of NewsMax Media Inc. – the parent company which owns Christopher Ruddy's NewsMax.com.

In his February 2001 article, Rees-Mogg called the Mena airport affair "the biggest scandal of modern American history." He noted that "there were several suspicious deaths" connected to Mena, notably those of former Clinton security chief Jerry Parks and Vincent Foster, and that money from Mena "can be traced through Parks as far as Vince Foster. …" Rees-Mogg cited evidence that the late Foster was involved in the drug-smuggling business that revolved around Mena.

"In 1993, Parks was murdered by two unknown gunmen," noted Rees-Mogg. "He lived in a dangerous world, as, indeed, did Vince Foster, who was found dead in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia."

The world of Jerry Parks and Vincent Foster was indeed a dangerous place. Christopher Ruddy had entered that same "dangerous world" when he undertook the Foster investigation. Now, by daring to extend a helping hand to Ruddy, Joseph Farah had entered that world, too.

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That story proved to be Weiss's ticket to the in crowd. He later wrote in the New York Observer of Nov. 22, 1999:


I became a White House friend. I didn't realize it fully until later, but I was in. One Clinton friend called me to ask if he could put my Foster article on a pro-Clinton website. I was flattered, and naïve. I didn't understand that the war had already begun, and that on the Web the Clintonites were losing.
Weiss had a friend in the White House named Chris Lehane, a lawyer who worked for Mark Fabiani. Readers will recall Fabiani from Part I of this series as the Clinton spinmeister

Weiss visited Lehane several times at the White House. On one of these visits, Weiss recalls that Lehane "proudly showed me a report he'd written. It was a thick blue looseleaf binder of news clippings interspersed with some analysis he'd written. It was titled, bizarrely, 'The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce.'"

Weiss did not know it, but Lehane had just shown him one of the deepest secrets of Hillary's Shadow Team – a secret that Weiss was destined to betray.

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In the fall of 1996, the New York Times Magazine asked Philip Weiss to write a story on "Clinton haters," eventually published on Feb. 23, 1997. Weiss' assignment was to interview Clinton conspiracy theorists and portray them as nutcases. Weiss called up his friend Chris Lehane at the White House and requested another copy of The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, which arrived "bigger than ever," updated with plenty of fresh news clips. Before departing for Arkansas, Weiss met with Mark Fabiani at the White House.

The first call Weiss made when he arrived in Arkansas was to Linda Ives. Weiss knew from the conspiracy report that Mrs. Ives was a central figure in the so-called "boys on the tracks" case, also known as the "Train Deaths" case.

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Arkansas State Medical Examiner Fahmy Malak ruled the deaths "accidental," saying that the boys had passed out on the tracks after smoking too much marijuana. Malak, however, was notoriously corrupt and incompetent, and a local grand jury refused to close the case. The bodies were exhumed and outside pathologists brought in. The new medical team concluded that the boys had been murdered. Someone had beaten Kevin Ives with a rifle butt and stabbed Don Henry in the back. Most likely, they were already dead when their killers laid them on the tracks. The grand jury ruled that the boys' deaths were homicides.

Bit by bit, the real story began to leak out. The place where the boys died was known to local law enforcement as a drop zone for drug smugglers. Low-flying airplanes regularly dumped their contraband there for pickup. The boys had likely shown up at the wrong place at the wrong time. They had seen too much. Arkansas State Trooper L.D. Brown was ordered off the case in 1988. "I was told it had something to do with Mena and I was to get off it," Brown later explained.

Bill Clinton played a suspicious role in the cover-up. As governor, Clinton shielded his medical examiner, Fahmy Malak, who remained in office until 1992. As president, Clinton hamstrung the Train Deaths investigation for good.

As recounted earlier in this series, Clinton ordered the resignation of all 93 U.S. attorneys and replaced them with Clinton loyalists – something no other U.S. president had ever done. He then fired FBI director William Sessions on July 19, 1993, an act equally unprecedented in U.S. history. Finally, Clinton appointed former campaign worker and long-time crony Paula Casey as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. He pulled the FBI off the Train Deaths case and turned it over to Casey. The probe fizzled out. Kevin's mother, Linda Ives, has been seeking justice ever since.

Of his meeting with Mrs. Ives, Weiss later admitted that the three or four hours he spent with her changed his life. He writes:


The boys' murders had been blatantly covered up as an accident by Gov. Clinton's medical examiner, and when at last the state was forced to rule them homicides, they had never truly been investigated. The drug dealers were obviously politically connected. The story was nauseating and left me troubled about the White House counsel's office. Here was a woman as wronged as an Argentinian mother, still seeking justice, and the White House had lumped her in with the lunatic fringe.
When I left Linda's house, late at night … I promised her I wouldn't sell her out. … I didn't realize it yet, but I was already becoming a Clinton-hater.

There was something else Weiss did not yet realize. In the three or four hours he had spent with Linda Ives, he had done something much more significant than simply begin to hate Clinton. He had jammed his foot in his mouth right up to the knee bone. Weiss had unwittingly blown the story of Hillary's secret war wide open.

Traitor to the cause

"Linda had been through hell, and she was a lot tougher than I was, and not nearly so naïve," Weiss recalls. "She'd asked me that night how I learned about her case and I'd glibly told her about the White House documents."

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Team had sent to ambush Linda Ives. A producer from "60 Minutes" had been there first. Former prosecutor Jean Duffey headed a drug task force in the Seventh Judicial District where the boys on the tracks were killed. Duffey's career in law enforcement came to an abrupt end when her Train Deaths probe began implicating public officials. She tells this story:


The summer before the White House sicced Weiss on Linda, Evalyn Lee, a "60 Minutes" producer, was sent on a similar mission. Again, after spending two days with Linda and me, Lee confessed that she was supposed to "befriend and interview" us and to "fold our interviews into a story about Clinton-bashers." According to Lee, the story was to air that fall before the '96 election and was supposed to boost support for Clinton. Lee said she had changed her mind about using us and planned to ask her superior to run a legitimate story about the Train Deaths. Of course, that never happened.

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One could argue that Hillary's secret war on "Clinton haters" made the White House, at the very least, an accomplice to murder after the fact. Vincent Foster may or may not have met foul play, but there is no question about the boys on the tracks. They were murdered. The Shadow Team's efforts to discredit Linda Ives plainly helped the boys' killers evade justice by discouraging further investigation. No matter. The scandal faded within days. Most Americans never heard about The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, and most have never heard about the Train Deaths.

Chris Lehane went on to become Al Gore's spokesman and later an adviser to presidential hopefuls Gen. Wesley Clark and John Kerry. He and Weiss no longer speak.

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In April 1996, Field Agent Cederquist submitted to Farah's Center an IRS "Information Document Request" which demanded, among other things, "Copies of all documents relating to the selection of Christopher Ruddy as an investigative reporter and how the topic was selected. Who was on the review committee?"

Accountant John Roux was shocked. What business did the IRS have questioning Farah's decision to fund Christopher Ruddy – or any other investigative reporter? In a face-to-face meeting, Roux confronted Cederquist over the strangely political flavor of his audit. It was then that Cederquist made his now-infamous declaration, "Look, this is a political case and the decision is going to be made at the national level."

For months, the Center devoted most of its manpower to dealing with the audit. It had to gather thousands of documents demanded by the IRS and pay a small fortune in accountants' and lawyers' fees. Worst of all, the nine-month audit cast a shadow over Farah's reputation. Contributors backed off for fear that the Center was about to lose its nonprofit status and that their donations would no longer be tax-exempt.

Other contributors, sensing the political nature of the audit, cut their ties with Farah for fear that they might be audited next. Those fears turned out to be well-founded. When Farah retained civil liberties lawyer Larry Klayman to sue the IRS in 1998, Klayman's Judicial Watch organization was immediately audited.

Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary even took it upon herself to contact one of Farah's major corporate donors and threaten to pull the donor's government contracts if he gave one more penny to the Western Journalism Center. "The warning was effective," Farah wrote later. "He has not donated any money since."

In the end, the Clinton administration's economic warfare succeeded in forcing Farah to cut staff and stop funding investigative reporters, including Ruddy. The long ordeal had crippled his operation.

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Joseph Farah broke the story of the IRS scandal nationally in an Oct. 22, 1996 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. In it, Farah traced his IRS troubles to a secret White House plan, concocted one month after Republicans swept Congress in 1994, to harass and neutralize Clinton critics.

Associate White House Counsel Jane Sherburne had drawn up a memo "naming names, outlining strategy and assigning staff to handle specific targets," wrote Farah. When congressional investigators obtained a copy of Sherburne's memo in September 1996, Farah discovered that he and his Western Journalism Center were targets. "When my article hit, it was like a bombshell," recalls Farah.

The Wall Street Journal mounted a crusade, publishing story after story on the IRS abuses. It soon became clear that few Clinton critics of any significance had been missed. Hillary's auditors hit dissident journalists particularly hard. Bill O'Reilly of Fox News was audited three years in a row, beginning the first year he launched "The O'Reilly Factor." Also hit was David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which published the magazine Heterodoxy and the popular website FrontPageMagazine.com. Hillary's IRS targeted the National Review, the Heritage Foundation and R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr's American Spectator magazine.

As the IRS spun out of control, even left-of-center journalists began to worry. "The talk shows got on the political audits and even the liberals on those shows were saying, 'This is beyond the pale,'" says Farah. However, as with all Clinton scandals, the indignation proved ephemeral. IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson – a friend of Hillary who had worked on the Clinton campaign – quietly resigned in February 1997. And that was it. The political audits continued under her successor. And Bill Clinton's articles of impeachment, unlike Nixon's, contained no mention of IRS abuses.

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Our offices were broken into twice, our New York apartment once," Tyrrell recalls. "Thieves stole the manuscript to [Tyrell's book] 'Boy Clinton' while it was being sent across town to Bob Novak for a blurb. … [N]umerous instances of intimidation [were] attempted against Spectator staffers by Arkansas thugs."

Most damaging to the Spectator – and to press freedom generally – was an effort by the Clinton Justice Department to press criminal charges against Tyrrell and his associates for what turned out to be trumped up allegations of witness tampering.

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For 14 months, Scaife and various associates of the Spectator were hauled before investigators to testify. In the end, no charges were pressed. Scaife and the Spectator were exonerated. But the 14-month investigation nearly bankrupted Tyrrell's magazine. More importantly, it set a dangerous precedent in American politics.

"[T]he precedent had been set to harass writers and publications that print unfavorable news about government. … [T]he practice of criminally investigating opposition journalists has now been established. …" Tyrrell later wrote.

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Joseph Farah likes to joke that Hillary Clinton gave him the idea of publishing WorldNetDaily.com. And in a way she did. Inasmuch as Hillary appears to have masterminded The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, Hillary grasped the power of the Internet years before most of today's leading Web journalists.

It would seem that, as early as 1995, the first lady had already identified the Web as a threat to Big Media's information monopoly – and therefore to the Clintons' power. A dark prophetess of doom, Hillary decried the Internet's subversive potential at a time when dissident scribblers such as Farah were still trying to get their message out through printed newsletters and op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal. In 1999, after the Drudge Report had fulfilled Hillary's direst warnings, Farah called The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce a "premonition" and a "prophetic nightmare." He wrote:


[R]emember that the White House was having this bad dream back in 1994-1995. This was long before anyone had ever heard of Matt Drudge. It was long before WorldNetDaily.com … was even on the drawing board. … Was it a premonition? Indeed, this was an administration doomed to scandal exposed by the Internet – the one form of mass communication its partisans in the old, establishment press couldn't seem to control. And, already, by early 1995, the White House could see the handwriting on the wall. … It doesn't take a Ph.D. in computer science to recognize that the Clintons and their political allies are scared of the Internet. They are clearly dying to get their hands on it – not for their own creative use, mind you, but for the purposes of control, for stifling free expression by others.
When Farah first saw the report, he read through it in amazement, paying special attention to Section IX, which dealt with "The Internet Influence." Farah says:


The ironic part is that we were not utilizing the Internet very well back then. We did have a website called etruth.com, and it did get a high level of traffic. I was always surprised that there were more people reading our stuff on the Internet than were reading our newsletter. But it still never occurred to me that it had all that much potential until the Clintons connected the dots for me.
When I saw that report, I became convinced that the Internet was the vehicle for keeping government under control, because if these guys were so scared of it, I felt we could do much more as journalists to utilize it. That report really was the genesis for WorldNetDaily.com.

More than any other factor, Hillary's fear of cyber-journalism alerted Farah to the power of the Net. Ultimately, it led him to focus his efforts on Web publishing. Many other dissident journalists made the same decision around the same time.

The Web Underground made a quantum leap from the newsgroups and message boards of the early '90s, when the Web had served mainly as a giant bulletin board to publicize articles from newspapers and magazines. Now it began generating its own reportage, much of it high-caliber investigative work, assigned and edited by news professionals such as Ruddy and Farah.

The Web Underground completed its metamorphosis just in time. It would play a decisive role in stopping the Democrats from stealing the 2000 election.

In the Monday interview, Deutsch asked Coulter: "If you had your way ... and your dreams, which are genuine, came true ... what would this country look like?"

"It would look like New York City during the [2004] Republican National Convention.," Coulter said. "In fact, that's what I think heaven is going to look like."

In her recollection of the convention, she said: "People were happy. They're Christian. They're tolerant. They defend America."

"It would be better if we were all Christian?" Deutsch asked.

"Yes," she said.

Later, Deutsch returned to the subject, saying: "[Y]ou said we should throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians."

"Yes," she replied again.

When pressed by Deutsch regarding whether she wanted to be like "the head of Iran" and "wipe Israel off the Earth," Coulter stated: "No, we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. ... That's what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws."

There's a lot of buzz about how Ann Coulter said on TV that Christians want Jews to be "perfected," presumably through conversion. Speaking for all Jews, I would be delighted to be perfected, and I'm intrigued by the suggestion that it might be possible. Of course, it all depends on what your definition of being perfected might be. If I could be assured that conversion to Christianity would instantly cause me to lose 80 lbs., give me infinite patience when my daughters wake me up at 5 in the morning, allow me to read 100 pages an hour with total recall, feel complete indifference when some @$%&^ cuts me off in traffic, grow my hair back on the top of my head and make it disappear from my ears, and keep me from checking my Amazon ranking when I have a book out, I would seriously consider it. Also, if a real African potentate's widow actually did want to deposit tens of millions of dollars in my bank account and give me a parking fee of 6 percent for my trouble, you know what, that would be good too.