It was nearly thirteen years ago that Hillary Clinton, speaking about the witch hunt then being pursued by Kenneth Starr, uttered perhaps her most famous quote:
I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this, they have popped up in other settings. This is the great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. A few journalists have kind of caught onto it and explained it, but it has not yet been fully revealed to the American public.
At the time, of course, she was widely ridiculed, and the word “conspiracy”, while accurate in a technical sense, was probably not the most astute way to put it. But she was also right.
Dating all the way back to their days in Arkansas, the Clintons had made enemies of some very wealthy and very unscrupulous people. Unlike in dopey fiction where the bad guys hire strangely incompetent assassins, in real life all they had to do was make up a few falsehoods and let ideologue media types run with it, something nearly as destructive as a bullet, but with little to no risk of a serious police investigation. And so the country was treated to an endless series of fake scandals that read as a kind of nemesis history of the Clinton Administration.
Eventually all those false accusations coalesced into a real one when Clinton, testifying in a trumped up lawsuit paid for by the very people trying to bring him down, lied under oath about an unauthorized blowjob. That all of the originating investigations, including outlandish absurdities such as the Clintons running illegal drugs in Arkansas and ordering Vince Foster murdered, were provably false didn’t matter. The damage had been done.
The main lesson to be drawn from all that unpleasantness isn’t about abuse of investigatory power, the trappings of the White House, or even the dangers of sex in a hypocritical society. It’s about media manipulation or, to use a term of an older fashion, demagoguery.
A tiny number of individuals were able to get the President of the United States impeached, despite the twin facts that there was no chance he’d be removed from office and that opinion polls ran heavily in his favor throughout the ordeal. Worse, all those fake scandals did a great deal to set the stage for the 2000 election, which remains one of the most costly disasters in American history. All it took was a measly few million bucks and a sympathetic media audience hungry for controversy of any kind.
At TomDispatch a few days ago, Max Blumenthal outlined a similar effort underway when it comes to demonizing Islam and the President that approximately sixty million Americans believe is a Muslim. Starting with efforts, as vitriolic as they are goofy, to demonize teachers and professors, it culminated in the embarrassing media clusterfuck over the Not Mosque at Not Ground Zero last year. The common thread through all of it is fear: fear of Islam, fear of Arabs, fear of anything that isn’t as American as apple pie served on Stars & Stripes plates on the Fourth of July.
As the populist half of Congress goes Red today, the potential for tiny molehills of fictional bullshit to be made into mountain ranges of phony scandals has increased enormously. The last time this happened, in 1995, the angle was sex and fake corruption. This time, it appears to be fear and fake corruption. The only remaining questions are about how true these sorts of lies will ring in a media environment much changed from the 1990s.
Has the level of absurdity that will be tolerated decreased or increased? Can they be shot down in a timely fashion? Most importantly, once something has been shot down, will the originator and supporters of the story actually lose some credibility? Media hysteria over everything from Obama’s birth certificate, to doctored videos of ACORN employees, to batshit insane cost numbers for Obama’s trip to India don’t bode well. But one way or another, we’re about to find out.
