Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (7 page)

The response was swift and brutal from the mainstream media. Maureen Dowd, a charter member, ripped Arianna, writing in her syndicated column, “The Clintonites have hidden behind double-talk so often, it was tempting to believe the Republicans’ sinister allegations. But the GOP case began to melt…. What you need to know about the Republicans is that the charge was disgusting.”
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White House special counsel Lanny Davis told the press that Lawrence “was thrown overboard and suffered a serious head injury. Had he been in the Navy and the same incident would have occurred, he would have received a Purple Heart.” The late Richard Holbrooke, former assistant secretary of state, said, “I’m dumbfounded that there would be the slightest question about the appropriateness of Larry Lawrence being buried at Arlington.” Army Secretary Togo West said there was no political motivation to
Lawrence’s burial. “I am the responsible person…. Just not done. Not possible… He deserves to be there.”
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But Arianna was just getting started. She was responding to attacks on her credibility with calm and composure, knowing that she had the goods, and reacting with utter serenity as she watched a phalanx of media swarm around her, looking for their pound of flesh. She fed them the story, bit by bit. And I was helping. There was a moment in my research when I personally realized that everything Arianna was saying was true. I was spelunking and spelunking, and finally I came across something big. I ran down to Arianna’s office yelling: “Arianna, Arianna! He didn’t serve in the Merchant Marines. I’m positive.” It was a piece from the
San Diego Union-Tribune
dated January 19, 1993. The story talked about how Lawrence had been honored by the Merchant Marine at a dinner, where he had recalled “the morning when, as an 18-year-old, he suffered head wounds during a German torpedo attack on his ship in the frigid waters off Murmansk.” There was only one problem: according to the newspaper, the incident was “previously unknown to most of his family and close friends.” To me, that was the whole goods. It was the confirmation in my mind that everything Arianna was laying out for the American public was true.

Arianna ran with it. Citing that piece and responding to her critics, she wrote, “What about the fact that the
Horace Bushnell
’s manifest does not include Lawrence’s name? Or the fact that the casualty list for the ship also has no record of the injuries so movingly described by the White House counsel? Indeed, according to the Maritime Administration and the U.S. Coast Guard, there is no record of Lawrence having served in the Merchant Marine at all.”
⁶

The house of cards that the Complex constructed for Larry Lawrence began to crumble. The same media that had attacked Arianna now began to swing behind her, calling for Lawrence’s
disinterment from Arlington: folks like Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, George Stephanopoulos—and yes, Maureen Dowd. All I could say as I watched it was three words: “This. Is. Awesome.”

The awesomeness culminated on a Thursday morning in December. I was working in my hidden office when I heard Arianna shouting: “Come down, come down, come down!” I came downstairs, and she pointed at the TV and shouted, “Watch!”

CNN was on. And it was showing aerial helicopter footage of Arlington National Cemetery, where a series of banquet tents formed a labyrinthine path to the exit of Arlington. They were disinterring Larry Lawrence at the behest of Shelia Lawrence, Larry Lawrence’s aforementioned fourth wife, who, along with Clinton’s liberal media allies, had shot at Arianna without aiming first in an attempt to smear her. They had instinctively defended Larry Lawrence. They had put their names and credibility out there, and when caught red-handed, none of them had ever apologized. But it didn’t matter. Arianna was staring at the TV with a look of utter serenity on her face: she’d gotten her scalp.

I knew right then and there that I needed to find a way to do this for a living.

One night in late December 1997, I watched an episode of
Nightline
. The subject: Matt Drudge. The premise: an entire hour about Matt Drudge. They started with this: “Do you know who this man is?” A picture of Drudge at his computer flashed on the screen—type, type, type. “If you don’t, you soon will.” The show actually went on in a semipositive vein—as positive as you can get for a conservative with a few scalps, a conservative who is trailblazing against the Complex. They had the requisite slams, of course,
posting a picture of Drudge’s website next to pictures of extreme websites, implying that the Internet was filled with crazies and white supremacists. But for the most part, it was fair.

Little did I know that ABC News was foreshadowing something much greater than Kathleen Willey or the death of Princess Diana.

They were foreshadowing the demolition of a presidency.

In January 1998, I was a happy guy. I was happily married, living in a tiny house with (I swear) a white picket fence. I had my buddies Arianna and Matt, and we were all hanging out together, and we were all doing more from Los Angeles with minimal resources than the mainstream media were doing from Washington, DC, with hundreds of reporters. It was great fun.

About two weeks after the New Year, on January 16, 1998, I spent the day at home paying attention to the unprecedented deposition Bill Clinton was giving due to his former student, Judge Susan Webber Wright, ruling that he had to testify in Paula Jones’s civil lawsuit. For me, as a Clinton aficionado, this was a huge day—a sitting president testifying about accusations of sexual harassment.

Now, I was against overly broad sexual harassment law on a philosophical level because of my belief that feminism had defined sexual harassment down to the type of interaction that created so many marriages—a secretary and a boss meeting each other at work, for instance. I didn’t believe in the post-structural PC Marxist/feminist critique that said that sexual relationships were inherently relationships between the oppressor and the oppressed, and that power structures between bosses and employees necessarily rendered such relationships a form of sexual harassment. I thought that was nonsense, which is why Clarence Thomas’s
confirmation hearings had been such an epiphany for me. But at the same time, I knew that if they were going to hold Thomas to that standard, they had to hold Clinton to that standard as well.

The Clinton hearings became, to me, the living embodiment of the Democrat-Media Complex—and the inherent biases of the media were multiplied when cable news came of age during this era. With an enormous dedication of resources, the Complex went to work spinning Bill Clinton out of peril.

Watching a purported women’s-rights advocate get away with sexual harassment—shoving cigars in the help, groping job applicants in the hallways—was the emblematic example of the media double standard, where a liberal could get away with anything as long as he toed the politically correct line. Clinton could attack women, use his gun-toting state troopers to recruit hand-picked groupies for him as if he were a rock star, pull down his pants and say, “Kiss it.” He could get away with it because he was a liberal, and because liberals wanted him to get away with it. I wanted Clinton to pay, and I wanted his enablers to pay—I wanted to see them held to the standard that they had created to destroy their enemies.

I wanted Clinton to get busted because it was obvious to me that this was the type of person you would not let your daughter date, your sister date, any distant relative date—that this was a guy who was not virtuous, that he was a glutton, that he had a voracious appetite for power and women and food and anything that he could use to fill himself up. As a human being, he was essentially a sociopath, but the mainstream media had built him up because he possessed weapons that suited their purpose: the correct pro-abortion and left-of-center economics policies, the wily charms of a born cad, and a venal commitment to the politics of personal destruction.

After watching the hearings, at around midnight, I got home and
started to climb into bed. Before I did, I logged on to the Internet. In my e-mail box was the Drudge Report.

NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN, the all-caps headline bannered. BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT.

At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States! The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president’s sexual preference. Reports of the relationship spread in White House quarters and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last month. The young intern wrote long love letters to President Clinton, which she delivered through a delivery service. She was a frequent visitor at the White House after midnight, where she checked in the WAVE logs as visiting a secretary named Betty Curry, 57. The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that tapes of intimate phone conversations exist….

Michael Isikoff was not available for comment late Saturday. NEWSWEEK was on voice mail.

The White House was busy checking the DRUDGE REPORT for details.
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I got into bed and stared at the ceiling. “Holy shit,” I said. “He did it.”

I was surprised to find a tear running down my face. I turned to Susie, who was lying beside me.

“Susie, history just happened,” I murmured. “Drudge just changed everything.”

On February 19, 2010, I spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The day before I spoke, Kate Zernike of the
New York Times
reported on another panel at the conference. In particular, she wrote about a young author and investigative journalist named Jason Mattera: “How can conservatives win the youth vote that overwhelmingly went for Barack Obama in 2008? At the Conservative Political Action Conference, apparently, some are betting on using racial stereotypes.” What had Mattera done? He “mocked what he described, with a Chris Rock voice, as ‘diversity,’ including, he said, college classes on ‘cyber feminism’ and ‘what it means to be a feminist new black man.’… Offering up a slogan, he adopted the Chris Rock voice again: ‘Get your government off my freedom!’ ”
¹

Except that Mattera wasn’t doing a Chris Rock impersonation. He was doing a Brooklyn accent—
because he’s from Brooklyn.

So when I spoke later that day, I called Zernike out by name. “Kate Zernike of the
New York Times
, are you in the room? Are you in the room? You’re despicable. You’re a despicable human being.”
Then I said what I really feel about the media: “This is what these creeps do. I’m sick of having cocktails with them. I’m now at war with them. No more cocktails.”

I’m at war with the mainstream media because they portray themselves as objective observers of reality when they’re no such thing—they’re partisan “critical theory” hacks who think they can destroy everything America stands for by standing on the sidelines and sniping at patriotic Americans with all their favorite slurs. They have nothing but contempt for the American people. They use all the weapons they have at their disposal to intimidate every one of us and force us to shut up and not to speak our minds.

Their days of doing this are over. They’re dying because they hate much of America and what it has historically stood for. Then they moan that no one wants to consume their product, saying it’s their business model that has just sold them short.

News flash to the media:
It’s not your business model that sucks. It’s you that suck.

My biggest experience yet with the mainstream media came after Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story.

As much as Lewinsky was a story, the story behind the story was the media’s determination to scuttle it as fast as possible.
Newsweek
had already tried to shut down Isikoff. The Friday before Drudge unleashed the scoop,
Newsweek
told Isikoff they might not run the story at all: “The first signal I got that the story might not go was when I was told we need a backup story on Clinton’s Paula Jones deposition in case we don’t go with the story,” Isikoff said later. Isikoff himself was concerned about the ramifications of releasing the story, since even the single Linda Tripp tape he had in his possession was supposedly “ambiguous. It neither confirmed nor
undercut the most serious charge, that the president and Vernon Jordan, Clinton’s trusted friend and adviser, instructed her to lie. That was the serious federal crime that [Special Prosecutor Kenneth] Starr was investigating. The tape that we heard, which was only one tape, did not prove that.”
Newsweek
’s managing editor, Mark Whitaker, blamed killing the story on the fact that the Starr team hadn’t yet grilled Lewinsky: “Let’s say they came back and said, ‘We talked to her, she denied everything. We believe her.’ Or they said, ‘We questioned her. She sounds like a flake. We are dropping the whole investigation.’ Then we would have been irresponsible to write a wildfire story about sex in the White House.” At 4:45 p.m. ET on Saturday, Editor in Chief Richard Smith said that
Newsweek
was going to hold the story pending further investigation.

All of this reeked of Clinton-defending, even the tone of the comments. Whitaker characterized the Lewinsky scandal as “a story about sex in the White House,” which it wasn’t—it was a story about the president of the United States committing perjury. Isikoff was acting as though journalistic standards were the same as jury standards—beyond a reasonable doubt, when he could simply have run with the story and let the world know that there were tapes of a White House intern talking about giving the president of the United States blow jobs in the Oval Office. That’s a story in itself.