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©2001 chadsux

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In This Edition We spotlight the cartoons of GWBush Art with additional cartoons from Chris Whitehouse, Political Strikes, Lisa Casey, Rex Babin and Chadsux. James Higdon reports on the beginning of the end in, "Gods And Monsters." Joe Conason explains the "Arkansas Project. Eric Alterman shows us employment opportunities in, "Lie To The Media, Get A Job." Greg Palast says it's pay back time in, "California Reamin'. Alicia Montgomery & Daryl Lindsey spin a tale of Washington intrigue in, "Olson By A Whisker." Carla Binion gives us part III of, "Goebbels And Mass Mind Control." Ron Rosebaum blows the whistle on college hi-jinx in, "At Skull And Bones, Bush's Secret Club Initiates Ream Gore." Dan Kennedy reports on the Media/Smirky love affair in, "Bush's Free Ride." Senator Hollings wins the "Vidkun Quisling Award." Molly Ivins says, "Bush Energy Plan Just Plain Silly." Kevin Cunningham asks, "What If Jenna Bush Killed Someone In A Drunk Driving Accident?" And finally Tally Briggs shares a, "Help Wanted" ad she found but first Uncle Ernie exclaims, "Now What?" Plus we have all of your favorite departments! Welcome one and all to "Uncle Ernie's Issues & Alibis." We hope you enjoy your stay! |

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With JFK in the White House I was comfortable with America despite this knowledge. We had survived the Republican sponsored witch-hunts of the 50’s and it truly looked like this America thing could work after all. Things were beginning to look up. The blacks were finally being set free. Even the Indians were beginning to get a break. We had sent out a "Peace Corp" to help others around the world. We had a nuclear treaty with the Russians. Americans in space, not just science fiction but for real! NASA was taking up JFK’s challenge to put a man on the moon before 1970. Girls had the birth control pill and there was this new band from England called the Beatles. Did you see their hair cuts? Then just as I was looking forward to going to high school in January, just ten days before my fifteenth birthday, a corporate sponsored hit team caught the presidential motorcade in a crossfire in Dallas. A sniper firing from the sewer grate in front of the Lincoln blew JFK’s brains all over the back of the limousine. It also destroyed any faith I had in America. The final nail in that coffin was when they released the Zapruda film. After reading the "Warren Report" and all the assurances that were given that Oswald was the lone assassin and then to watch as JFK head jerks backwards and his brains blow out the back in a vee shape to splatter all over the trunk! Just remember boys and girls, "John F. Kennedy didn't die in vain! He died in Dallas Texas!"
Wasn’t it Ben Franklin who asked the question and then answered it when he said, "How do you tell when a politician is lying? HIS LIPS MOVE!" George Carlin said, "Never believe anything coming out of Washington," words to live by. The Republicans hot to trot with all the power they had for eight years, something they hadn’t had for over a generation. Somehow the American public got pissed about the ‘Great Depression’ and blamed it on them and the fat cats that profited by it. They suddenly had all this power to make everyone in America who wasn’t one of them the enemy. I wonder where they got that idea at? Yes with the Trick as President it would be a simple move to establish their very own empire. Today New Jersey, tomorrow DAS WELT! Amerika Uber Alle! Das ist gut, das ist ver gut! And then JFK came along and ruined their timetable and then did something even worse, he actually cared about the people. Imagine one of them, born with a silver spoon in his mouth from another famous American capitalist family. A family in fact as crooked as the Bush’s and the Walkers and that’s saying something. Went to Harvard and then did a silly thing. When America was steered into WWII he went over Pater’s head and got rid of his Washington appointment and joined the regular folk on the line in the Pacific and became a human being! Wow! Sure he was a whore but one has to admit he did it with class. No military aide like Ike’s or office bimbo like Clinton’s for John, he did Marilyn! "Happy Birfday Mista Pwesident," indeed! Even Jimmy Carter, ‘Mr. Straight Arrow,’ admitted to lusting after women in his heart. All men, either through thought or deeds, are whores!
If this didn’t angry the powers that be, JFK then went after the Steel companies, monopolies and brought the civil rights movement into Washington, a very dangerous man! Et Tu Tricky Dicky? Like a balloon bursting there went my childhood and at not quite fifteen I turned to face reality, BUMMER! I naively thought the rest of my generation knew this as well as the rest of the world. Duh. What was all that protesting and marching about? As I look back at it today it’s crystal clear what it was about, it was about getting high and getting laid! Whatever slogan, Peace & Love Man, Stop The War, Nixon's The One, whatever, was just a prelude to sex. After all we’re Americans! So as soon as they got the MBA from Harvard the beads and long hair came off and the t-shirt and the bell-bottoms were replaced by Armani pin stripes and the hippies turned into capitalists and moved to suburbia. The only thing that stopped the Trick from doing what Smirky has done was that he, like most of his kind, are incompetent. Had the three stooges not been caught at the Watergate Hotel we could soon be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Empire. Another infamous non-elected president, one of the ‘Warren Report Conspirators,' was Gerald R (Ratso) Ford. Who with a wink of his eye pardoned The Trick and sent him off for life at taxpayer expense instead of to the headsman axe where he belonged! Does it strike you as odd that we’ve had 6 un-elected Presidents in this country and they were all, to a man, Republicans? Do I detect a pattern here? Hmmm.
America went to sleep after electing ‘Jimi’ Carter and by the time Ronnie snuck in with the help of a third party and the Ayatollah, America merely rolled over and went back to sleep. Then it was Anderson who was bought and paid to split the Democrats, just like Nader was last year. Having a Déjà vu are you? Ronnie looked a bit like Ozzie Nelson and in the acting roll of his life he looked so heart warming and plastic that we overlooked all the carnage and mayhem that this bumbling moron did. But with the Republicans in power once again they quickly sold America out while Ronnie tripled the nation’s debt, forcing middle class America to pick up the check he wrote to America’s corporate masters. Then just when power was getting good to them again, along came Clinton and the party was over.
By the time it became apparent that it was too late for Papa Smirk to stage a coup they were out to get Clinton at all costs. It began to drive them quite insane in their overwhelming drive to take Bill down. With the help of Corporate America money driving the engine and the fact that the American media was bought and paid for by the Republicans during this era. This really didn’t become apparent until the Gulf War when for the first time the reporters were kept from the front lines and the troops. Suddenly the Pentagon was holding news conferences and keeping the reporters in their hotel rooms. By this time it was obvious that the media was gone. Still even as Clinton sold the country out to NAFTA and we were beginning to believe it wasn’t that Bill didn’t inhale but that he forgot to exhale, still we thought perhaps we could use that Oxford education anyway? Bill Clinton is the reason I’m no longer a Democrat, as I’m a Liberal. But I have to admit I do admire one thing about him, I speak of course of his ability to drive the right wing absolutely insane! I have never seen so many drooling, open mouth, vein bursting, brain dead, jack booted, ditto-head yahoos since Der Snifter bit the Big One! Zeus knows how many belly laughs I’ve gotten watching some right wing, mouth-frothing nit-wit rant about Bill. Te he he
So surprise, surprise they stole another election. Ho-hum! It’s getting rather boring really. Think I’ll just roll over and go back to sleep. ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzZZZZZZZ
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Gods And Monsters
By James Higdon Cracks are beginning to form in the Republican ranks! Yesterday, a broadside was delivered directly into the bow of the Republican, starboard side, and the shot was fired by a conscientious Republican. Yes, my friends, apparently there was one leftóuntil, that is, yesterday. Jim Jeffords, the senator from Vermont announced that he would now become an Independent, and caucus with the Democrats! You see, Senator Jeffords has more concern for his constituents than for the right wing agenda. He is a genuine conservative. He does not use the term as a shallow excuse for a power and money grab by the few at the expense of the many. He cares about education, independent farmers, the environment, he cares about people. He fought against Bush's rip off for the rich. Thank you, Sen. Jeffords! You are a profile in courage! What this means is that the Democrats now control the committees in the Senate, making it infinitely more difficult for the pResident to stack the courts. The Democrats can no longer use their weakness as an excuse to capitulate. No sooner do the Democrats in Congress prepare to take charge of the Senate, than they decide to put on their pink tutus and dance in celebration. And in a giddy moment allow the Senate Republicans to bring Theodore Olson's nomination for solicitor general to the Senate floor. Olson was confirmed by a vote of 51ñ47. There will be no investigation into charges of attempting to mislead the judiciary committee by denying his involvement in the Arkansas Project. I'm sure that the Democrats would argue that presidential White House appointments differ from judicial appointments, because Olson's job as solicitor general will last only as long as W lasts in the office he was able to steal. A judicial appointment is for life. To that extent and in so far as it is the job of the Solicitor General to oversee only the litigation that the current pResident selects to pursue, they are right. But one can't help but feel how Lincoln must have felt when, until selecting U.S. Grant to lead the Army of the Potomac, general after general would get Confederate armies on the run only to let them go. And Bob Jewett was quite correct when he referred to this fight as a "cold civil war." The opportunity lost was the chance to investigate, and expose through congressional investigation the malicious right wing tactics that the corporate press has refused to reveal over the last eight years. Meanwhile, the Frankenstein monster created by Richard Mellon Scaife, Larry Klayman, currently on a Clinton bashing cruise to the Cayman Islands, is upset the Republicans have finally dropped their witch hunt for all things Clinton. Otherwise an obscure trade lawyer, Larry Klayman will quickly become irrelevant if he cannot maintain the funding delivered him for filing repetitive, frivolous, nuisance law suits against Bill Clinton and anyone who has ever shaken hands with him. Currently trying to keep the money coming in, Klayman is aboard the MS Masdaam with Gennifer Flowers and Donato Dalrymple, regaling $2,000 to $5,000 donors with scary Clinton adminstration tales. (This is not a joke, just really sad.) The only way Klayman can avoid becoming invisible is to maintain pressure on the executive office. Unfortunately for the Republicans, Clinton no longer occupies it. Since Hilary and Bill have moved out, Klayman has begun to investigate Bush's handling of the China spy plane incident to "find out if any promises were made to the 'Butchers of Beijing.'" Judicial Watch has gone after Tom Delay and the National Republican Congressional Committee for the "Clintonian" manner in which they raise funds; they are investigating whether the Trent Lott Leadership Institute at the University of Mississippi is a funnel for illegal campaign contributions, whether HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson met with political donors in his government office, and a charge, going back to the Bush I administration, that Cheney held fund-raisers at the Pentagon.
One almost suspects that if we just leave them alone, the Republicans
will just begin to eat their own. But I suppose, like any individual
going through cancer treatment, a nation suffering from the political
version thereof goes through good days and bad days. After four
months of bad days, we've finally had a good one.
The lesson to be learned is that the fight is continuous perhaps never
Ending and one cannot afford to celebrate victory too soon or too
long. |

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Ted Olson's defenders say the Clinton-bashing effort was protected by
the First Amendment -- and besides, Olson didn't know much about it anyway.
They're wrong on both counts.
While the nomination of Theodore Olson for solicitor general languishes in the Senate
because of doubts concerning his candor about his involvement in the "Arkansas Project," conservative
pundits and politicians are mounting a strangely contradictory defense. As if reading from a common
script, they all insist that the Arkansas Project was nothing more sinister than hard-hitting journalism,
protected by the First Amendment.
And then, often in the same column or statement, they hasten to add that Ted Olson had nothing to do
with the Arkansas Project anyway, except to help "shut it down."
Over the past week or so, this line of argument has been offered by such prominent conservatives as William Safire, Tony Snow,
Trent Lott, Kenneth Starr and Robert Novak, among others. Like Olson's own testimony, it raises more questions than it resolves.
If the Arkansas Project was truly just an exercise in political reportage, then why did Olson and his fellow American Spectator
board members decide that it should be shut down? And why would the Spectator's own attorney feel such a powerful need to
dissociate himself from the magazine's pioneering journalistic endeavors?
The truth -- as Novak and Starr know and as Olson's other defenders probably surmise -- is that the Arkansas Project had very
little to do with journalism. Although that was indeed the ostensible purpose of the funding provided by Richard Scaife's
foundations, the four-year enterprise produced very few publishable words for $2.4 million.
In fact, according to Wladyslaw Plesczynski, who served as the Spectator's managing editor in those days, the Arkansas Project
didn't come up with much that he could use. In a 1997 memo he sent to publisher Ronald Burr, Plesczynski described its activities:
"There always seemed to be lots of hush-hush and heavy breathing, but it never amounted to anything concrete enough for a
story."
Not quite "never," in fact, but very rarely. So given its meager literary output, what did the Arkansas Project actually accomplish,
aside from paying expenses for dinner parties, travel and office supplies?
As reported in Salon and later in "The Hunting of the President" (which I coauthored with Gene Lyons), the project's overseers,
Steve Boynton and David Henderson, were mostly concerned with the care, feeding and encouragement of Whitewater witness
David Hale. They also spent a lot of time and money supervising a Mississippi private detective named Rex Armistead, who
received more than $400,000 in project funds. (Another private detective in Little Rock, Tom Golden, was later hired with
Arkansas Project funds by Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.)
Among the dubious tasks assigned to Armistead was an intimidation campaign against CNN correspondent John Camp, whose
skeptical reporting on Whitewater and other Clinton fables had annoyed the president's enemies. That job included contacting
Camp's former wife to ask whether she would provide any dirt on the award-winning correspondent. (She wouldn't, and informed
Camp immediately about the detective's approach to her.) Somehow, as reported in Salon by Murray Waas, a derogatory report
on Camp later turned up in the files of the Republican chairman of the House Banking Committee.
Another Arkansas Project intimidation scheme targeted U.S. District Judge Henry Woods, whose pretrial rulings in Kenneth
Starr's prosecution of James and Susan McDougal and Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker had also upset the anti-Clinton camp.
The result was a smear campaign against the judge, engineered by the Arkansas segregationist politician "Justice Jim"
Johnson and the project's local handyman, Parker Dozhier.
Their ugly, inaccurate assaults on the character of Woods were fed by Boynton to Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth,
and eventually showed up in such Clinton-bashing organs as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Wall Street Journal
editorial page.
In short, the Arkansas Project was a dirty-tricks operation more than a journalistic investigation. It's easy to understand why
an attorney of Ted Olson's great reputation would rather say he had no connection with such unsavory people and practices.
But is he telling the truth?
The latest item of evidence to the contrary turned up in a dispatch Sunday by the Washington Post's Thomas Edsall.
That article noted a curious reference to Olson in "Crossfire," a memoir published two years ago by former Arkansas state
trooper L.D. Brown. It recounts at some length his dealings with the American Spectator between 1994 and 1997.
Salon readers may recall that Brown was the trooper who gained some notoriety for accusing Bill Clinton of complicity in
cocaine smuggling at a rural airport in Mena, Ark. That tall tale enthralled Tyrrell, and earned Brown about $10,000 in
Arkansas Project payments plus several trips to Washington and dinners at Tyrrell's house.
The ex-trooper was also quoted extensively in Tyrrell's own far-fetched version of the Mena affair, which was featured
in the Spectator's August 1995 issue. Plesczynski's 1997 memo refers disparagingly to Tyrrell's 1995 Mena story as
"the Arkansas Project's last hurrah."
According to Brown's memoir, he was introduced to Olson by Henderson, who also brought Hale to Olson as a client -- and who
is identified in "Crossfire" as "a board member of the American Spectator and liaison to the magazine for Richard Mellon Scaife."
(The date of the meeting isn't clear, but it certainly preceded the "shutdown" of the Arkansas Project by the Spectator board.)
Having left the state police, Brown needed advice about whether he should take a job in England, which he suspected might be
connected somehow with the Clinton apparatus.
On Page 202 of "Crossfire," he writes: "Henderson offered to have Olsen (sic) talk with me and give me advice on whether
or not to take the job. I traveled to Washington and met with Henderson and Olsen at Ted's office. I laid out the extensive
story as Ted listened with interest. Ted is an exceptional lawyer and I trusted his advice explicitly (sic).
It was with this opinion that I took what he said to heart."
And so on -- the point being that this little anecdote, if true, indicates yet another contact between Olson and Henderson,
and yet another set of connections between the conservative lawyer and the Arkansas Project.
Perhaps L.D. Brown should be added to the Senate Judiciary Committee's witness list so that he can explain his acquaintance
with the man who would be solicitor general. |
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Lie To The Media, Get A Job By ERIC ALTERMAN Perhaps I underestimate the joy of being given a silly nickname by the Leader of the Free World, but I'm having a hard time understanding why media big feet are so taken by the nation's new Charmer in Chief. Leave aside the extreme right-wing agenda he's pursuing when by any fair measure of voting he lost the election. Forget that he began his term by breaking his key campaign promises. And ignore his frequent and unapologetic lies about his commitment to bipartisan governance. What about the fact that, perhaps more than any President since Nixon, Bush holds the media and its denizens in utter contempt? Take for example Bush's decision to appoint Otto Reich to head the Latin American office in the State Department. As Peter Kornbluh discusses elsewhere in this issue [see "Bush's Contra Buddies," page 6], Reich's job in the Reagan Administration was simply to lie to (and about) the media. He did it very well. According to Walter Raymond--the CIA propaganda specialist whom William Casey transferred to the National Security Council in order to circumvent the 1947 National Security Act, which restricted CIA involvement in domestic propaganda operations--the purpose of Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy was to "concentrate on gluing black hats on the sandinistas and white hats on the UNO [contras]." Staffed by senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, military intelligence and psychological warfare, the OPD offered privileges to favored journalists, placed ghostwritten articles over the signatures of contra leaders in leading opinion magazines and on Op-Ed pages, and publicized nasty stories about the Sandinistas, true or not. In its first year, it sent attacks on the Sandinistas to 1,600 college libraries, 520 political science faculties, 122 editorial writers, 107 religious organizations and countless reporters, right-wing lobbyists and members of Congress. It booked advocates for 1,570 lecture and talk-show engagements. In just one week of March 1985, the OPD officers bragged in a memo of having fooled the editors of the Wall Street Journal into publishing an Op-Ed about Nicaragua penned by an unknown professor, having guided an NBC news story on the contras and having written and edited Op-Ed articles to be signed by contra spokesmen, as well as having planted false stories in the media about a visiting Congressman's experiences in Nicaragua. Among the OPD's lies were stories that portrayed the Sandinistas as virulent anti-Semites, that reported a Soviet shipment of MIG jets to Managua and that purported to reveal that US reporters in Nicaragua were receiving sexual favors--hetero- and homosexual--from Sandinista agents in exchange for pro-Communist reporting. That last lie, published in the July 29, 1985, New York magazine, came directly from Reich. Perhaps OPD's most important effort was to convince Congress and the media of the contras' democratic bona fides. They did this by pretending that the men handpicked by North as front men were operationally in charge of contra political and military operations. In addition to signing the names of these men to fake Op-Ed articles, Reich and company coached them on how to lie whenever they were asked about being on the US government payroll, as well as about their aims for their US-funded armies. Together with top officials of the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council, the OPD spent millions to paint civilians as the true leaders of the contras. The United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO), founded in San José, Costa Rica, in June 1985, thanks in large part to the efforts of Oliver North, was designed to manufacture an acceptably "democratic" face for the contra leadership. According to a private 1985 memo by Robert Owen, North's liaison with the contras, the UNO was entirely "a creation of the USG[overnment] to garner support from Congress." Its leaders were "liars" and "greed and power motivated." Reporting on Reich's appointment has been decidedly unsensational. The LA Times has ignored it. The New York Times and the Washington Post assigned to the story knowledgeable reporters who covered Central America, but the results reflected the strictures of journalistic objectivity as much as the outrageousness of Reich's activities. Raymond Bonner and Christopher Marquis wrote in the Times that "a government investigation concluded that Mr. Reich's office engaged in prohibited acts of domestic propaganda." (In a backhanded tribute to Bonner's brilliant Central American reporting of the 1980s, Reich called the Times editors with a vicious personal attack on the journalist hoping to get him taken off the story.) Karen DeYoung noted in the Post that the OPD "used what critics called legally questionable means to promote favorable publicity and political support for the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua in their war against the Cuba-backed Sandinista government." The Economist was even more generous, insisting that Reich "got marginally caught up in the Iran/contra scandal when his office was accused of engaging in covert propaganda activities to get Americans' support for the Nicaraguan contras." No major paper has yet addressed the issue in an editorial. Most reports on the appointment have focused on it as payback to extremist Miami Cubans and brother Jeb for their instrumental role in helping Bush hijack Florida and hence the election. (Reich regularly likens Cuba to Auschwitz and to an antebellum slave plantation.) Perhaps it is. But Reich's appointment ought to be recognized as an intentional kick in the teeth to the media, as well as a testament to its lack of institutional memory.
When Kornbluh and Robert Parry first revealed the activities of the OPD in Foreign Policy magazine in 1988,
Reich, according to a Boston Globe report, compared the fully accurate article to Hitler's "big lie" technique
regarding the Final Solution. It's hard to imagine a more offensive manipulation of the murder of millions than
using it to slander journalists and lie to the country about an illegal war--but hell, the Bush people are just getting
started. |
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Special report: George Bush's America
If that's what you think, you've overlooked the
vicious intent of the whole programme. It's
payback time - and Bush intends to make
California pay.
Let me list California's sins. First, California
voted Gore. Second, California's governor, Gray
Davis, is an intelligent, popular Democrat who
could whup little George's butt in the next
election. Three, California voted Gore.
Keep in mind that the entire excuse for this
polluters' wet dream of an 'energy plan' is that
there is an energy 'crisis' in California. We are
told that there is just not enough electricity and
gas.
Even the Democrats and the New York Times agree
that there is an energy crisis in California, which
is evidence enough to conclude: There is no energy
crisis in California.
In case you need more evidence, check this out. In
December, the lights went out in southern
California, the price of electricity jumped
1000% over the previous year and the price of
natural gas jumped 1000% in one week.
Power shortage? Nope. The California power grid
operator reported that, just over the California
border at the 'Henry Hub' gas pipeline switching
centre, you could buy plentiful gas for $1
(£66p) a therm. A couple of miles down the road
in California, the price was $10.
By golly, it turns out the two power merchants
that controlled the biggest pipe into California
simply blocked part of the tube. Result: panic,
price spikes and black outs.
Market speculators made half a billion dollars on
that cute little manoeuvre. In all, says last week's
report by Dr Anjali Shiffren of the grid system,
"monopoly rents," "economic withholding" and
"physical withholding" were responsible for
artificial shortages and excess charges of $6.2
billion last year - half the state's light bill.
In other words, California did not run out of
energy, it ran out of supplies of government.
Until two years ago, California regulated electric
companies. Then Mr Davis' predecessor, a
Republican governor, 'de-regulated' energy, and
the state became a pricing predators' picnic.
Governor Davis' own plan to end this faux crisis
is a combination of re-regulating electricity
prices and de-privatising part of the power
system. In other words, Davis's cure is one part
realism, one part populism and one part
so-she-lizm.
Texas Power trading corporations (TXU), Reliant
and Enron (Bush's numero uno campaign donor),
would bleed profits under the Davis plan.
Now that's a crisis. So, the vice-president, Dick
Cheney, the man we Americans pay to think for
Dubya, drafted a plan to deal with the Davis
crisis. Until January, Mr Cheney was CEO of
Halliburton Corporation, the USA's largest
oil-drilling services company and builder of
nuclear plants.
Mr Cheney wants us to drill more oil and build
more nukes. This won't do squat for California,
which does not have oil-fired power plants and
cannot put more reactors on earthquake faults.
But then, if I may remind you first, California
voted Gore.
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Olson By A Whisker In a surprising reversal of fortune, before relinquishing control of the Senate, Republicans force a vote on the controversial solicitor general -- and win. By Alicia Montgomery and Daryl Lindsey WASHINGTON -- As the clock on solicitor general nominee Ted Olson wound down, Republicans took a bold final shot, and Democrats, perhaps already satisfied knowing that they would soon be the new majority party in the Senate, made only a token effort to block it, and Olson won by a 51-47 vote. While it might have looked like the Democrats were firmly opposed to Olson's nomination, the party, according a senior Democratic staffer close to the proceedings, could not recruit the requisite number of 41 to support a filibuster to hold up the Olson nomination. So when the roll call finally came, only two Democrats (Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., and Sen. Ben Nelson, D- Neb.) voted for Olson, but the other 47 who voted against him already knew he was a sure thing. Olson's success was a remarkable reversal of fortune. When word spread earlier in the week that Sen. Jim Jeffords, R-Vt., would be abandoning the GOP to become an independent, it slowly became clear that the Democrats would win control of the Senate, and Olson's chances began to look grim. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., predicted Wednesday that, under Democratic Senate rule, "Ted Olson will be practicing law, making a lot of money" in the private sector. By Thursday morning, Margaret Aitken, Biden's press secretary, tried to soften her boss's earlier statement. "I don't think it's really clear yet how it's going to shake out," she said. "I think it is too early to speculate about that." Actually, it was already too late. In less extraordinary times, Olson's nomination would already have been long dead. On May 18, the Senate Judiciary Committee split 9-9 over Olson, with Democrats still loudly questioning his answers under questioning about his ties to the Arkansas Project, the anti-Clinton scandal-hunt run through the American Spectator and funded by Richard Mellon Scaife during the mid-1990s. In ordinary times, a tie vote is a losing vote in the Senate. But the Republicans and Democrats in the evenly split Senate had agreed in December to allow Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., to break such deadlocks by filing a "discharge motion." Lott did that last week, so Olson's nomination could've been moved to the floor any time after that. But committee Republicans, in deference to continued Democratic complaints and possibly in fear of a filibuster, allowed the minority members to continue probing Olson. But when it became clear that the Democrats would assume control of the Senate, Lott set the Olson vote, frustrating opponents, including a prime target of the Arkansas Project. "It strikes me as a desperate measure," New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters, accusing the GOP of "try[ing] to jam this through while they still control the floor." For Clinton, this nomination was personal. While Republicans publicly accused Democrats of opposing Olson purely for his role in successfully representing George W. Bush before the Supreme Court in the decision that effectively awarded Bush the presidency, they shied away from the virulent role the Spectator -- and Olson -- played during the 1990s as a critic of the Clintons. Olson himself, writing under a pseudonym, coauthored an outlandish article outlining the possible crimes that had been committed by President Clinton and Hillary Clinton and how stiff the penalties might be for those crimes. His wife, former federal prosecutor and conservative cable-TV pundit Barbara Olson wrote "Hell to Pay," the bible of anti-Hillary books among the far right, in which she described the former first lady as a woman "who has gone to the brink of criminality to amass wealth and power." Clinton made an appearance before reporters to attack Olson, a man she said didn't "meet the standards that we should expect from somebody nominated for solicitor general." But as the day wore on, even Leahy's office began to downplay the need to continue with a probe. "The bipartisan inquiry has gone on all week," said Leahy's press secretary, David Carle, when asked if the vote would cut off the probe prematurely. As for whether all Leahy's questions about Olson had been answered, a flustered Carle replied, "Yes." But the committee planned on asking more questions for David Brock, an American Spectator reporter who has been the chief source contradicting Olson's account of his involvement with the Arkansas Project. The Spectator was the home of Scaife's effort. In recent weeks, Brock has offered a far different account of the project and Olson's part in it than the nominee had testified to, and Brock's words provided a foundation for the suspicions of Democrats. As a result, Hatch had issued an invitation to Brock on Tuesday to speak to Senate investigators as soon as possible, but a date was never scheduled. Investigators also didn't get a chance to hear from Ronald Burr, former publisher of the American Spectator who left the publication in a cloud reportedly after criticizing the Arkansas Project. Salon has previously reported that Burr, after receiving a $350,000 severance package from the Spectator, signed a non-disclosure agreement that prohibits him from making public statements about the company. Though Burr hasn't spoken for himself, Ralph Lemley, his advisor and friend at the time of departure from the Spectator, declared earlier Thursday in a letter that Olson had been a part of the Arkansas Project from the beginning, and that Burr was pushed out of his post because he objected to the Arkansas Project, and had asked for an internal "fraud audit" of the enterprise. Salon obtained and published that letter on Thursday afternoon, about an hour before the Senate voted to confirm Olson. Lemley had earlier sent a copy of the letter to the Judiciary Committee, but after discussion had already begun on the floor of the Senate. Had that letter come out earlier, according to Clinton spokesman Jim Kennedy, it may well have affected the outcome. "The Republicans seemed eager to cut off any further inquiry," he said. Kennedy added that the quick vote virtually ended Democratic hopes to engineer a filibuster. "There just wasn't enough time," Kennedy said. That could account for the tone of grumpy resignation that characterized Leahy's remarks after the Olson vote. "We could have held him up forever," Leahy hypothesized before reporters outside the Senate chambers. But Leahy, putting a brave face on defeat, said that he didn't want the first Democratic Senate majority since 1994 to take over in an atmosphere of gridlock. "I don't believe in doing the kinds of things they did for six years," he said. Biden -- predicting Olson's doom just a day earlier -- seemed anxious to put the fight in the past. "What's done is done," he said, leaving the Capitol. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., struck a more defiant stance, claiming that the 47 votes against Olson would "send a message" to Bush. "It proves that we will not be a rubber stamp for his nominees," he said. Meanwhile, Olson's conservative allies were celebrating his good fortune. R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor in chief of the Spectator, responded angrily to inquiries for a reaction. "You have never run anything accurate in Salon magazine about me, Ted Olson or the so-called Arkansas Project," he said. Wladyslaw Pleszczynski called inquiries about the Arkansas Project "a ghoulish, nightmarish attempt" to rewrite the history of legitimate Spectator criticism of the Clintons. He described the experience as "Kafkaesque."
Salon published investigations in 1998 that first raised questions about the
Arkansas Project and its dealings with David Hale, the controversial main
witness in the Whitewater investigation against the Clintons. The relationship
between Hale and the Spectator was ultimately the subject of a federal
investigation. Olson's relationship with Hale, whom he represented when Hale
fought a federal subpoena, was also a subject of the federal probe. The articles
in Salon, as well as "The Hunting of the President," a book by Salon columnist
Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, were frequently used in documents that Leahy
presented to bolster his case against the Olson bid. |

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Goebbels And Mass Mind Control: Part Three How PR opinion-shapers undermine the people's political power By Carla Binion In parts one and two, we compared the methods of Hitler's propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, with the PR techniques of today's corporate spin doctors. We also looked at the ways in which corporate PR spin works against the public interest regarding health care and the environment. Now we'll explore the ways that corporate propaganda undermines the political power of ordinary citizens. Journalist Frank Rich wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece that he felt he was living through a "Twilight Zone" episode when he read the Palm Beach Post's scoop saying that Palm Beach's butterfly ballot cost Al Gore "about 6,600 votes, more than 10 times what he needed to overcome George W. Bush's slim lead in Florida." Rich said the reason it felt as if he had entered "The Twilight Zone," was because, beyond Palm Beach, he could find no sign such a thing had happened. "I turned on my TV," writes Rich, "and had to search to find a mention of the Post's story. It might as well have been a hallucination." In an article entitled "The Invisible People," (The Progressive, March 2001) June Jordan writes about Election 2000's disenfranchised African-American voters and the corporate-owned news media's neglect of the story. Jordan, a noted author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, says, "We have moved from The Invisible Man to The Invisible People. It's a raging and a sorrow at the terrible meaning of that discount—for us, and for democracy itself." The corporate-owned news media "invents reality," as author and educator Michael Parenti has said, by instructing the American people on which news stories are real, and which facts to ignore. Parenti has also written (Land of Idols, St. Martin's Press, 1994) that our political system can be seen in one of three ways: 1."A conservative celebration of the wonders of our free-market society, coupled with an insistence that capitalism would be still more wonderful were it not for meddlesome government regulations and the demands of undeserving, low-income people who feed out of the public trough." 2.A liberal complaint about "aberrant problems that remain in an otherwise basically good System." 3.A radical analysis "that sees ecological crisis, military interventions, the national security State, homelessness, poverty, an inequitable tax system, and undemocratic social institutions, such as the corporate-owned media, not as irrational outcomes of a basically rational system, but as rational results of a system whose central goal is the accumulation of wealth and power for the few." Parenti adds that if you take the radical analysis perspective, you "cross an invisible line and will be labeled in mainstream circles a 'conspiracy theorist.'" He notes that Abraham Lincoln might today be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, because Lincoln once observed in a speech, "These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people." However, Parenti adds that the corporation/ruling class's mode of operation is systemic and institutional rather than conspiratorial. The fact that corporate domination is built into our existing political system, and into many of our institutions, makes it a more daunting problem than a grand and aberrant conspiracy might be. In a brilliant article for Online Journal (4/24/01), Scott Morschhauser took up the same issue, pointing out that the label "conspiracy theory' is used by those defending corporate interests the same way they use the label 'communist.' If you are successful at pinning a person or idea with a negative label, then the public will ignore the message. It doesn't matter whether or not the label fits. The facts don't matter. All that you have to do is accuse (see the elder Bush administration for prime examples.)" When corporate PR teams are able to confuse the public by spinning citizen dissenters as "conspiracy theorists" or as "wacko, tree-hugging environmentalists" or as "extremist fringe," they are able to marginalize activists and dilute their political effectiveness. Journalist Norman Solomon once suggested that rather than succumbing to media manipulation, we can "tune up our personal and collective 'radar screens' to track unidentified flying propaganda." In "False Hope," (Common Courage Press, 1994) Solomon also discusses the subject of public confusion. He writes about the various ways in which corporate PR spin and media "illusion-making" confuse the public. Solomon quotes Anne Wilson Schaef on the results of this kind of confusion: "First, it keeps us powerless and controllable. No one is more controllable than a confused person; no society is more controllable than a confused society. Politicians know this better than anyone, and that is why they use innuendo, veiled references, and out-and-out lies instead of speaking clearly and truthfully. "Second, it keeps us ignorant. Professionals give their clients confusing information cloaked in intimidating language that lay-people cannot understand. They preserve their one-up status while preventing us from learning about our own bodies, our legal rights, and our psychology. "Third, it keeps us from taking responsibility for our own lives. No one expects confused people to own up to the things they think, say, or do . . . "Fourth, it keeps us busy. When we must spend all our time and energy trying to figure out what is going on, we have none left over for reflecting on the system, challenging it, or exploring alternatives to it." A confused person will stay stuck within the corporate-dominated system, because creating new options requires mental clarity. Confusion also causes numbness and political passivity. Frank Rich's "Twilight Zone" experience of the media's ignoring the butterfly ballot story, and June Jordan's sense that African-Americans have become invisible, are normal, healthy responses to the corporate media's lying about reality. When the people see one reality with their own eyes, and simultaneously the corporate media denies that reality, the effect is hallucinatory. People need truthfulness about politics in order to operate powerfully in the world. Truth is one of psychologist Abraham Maslow's "meta-needs." It has always been a high priority for the world's spiritual and philosophical thinkers. Factual information is a necessary foundation in order for ordinary Americans to set priorities for political action and organize accordingly. A high priority concern might be weighing corporate interests against the public interest. Another priority might be clearly deciding what our values are. Corporate spokespeople sometimes try to blur the distinction between, for example, good-versus-harmful effects on the environment, or good-versus-harmful health care proposals. Some corporate spokespeople claim terms such as "good" or "truth" or "justice" can only be vague, misleading "weasel words," despite the fact that philosophers from Aristotle, to the various Enlightenment-era philosophers, to today's best political thinkers have used such terms freely, and have helped clarify their meaning. For example, the dialogues of Plato explore the meaning of the word "justice." Harvard Professor John Rawls has said, "A just basic structure will be one which produces a proper distribution of prospects of obtaining primary goods, such as income and health care." How do we define "good" or "harmful" for purposes of the subject at hand? Let's just play with possible working definitions, for the sake of argument. Those options which are "good" could be defined as options that promote health, safety and well-being for the largest number of people, in a kind, egalitarian manner, without discrimination against race, sexual orientation, religion or lack of religion. Those options which are "harmful" might be defined as ones that destroy health, safety and well-being for large numbers of people in order that corporations can increase their profits, without regard for kindness, egalitarianism, and with (at times) discrimination based on race (as during the Florida election debacle, racial profiling, etc.), sexual orientation, religion or lack of religion. Are there gray areas within those definitions? Yes. Are there complexities, and is there room for debate? Of course. However, the lines between good and harmful; right and wrong; public health and public detriment are not as blurry as many corporate spokespeople would have us think . . . or, more precisely, would "confuse" us to think. Most of our founding fathers, Jefferson and Paine among them, didn't want the people confused. Jefferson said repeatedly that democracy could work only if the electorate were "fully informed." He said, "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome direction, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." Thomas Paine, in "The Rights of Man," urged "education for one million and thirty thousand children," saying that "the poor laws, those instruments of civil torture will be superceded" by an informed public given a modicum of "comfortable provision" by government. Paine also wrote that as a result of a better informed and educated public, and of government's providing some assistance for the poor, "The hearts of the humane will not be shocked by ragged and hungry children, and persons of seventy and eighty years of age begging for bread. The dying poor will not be dragged from place to place to breathe their last . . . The poor as well as the rich, will then be interested in the support of government, and the cause and apprehension of riots and tumults will cease." Pop-propagandists such as Rush Limbaugh and his many clones often say, in their usual Orwellian style, that government assistance for the poor actually hurts the poor. Never mind that the Limbaugh types also generally claim to be of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's interesting to contrast their "screw-the-poor" comments with those attributed to Christ, such as, "What you do for the least of these, you do for me," or with a typical Hebrew proverb, such as, "When a needy man stands at your door, God stands at his side." And, of course, to corporate mouthpieces such as Limbaugh, agnostic or "pagan" humanists (such as Thomas Paine) who might suggest assisting the poor don't count at all. Limbaugh clone and radio talk show host, Neal Boortz, has said, "That bum sitting on a heating grate, smelling like a wharf, is there by choice. He is there because of the sum total of the choices he has made in his life." ("The Terrible Truth About Liberals," Longstreet Press, 1998.) Boortz implies people are never poor due to being laid off from a job by a corporation that moved offshore in order to pay slave wages; or due to sudden overwhelming medical bills; or, least of all, due to flaws within the corporate-dominated system itself. Boortz also says this country is a republic rather than a democracy. He claims that the view that this country is meant to be a democracy is an "insidious idea planted by the Left, by liberals anxious to expand the role of government and their own power." Limbaugh often says the same about democracy, and such antidemocratic views have been popular among many right-wing groups in recent years, just they were in Nazi Germany. The fact is, America is not merely a republic, but a democratic republic. This country has a strong democratic lineage. The above comments by Jefferson and Paine have to do with enhancing American democracy. Activists who worked toward civil rights, women's rights, labor rights and many other social causes, have helped strengthen democracy within the nation. In parts one and two, we showed that Hitler and his propagandist, Goebbels, worked to dismantle democracy. They accomplished their goal in part by using PR spin, in order to confuse the people and convince them that democracy wasn't good for them. Through propaganda, Goebbels created a national "Twilight Zone," making the Jewish people invisible, marginalizing dissenters and rendering potential activists powerless. Somehow, it has turned out that corporate America's PR spin has also taken aim against democracy, confused the people, created a national "Twilight Zone," made ordinary Americans (especially Jewish and African-Americans) invisible, marginalized dissenters and rendered potential activists powerless. Ordinary Americans have been rendered at least so powerless that we have not yet found a way to persuade our elected representatives to enforce laws that would curb corporate excesses when it comes to polluting the environment; to create legislation that would give this country affordable pharmaceutical drugs or a good health care system; or to bring back the Fairness Doctrine or create similar new legislation, so that our nation's news media is not entirely corporate-controlled. In a Showtime movie aired this week, Varian's War, the lead character (played by William Hurt) helped bring around 2,000 artists and intellectuals to America, to escape the Nazi Holocaust. A character played by the actor Alan Arkin described the Nazis as "destroying everything they do not understand, which is everything that makes life beautiful and sweet and pure."
Corporate polluters, health care opponents, and illusion-makers,
probably don't understand that they are contributing to the destruction
of (almost) everything that makes life beautiful, sweet and pure.
However, it is up to ordinary Americans with clear vision to toss a
little light on the subject. In our proposed working definition of
"good," working to preserve the beautiful, sweet and pure things in
life has to figure in somewhere. It is a better way to spend a life than
screwing the poor, plundering the earth and grubbing for corporate
profit.
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And last Saturday, April 14–for the first time ever–that long-secret rite was
witnessed by a team of outsiders, including this writer.
Using high-tech night-vision video equipment able to peer through the gloom into the inner courtyard of
the Skull and Bones "Tomb" in New Haven, The Observer team witnessed:
o The George W. effect: intoxicated by renewed proximity to Presidential power, a robed Bonesman
posing as George W. harangued initiates in an eerily accurate Texas drawl: "I’m gonna ream you like I
reamed Al Gore" and "I’m gonna kill you like I killed Al Gore."
o Privileged Skull and Bones members mocked the assault on Abner Louima by crying out repeatedly,
"Take that plunger out of my ass!"
o Skull and Bones members hurled obscene sexual insults ("lick my bumhole") at initiates as they were
forced to kneel and kiss a skull at the feet of the initiators.
o Other members acted out the tableau of a throat-cutting ritual murder.
It’s important to remember this is not some fraternity initiation. It is an initiation far more secret–and
far more significant, in terms of real power in the United States–than that of the Cosa Nostra. If the
Bushes are "the WASP Corleones"–as the ever more stingingly waspish Maureen Dowd has
suggested–this is how their "made men" (and women) are made.* It’s an initiation ceremony that has
bonded diplomats, media moguls, bankers and spies into a lifelong, multi-generational fellowship far
more influential than any fraternity. It was–and still remains–the heart of the heart of the American
establishment.
Further revelations turned up by the Observer Bones Investigation Unit include:
o The words to the secret Skull and Bones "death mantra."
o Copies of the Skull and Bones tax returns, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests,
raise questions about the legitimacy of the secret society’s claim to charitable tax-exempt deduction
status–particularly relevant considering recent criticism of the Bush tax plan for favoring the privileged
few.
o A possible explanation emerged in the course of the initiation ceremony for George W.’s decision to
run for President in the first place.
‘The Devil Equals Death’
The Observer Mission Impossible expedition had its inception several months ago with a phone call
from Peggy Adler, the research associate on my previous Skull and Bones piece in The Observer (July
17, 2000). She is the demon investigator and former Iran-contra committee staffer who, among other
coups, cross-referenced corporate boards to crack the "RTA code," the corporate shell game by which
the corporate shell of the Skull and Bones society, the Russell Trust Association, shielded its paper trail
from prying eyes by changing its name to RTA Inc.
Ms. Adler said she had been approached by a member of the Yale community who wanted to share with
us a remarkable coup of his own: He had found a way last year, in April of 2000, to audiotape the Skull
and Bones initiation ceremony. And he wanted to know if we’d be interested in an attempt to videotape it
this time.
And so one afternoon last December, shortly after the Bush electoral victory had been certified, I met
with the intrepid fellow; he booted up his laptop and let me listen to the sounds of a ceremony that had
been the subject of fevered speculation for nearly two centuries now.
Of course, there is more to Skull and Bones than the mystical mumbo-jumbo of its rituals. The rituals
are less important than the relationships–the bonds of power and influence that develop between Skull
and Bones initiates after they graduate. But the relationships are first forged by the rituals and fact that
the founders of Time Inc. and the C.I.A., as well as several Secretaries of State and National Security
Advisors–the men who made the decision to drop the Hiroshima bomb, invade the Bay of Pigs and
plunge us into Vietnam, the Tafts, the Bundys, the Buckleys, the Harrimans, the Lovetts–all took part in
this initiation ritual may have something to do with the real world power of those bonds. The unspoken
understanding, the comfort level with the clandestine, the nods and winks with which power is exercised.
The initiation ceremony begins the process of inculcating into the elect of the elite (just 15 out of 1,300
in every Yale class) the same mystical sense of mission that allowed the British Old Boy network to rule
a worldwide empire.
The whole phenomenon is rarely looked into beyond the exotic ritual trappings (although Evan Thomas
and Walter Isaacson talk about the world-wide web of Bones foreign policy mandarins in The Wise
Men). But it’s something I’ve been investigating off and on for a quarter of a century now. I am the
Ahab of Skull and Bones, pursuing the white whale (or white male) leviathan to the utmost depths. As an
undergraduate at Yale I lived next door to the Skull and Bones Tomb, and back in 1977 I published the
first outsider’s investigation into Skull and Bones, its rituals and its influence on American political
culture (an updated version of that piece, revised to include my chilly exchange with George and
Barbara Bush on Air Force Two, can be found in my recent nonfiction collection, The Secret Parts of
Fortune).
And so it was momentous for me to actually hear the sounds of the Skull and Bones initiation on that
laptop. But in listening to it, awe gave way to a mixture of puzzlement and embarrassment–and an even
deeper, unsatisfied curiosity.
In part it was the fact that the ritual was heard but not seen. My Yale source had found a previously
unexploited perch from which to record the sounds of the ceremonies, but could glimpse them only
incompletely. He reported a figure dressed like the devil, another one in a hooded-skeleton costume and
others in robes. The thing that stood out for me, listening to it, was what I’ve come to think of as "the
death mantra."
Yes, the death mantra–here it is, the three-line Skull and Bones initiation-ritual theme that has bound
three Presidents (including the present one) to their secret society:
‘THE HANGMAN EQUALS DEATH!
The death-centered imagery, the injunction to initiates that they must "die to the barbarian world" and be
reborn in the Elysian company of the elect of "The Order," as they call it, is what makes Skull and
Bones as radically different from a college fraternity as the Gambino family is from the "hunting and
fishing club" that was their nominal headquarters.
The hangman equals death. The devil equals death. Death equals death ….
What the hell is going on there? Is it a puzzle in logic, like "All men are mortal. Socrates is mortal …"?
Does it solve out to "The hangman equals the devil?"
Could one detect a capital-punishment theme here–the hangman as executioner presaging George W.’s
prolific execution rate as Texas governor? "George W. equals death," you might say.
And what about the devil? (Well, the figure dressed like the devil.) Is that the secret they’ve been
covering up ever since the society was founded in 1832, the offshoot of a German secret society: devil
worship? A fulfillment of the paranoid fantasies of the fundamentalist right, who believe the Eastern
establishment is a front for Satanic conspiracy.
Probably not, but it made me more eager to participate in this year’s caper: the attempt to see as well as
hear it, to capture it all on video–for educational, historical and journalistic purposes to document a
defining rite of passage of the American ruling class.
Oh, yes–before we get to the night-vision videotape, there was one more thing, the embarrassing part of
the audiotape, the OOGA-BOOGA part. Part of the ceremony on the tape involved an initiation master
ordering the neophytes to fetch bones and uttering the (I guess) fake Tarzan-movie "native" chant
"OOGA BOOGA." It left me feeling embarrassed for Skull and Bones. Hard to ever take seriously again
anyone whose defining life-mission moment includes an OOGA BOOGA.
But as it turned out, "OOGA BOOGA" was not evident in this year’s ceremony, as far as we were able
to tell. Perhaps it was an improvisation, like this year’s impersonation of George W. ("I’ll ream you like
I reamed Al Gore") was.
The Observer Mission Impossible Force met to plot strategy an hour before sunset on initiation night,
Saturday, April 12. It is not widely known, but Tap Night, which occurs on Thursday, is not generally
the same as initiation night. The good stuff happens on Saturday night, and already limos are cruising the
quiet streets that crisscross the Yale campus, conveying initiates of other secret societies to their rituals.
Bones initiates come on foot, knock on the massive triple-locked wooden door of the Tomb and are
conveyed to the first stage of the ritual. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Let me just mention how much I admired the intrepid Yale members of the Observer Bones Task Force
for displaying the kind of curiosity, initiative and heretical, skeptical impulse apparently absent on most
Ivy campuses, if you believe David Brooks’ recent Atlantic Monthly cover story on get-along-go-along
premature careerists. The guys on my team will make more of a real contribution than any of the smug
secret-society types.
First on the agenda was a quick examination of the Bones income-tax filings, which an outside consultant
to the team had obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. He and Peggy Adler pointed out
to me a couple of dubious assertions on the Form 990’s (Return of Organization Exempt from Income
Tax), which called into question certain of the grounds for charitable exemption. In particular, there was
the assertion in the 1997 RTA Incorporated filing (Part VI, line 80b) that the organization was not
"related … through common membership, governing bodies, trustees, officers etc. to any other exempt
or non-exempt organization."
Contradicting that assertion is information on the filing of the Deer Island Club Corporation. Deer
Island is the private island of the Skull and Bones Society, located in the St. Lawrence River. It is the
place where Bones members bring their families for summer get-togethers. It is wholly owned and run
by Skull and Bones members, apparently contradicting Bones’ claim of "no relationship" to another
exempt organization, and appearing to contradict the strictly educational and charitable mission for
which RTA gets its exemption for Skull and Bones.
The consultant argues in a memo that the purpose of the 80b question on the Bones deduction claim form
"is to prevent tax exempt charities from undertaking non-charitable activities by hiding them in another
corporation. This is of course precisely what RTA Inc. is accomplishing through the Deer Island Club
Corporation. In order to conceal this arrangement however RTA Inc. denies its connection to the
DICC."
In fact, he goes on, "RTA and the DICC are so closely linked that for all intents and purposes RTA Inc.
does own Deer Island despite its claims to the contrary."
I’m not going to go into the whole tax issue here. Perhaps the Bones shell corporation has a good and
valid reason for claiming that it has no connection to the Bones private-island country club.** Perhaps
this sort of thing goes on all the time among the private charities of the privileged. I don’t think Deer
Island will become George W. Bush’s Whitewater. But one might think that a scrupulous White House
counsel would want to look at the kind of tax information George W.’s secret society is filing on his
behalf. Particularly since he’s promising enormous windfalls for the privileged, the tax breaks his secret
society takes should be utterly beyond suspicion. Does the President, I’d like to know, claim his Skull
and Bones dues as a charitable deduction, when the only charity seems to be providing a club house and
country house for the privileged? The RTA filing claims Skull and Bones exists "for the benefit of Yale
University." But Yale–which celebrates three centuries of luminous atainments this weekend–ought to
question what "benefit" it gets from chants of "lick my bumhole" and the mockery of Abner Louima.
Anyway, as night came falling and we choreographed the evening’s caper, I felt that we were carrying
on an old-fashioned, longstanding tradition: the natural reaction of the democratic (small D) tradition to
elitist power that conceals itself within the cloak of privilege and secrecy. And for me, it was a
culmination of my own quarter-century quest, one that had become personalized lately by the fact that
our Skull and Bones President had been a classmate of mine at Yale.
‘Run, Neophyte, Run!’
At last, zero hour approached. For two centuries, the outside world had wondered and fantasized about
what was about to happen, what actually went on in the fabled Skull and Bones initiation. There’s a long
tradition of Yale secret societies (including Bones) raiding other secret societies to capture their ritual
artifacts. In the 1970’s, an all-woman break-in team published photographs of the Bone’s Tomb’s
interior. But tonight, for the first time ever, we would attempt to capture the actual secret initiation
ritual and bring it to light for anthropological study. Our team’s equipment included three
night-vision-capable digital-video cameras, one tape recorder, a stepladder and two walkie-talkies. (I
could never get mine to work.) Because of a recent injury which limits my mobility, I was stationed at a
listening post with my tape recorder while the video-cam team proceeded to their more perilous perch at
the forward base (as those of us in special ops call it). We planned to rendezvous afterward for me to
view the tape.
We split up just as the whoops and groans, the screams and moans began to emanate from inside the
Tomb and the masters of the Skull and Bones initiation began establishing the posts they’d man for the
occult psycho-drama to come.
From my post, I could see through an open window shadowy figures walking very close above my head.
Later I’ll put my audio impressions together with the video-cam record the other team obtained for a
more complete picture, but first let me transcribe some of the notes I made from listening in.
Fragmentary as they are, they capture some of the strangeness, and perhaps the kind of disorientation the
initiates themselves experienced there in the courtyard of Skull and Bones.
First, there was the guy posing as George W. He seemed to be a bit disgruntled at being given this role–a
feeling he expressed by calling out in his George W. drawl to another "Patriarch" (as they’re called): "I
got the power to bomb the crap out of China and they give me this station."
Then someone–one of the initiates?–called out "Uncle Toby!" (Many Bone ritual personae are taken
from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy– you gotta give them credit there for good taste.)
"Uncle Toby!" the cry repeated.
"Shut up, neophyte."
"Take that plunger out of my ass, Uncle Toby."
Presumably, this mocking Louima reference was a ploy to scare initiates into thinking Uncle Toby was
going to give them the plunger treatment.
That cheerful rectal theme was followed up by:
"I’m gonna ream you like I reamed Al Gore!" from the George W. imitator.
Followed by "Help me! It’s the devil!"
And then "George W." really getting into it: "I’m gonna kill you like I killed Al Gore."
Silence. Then a door opened. Voices–half of them, it seemed, women–were screaming: "Run! Neophyte!
Run, neophyte!"
(The neophytes are, of course, the new initiates.)
From my post, I could only see hooded figures racing about in the darkness above my head,
accompanied by cries of:
"Run, neophyte!"
"Find the femur!"
And (again): "Take that plunger out of my ass, Uncle Toby!"
Then silence for awhile. The neophyte seemed to have gone back inside the Tomb. After which one of
the Patriarchs complained, "We ought to get better blood than this fuckin’ syrup, man."
It was only later that I learned what the blood was for: the whole throat-slitting "barbarian" tableau after
the skull-kissing.
But first there was a different kind of kissing being referred to. There were cries of "Lick my bumhole,
neophyte!" "Lick my ass, neophyte!" "Do you like my bum, neophyte?" (Despite these heartfelt pleas, we
did not witness any of those acts being consummated.)
The bumhole tribute was followed by more cries of "Get the femur!" and at least part of the death
mantra I’d heard before: "DEATH EQUALS DEATH."
Following which, "George W." chimed in with "I’m the President of the motha-fuckin’
U.S.A."–apparently just for the sheer pleasure of saying it. (He was sounding more like the real George
W. all the time.)
It began to be clear that what was going on outside in the courtyard was the climax of an initiation
ceremony that began inside the Tomb. There, it’s reputed, the initiates must first enter into a coffin and
"die to the barbarian world," to the world of "savages" (all but the Skull and Bones elect), in order to be
reborn as a member of "The Order." Then comes the skull-kissing and the throat-slashing.
Two hours later, after all 15 of the initiates had burst out to be harangued and scared, I approached the
rendezvous point with the night-vision camera team. This was the moment of truth: The night-vision
team wasn’t sure what their digicams had picked up. With their own eyes they’d gotten evocative
glimpses, but the playback on the camera’s swing-out view screens would be the first time, so far as we
knew, any outsider had really seen the legendary ritual. A ritual three Presidents, a few Supreme Court
justices, maybe a dozen Senators (including 2004 Democratic Presidential contender John Kerry–which
would mean a head-to-head, Skull-to-Skull smackdown with George W.), several Secretaries of State,
literary and cultural luminaries including John Hersey and William F. Buckley, had all undergone.
The footage was ghostly, it was grainy–but from the angles of the night-vision cams, we were able to
piece together a narrative of what happened when the initiates emerged one at a time from the
preliminaries inside the Tomb.
First they were led forward by a figure in a devil costume. Not really a sinister, Satanic-looking figure
but, as one of the team put it, "More like Satan’s Little Helper."
A shrill, menacing and sometimes blood-curdling chorus of cries and screams and imprecations
accompanied the emergence:
"Hurry, neophyte!" "Run, neophyte!"
"Find the femur, neophyte!" Along with the occasional "Lick my bumhole!" "Remove the
plunger!"—type outcries.
The devil figure pulled them into a white tent in the courtyard where, we think, they found their femurs
and emerged with what looked like a thigh bone, although it was impossible to tell whether it once
belonged to a human or not.
When they reemerged from the tent, they were led to the centerpiece of this part of the ritual.
They were forced face-to-face with a shocking tableau: a guy holding what seemed like a butcher knife,
wearing a kind of animal-skin "barbarian" look, stood over what seemed to be a woman covered in
fake blood and not much else. The neophyte then approached a skull a few feet away from the
knife-wielder-and-victim tableau. The neophyte knelt and kissed the skull, at which point the guy with
the knife knelt and cut the throat of the prone figure. (Well, pretended to cut the throat.)
I’m not sure what it all means. I’ve yet to decode the mystical significance of this, although I do love to
think of former President George Bush kissing the skull. Obviously, it has something to do with
subservience. Kiss the skull of power. Bow down to The Order. But what about the "barbarian" cutting
the throat of his victim?
Does it mean "One dies to the barbarian world"? Does it mean "Death to the barbarians"? Does it
endorse cutthroat tactics? Is that how they enforce silence and secrecy?
I plan to continue my relentless study of the hermeneutics of the Bones rituals, myths and symbolism
based on these new revelations, and perhaps with the help of a Bones graduate who feels the time has
come to lift the veil on the silly (and no longer even secret) symbolism of their society. (Contact me
privately c/o The Edgy Alliance, 577 Second Avenue, Box 105, N.Y., N.Y. 10016.)
All that death imagery, though: Maybe it’s meant to be a first ritualistic confrontation with Mortality,
the skull as a memento mori designed to instill in the "neophyte" a sense of the gravity of one’s mission
in life.
In that regard, consider the direct relevance of at least one aspect of the ritual to George W. That
recurrent phrase: "Run, neophyte, run!"
Think about it. When George W. was first considering the fairly serious shift from baseball-team owner
(whose major achievement was trading away Sammy Sosa) to governor of Texas, or when he was
considering the shift from one-term governor of Texas to President of the United States, what decided
him–what made him think he could pull it off, despite years as a semi-permanent neophyte? Could it be
that what he heard, echoing in his brain, down the corridors of the years, was the injunction from that
long-ago April night when he was a Skull and Bones initiate? When he bent down to kiss the skull and
heard, resounding in his ears, the command: "Run, neophyte, run!"
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Bush’s Free Ride
From the attack dogs of the Clinton era to the lap dogs of
today, the White House press corps sure isn’t what it used
to be.
A LONG FEATURE in the business section of this
past Sunday’s New York Times tells you everything
you need to know about the comfortably cushy
flight the media have been providing for our
leisurely First Passenger, George W. Bush.
The piece, by Richard Stevenson, is a profile of
Bush’s economic team, which is pushing an
ultraconservative line of dramatically lower taxes,
less government spending, a privatized Social
Security system, and fewer regulations.
Stevenson pays lip service to the notion that the
president’s "ideological opponents" have accused
him of an agenda that is "fiscally irresponsible, a
payoff to its corporate patrons and an effort to
repackage right-wing policies in a centrist guise."
Then Stevenson weighs in with this assessment:
"But even some of the administration’s harshest
critics say they have been impressed by the
discipline and political touch that the president and
his team have brought to pursuing their agenda,
especially the tax cut."
Hey, the White House may be populated by
right-wing kooks who will wreck the economy and
destroy the environment in their zeal to serve their
wealthy patrons. But you’ve just got to admire how
competent they are.
Sorry for the turbulence, Mr. President, but it looks like clear skies ahead. Would you like an extra
pillow?
WHEN BILL Clinton took office eight years ago, he was knocked senseless before he could even get
his feet under him. There was the maladroit manner in which he advanced and then abandoned his
plan to let gay men and lesbians serve openly in the military; his stumbles alienated both homosexuals
and homophobes. There was the controversy over his first two nominees for attorney general, Zoë
Baird and Kimba Wood, both of whom withdrew over nanny-tax problems. There was even the
high-priced designer haircut Clinton received on an airport runway, the subject of days’ worth of
sneering commentary.
Bush, by contrast, has enjoyed a remarkably untroubled transition. Some of this is his own doing: when
his first nominee for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, was found to have a nanny problem of her own,
she was cut off at the knees before she could even begin to defend herself. Bush’s lack of visibility,
and the capable but colorless way his superannuated Ford-era staff has gone about setting up shop,
have given the media little to do and little to report on in the way of chaos and controversy.
But chaos or no chaos, the media are supposed to subject the president to tough scrutiny.
Superficially, Bush may be conducting himself in a more admirable manner than Clinton — no blowjobs
in the Oval Office, no sexual-harassment suits, no unfathomable home-state financial tangles of
dubious legality (after all, there’s no need to flirt with the outer boundaries of the law when you can
trade on your father’s name). Still, George W. Bush, who entered office despite having lost the popular
vote by a half-million ballots, is moving ahead with the most conservative agenda since Ronald Reagan
became president in 1981. You’d think the media would ask some tough questions.
Now, four months into the Bush presidency, the media’s transformation from attack dog to lap dog is
finally beginning to attract attention. Unfortunately, the most visible example — a piece by political
reporter John Harris in the Washington Post on May 6 — attempts to divert blame away from the media
and onto Hillary Rodham Clinton’s favorite bogeyman, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. According to
Harris, the principal difference between Bush’s early days and Clinton’s is that Clinton, from day one,
had to contend with a mobilized corps of conservative activists — interest groups, commentators, and
members of Congress — who continually sought to undermine his presidency.
"They succeeded in many ways," Harris wrote. "One of the most important was their ability to take all
manner of presidential miscues, misjudgments or controversial decisions and exploit them for maximum
effect. Stories like the travel office firings flamed for weeks instead of receding into yesterday’s news.
And they colored the prism through which many Americans, not just conservative ideologues, viewed
Clinton. It is Bush’s good fortune that the liberal equivalent of this conservative coterie does not exist."
Well, now. According to Harris, the reason Bush is getting better press than Clinton is that liberals are
not attacking Bush the way the VRWC went after Clinton, and therefore the media have no one from
whom to take dictation. As Kenneth Doran, a bankruptcy lawyer and author from Madison, Wisconsin,
put it in a letter to Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews.org, Harris "sets out to defend the Washington press
corps against the charge of being George W. Bush’s puppy dogs, but the result reads more like a
confession." In the webzine Slate, Joshua Micah Marshall recently blasted the Democrats’
ineffectiveness in criticizing Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s sleazy, politically motivated firing of the
Senate parliamentarian. In a tip of the computer to John Harris, the piece was titled wanted: a vast
left-wing conspiracy.
On CNN’s Reliable Sources last weekend, co-host Bernard Kalb told Harris, "John, when I first read
your piece ... I thought it was brilliant. And a moment later I was smitten by a second thought, which
essentially is this, and let me overstate it. Didn’t you do a portrait of the media as a stenographer for
the right wing?"
Harris’s response: no, no, no.
But oh, yes, yes, yes.
THERE IS, of course, no shortage of Bush criticism in the media. The editorial and op-ed pages of the
Times have attacked Bush continuously for his irresponsible tax-cut and anti-environmental positions.
Even columnist Maureen Dowd, who loathes policy and is reportedly friendly with Bush’s father, has
gotten into the act.
All three political weeklies — the left-liberal Nation, the moderate-liberal New Republic, and even the
moderate-conservative Weekly Standard — have been on Bush like a pissed-off loan shark. The
webzine Salon has produced a huge quantity of important reporting about Bush’s nominee for solicitor
general, Theodore Olson, who barely escaped a perjury rap during his Reaganaut days, who has been
accused of lying about his role in the Richard Mellon Scaife–financed "Arkansas Project" (aimed at
digging up dirt on Clinton for publication in the right-wing American Spectator), and who helped
mastermind Bush’s disingenuous legal case during the Florida recount.
By last week, the Olson affair finally appeared ready to break into the mainstream. And it should.
Journalist David Brock, an Arkansas Project alumnus who wrote the "Troopergate" story early in
Clinton’s first term, went so far as to charge that Olson had urged the Spectator to "report" that the
suicide of Clinton aide Vincent Foster may actually have been a political murder — an ugly bit of
paranoia that Olson himself supposedly didn’t even believe.
Nevertheless, Olson is still a long way from becoming a household name the way, say, Lani Guinier
was. And that’s because Bush-whacking has not trickled down in any significant way to the media from
which average Americans receive most of their information.
The disparity between anti-Bush elite opinion and pro-Bush mainstream opinion was quantified several
weeks ago in a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism titled The First 100 Days. Most of the
coverage of this report has focused on the bottom-line finding that coverage of Bush was actually more
negative than coverage of Clinton during the first three months of their presidencies (28 percent
negative for both; 27 percent positive for Clinton, but only 22 percent positive for Bush). But this is
actually a complete misinterpretation of the report’s findings.
In fact, the report looked at coverage by the Big Three networks, PBS, the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and Newsweek. When you remove Newsweek plus the editorial and op-ed pages of
the Times and the Post from the mix, coverage of Bush has been 24 percent positive and 18 percent
negative — a marked improvement over Clinton’s 23 percent positive and 28 percent negative
coverage. And, of course, despite their declining influence, the three commercial networks still do more
to shape public perceptions than any other medium.
Add to that the finding that Clinton got about twice as much coverage as Bush, and the reality
becomes clear: in contrast to the relentless pounding to which Clinton was subjected, coverage of
Bush has been low-key and polite.
NUMEROUS THEORIES have been advanced to explain the media’s somnolence, and all have at
least some validity. In the New Republic, Jonathan Chait joins an old theory — that reporters like
politics but hate policy — with a new one: that old-fashioned ideas about objectivity, abandoned long
ago when covering purely political stories about strategy, polls, and the like, remain the coin of the
journalistic realm when it comes to actual proposals, such as the Bush tax plan. Thus, reporters feel
obligated to seek out opposing positions and give them equal weight even when they know that one
side is telling the truth and the other is lying — as the Bushies surely are when they claim their tax cut
will cost "only" $1.6 trillion, and that it won’t harm Social Security when in fact it is a bold raid on the
Social Security trust fund.
Chait’s colleague Franklin Foer, in a commentary on TNR’s Web site, blamed the pro-Bush tilt of the
media on liberal bias — that is, reporters are so afraid of being accused of bias that they are bending
over backward. Certainly that would explain the self-congratulatory tone of Washington Post media
reporter Howard Kurtz’s recent column in which he fairly bragged of all the e-mail the Post has
received from liberals complaining about the paper’s alleged newfound conservative bias.
Then, too, there’s the thuggishness of the Bush press operation. The Clintonistas often disdained the
media, and were sometimes criticized for failing to suck up to reporters. The Bushies, though, threaten
to make life difficult for anyone who isn’t with the program. Take Houston Chronicle reporter Bennett
Roth. After Bush urged parents to talk to their kids about the dangers of drinking and drugs, Roth had
the good sense to ask White House spokesman Ari Fleischer whether Bush had talked to his
daughters — one of whom, after all, had recently been arrested for underage drinking. The Post
reported that Fleischer tracked Roth down after the briefing and told him ominously that his question
had been "noted in the building."
And, reportedly, that’s not the first time Fleischer has delivered such a message to a wayward
correspondent. Do you suppose that could explain why there has been so little criticism of, say, Dick
Cheney’s secret meetings with well-heeled oil-industry representatives in drafting his anti-conservation
energy policy — and why there was so much criticism of Hillary Clinton for crafting her health-care plan
behind closed doors?
But though there’s something to all these particulars, at root the most important difference is cultural.
Clinton’s enemies hated him — really hated him — in a way that Bush’s enemies do not. This hatred
extended from Whitewater to Lewinsky and even, on Clinton’s way out the door, to the phony White
House vandalism story, whose dismissal last week by the General Accounting Office was barely
reported by the media. This irrational hatred was even on display during the recent China crisis, when
Senator John Kyl, an Arizona Republican, affably admitted to National Public Radio that if Clinton had
acted as obsequiously as Bush, he would have gone ballistic.
"I have more confidence in the Bush administration than I did the Clinton administration when it comes
to the conduct of foreign affairs," Kyl said. "So I am naturally much more willing to assume that they are
making good decisions than I was after we began to see what the Clinton administration did."
Marbled into all this is the element of generational betrayal. Clinton was the first baby-boomer
president, and his attitudes — like those of many of the reporters who covered him — were shaped by
the ethos of the 1960s. Some of those reporters, like Sidney Blumenthal, went to work for him. Others,
like Joe Klein, saw their initial infatuation turn to repulsion as they learned more about his personal
flaws and excesses. An early Newsweek essay by Klein, in which he referred to Clinton’s massively
disorganized, omnibus approach to governing as "promiscuity," helped set the tone for much of the
subsequent press coverage. By late 1994 Clinton was, as an amazed Pete Hamill wrote in Esquire,
"the most hated president in memory."
Clinton was, and is, a sleazeball, a man whose human flaws were too grotesque to be ignored. But at
some point, isn’t policy more important than personality?
ON THE Wall Street Journal’s Web site, you can purchase a CD-ROM, in both Windows and Macintosh
formats, called Whitewater: The Collection, in which you can relive those halcyon days of Vince Foster
and Webb Hubbell, of Susan McDougal and David Hale, of Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky.
Those were great times for the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Now there’s nothing left but nostalgia.
The media, though, have a president to cover. They damn well ought to start doing it. |

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Dead Letter Office
Heil Bush,
Dear Gruppenfuhrer Hollings,
Congratulations you have just been awarded the Vidkun Quisling Award for 2001. Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling and last year’s winner Volksjudge Antoni (light-fingers) Scalia.
With your vote to weaken workers safety laws and thereby save your corporate masters billions of dollars, while eliminating useless, worn out workers from corporate responsibility, you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new world.
Along with this award there will be an Iron Cross 2nd class presented by our glorious Fuhrer Herr Bush at a gala party in das Fuhrer Bunker, formerly the White House on 7-4-2001. We salute you Herr Hollings! Sieg Heil!
Signed,
Heil Bush
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Bush Energy Plan Is Just Plain Silly
To recap the energy "crisis," our first problem is soaring gasoline
prices caused |