THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1993
October
- Early October: Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh makes the following joke on his TV show:
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
"Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is a White House dog?" He then displays a picture of 13-year old Chelsea Clinton. Limbaugh later claims that he had no responsibility for the joke, and fires a low-level technician for supposedly displaying the photo without authorization. Watchers of the broadcast confirm that Limbaugh was setting up the joke with his own words, and that Limbaugh found the display of Chelsea's photograph hilarious. (FAIR)
A US military raid in Somalia goes awry, causing the deaths of 18 soldiers
- October 3-4: Two US MH-60 helicopters, with their crews, are shot down in Mogadishu, Somalia, during a night raid on Somalian warlord Mohamed Aidad's headquarters.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
The ensuing urban battle is later called the "Battle of Mogadishu," and is chronicled in Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down. The battle is made more difficult by the violent resistance from Somali civilians along with Aidad's own militia (the militia made use of civilians as screens, counting on US reluctance to fire on civilians, while they attacked from the cover provided by the civilians. It did not take long for the US troops to overcome their resistance to firing on the Somalian civilians, many of whom were firing on US positions and setting up roadblocks of cars and burning tires.) While the rescue mission, mounted by an international force of Pakistanis, Malaysians, and US troops, is more or less successful, the broadcast videotape of 18 dead Army Rangers makes a harsh impression on viewers around the world and leads to heavy protests against America's involvement in Somalia both in the US and abroad. (The casualties include 18 American dead, one dead Malaysian, and 82 wounded, including 73 Americans. 500 to 1000 Somali militia members and civilians were killed, and up to 4000 were injured.) Republican politicians seize the opportunity to lambast Clinton for being involved in Somalia, ignoring the fact that they had roundly approved the intervention when Bush asked for it in 1992. Pakistani ISI operative and terrorist Maulana Masood Azhar is the link between the Somalians and bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network. Azhar continues to live a free and unimpeded life in Pakistan; the US government has never asked that he be brought to trial for his role in the death of the 18 American soldiers. The debacle will bring about the US Marine Corps' Urban Warrior training program. (ABC News, CCR, Wikipedia)
Communist resistance to change in the former USSR is defeated
- October 3-6: The Russian government is under siege by recalcitrant Communist elements.
Fall of Soviet Union
On October 6, tank fire damages the Russian White House; over 150 die in the clash. Yeltsin's forces eventually triumph, leading to the removal from power of Communist and other dissident elements in the former USSR. (Hammer News, BBC) - October 7: After 18 US soldiers are killed in the Battle of Mogadishu, Clinton orders reinforcement troops to be sent to Somalia.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Over the next six months, Clinton will withdraw all American troops from Somalia. UN peacekeeping forces attempt to keep order for another year after the American departure, but are unsuccessful and finally abandon Somalia to sort its own problems out. As of early 2003, Somalia has yet to form a stable government, and anarchy reigns throughout the country. (CNN)
Whitewater investigation begins
- October 31: Resolution Trust Corporation investigator and radical conservative L. Jean Lewis recommends a criminal investigation of Jim McDougal's Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan (see related items above and in earlier pages, particularly the 1992 page).
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
The Clintons are former business partners with McDougal in Whitewater. Allegations that McDougal used his position to funnel illegal monies into Clinton's 1986 gubernatorial election fund are later proven to be false; during Clinton's term as governor, the Arkansas Securities Department had recommended that Madison Guaranty be shut down and McDougal removed. It is later proven that Lewis spent an inordinate amount of time investigating Madison S&L. Of the eight top S&L failures, the other 7 cost taxpayers over $2 billion and were investigated a total of 346 hours; Lewis spent 5,661 hours investigating Madison, which lost $73 million. Lewis will make 9 criminal referrals as a result of her investigation; none of the referrals against the Clintons survive initial court review. Lewis told Republican senator Alfonse D'Amato that she had imposed on herself a deadline of August 31, 1992, for finding enough dirt on the Clintons to file a criminal referral to the US attorney in Little Rock; the deadline is designed to have the maximum impact on the upcoming presidential elections. On September 2, Lewis will file her first referral, naming both Clintons as witnesses and potential beneficiaries of criminal wrongdoing. The Justice Department finds Lewis's evidence so fragmentary, contradictory, and just plain wrong that it refuses to follow up on the referral, nor will it consider Lewis's further referrals. (CNN, Washington Post, Washington Post, How the Smear Began, H.R. Clinton, James Carville) - Late October and early November: Two veteran investigative reporters for the Washington Post, Susan Schmidt and Michael Isikoff, publish three stories that open the "Pandora's Box" of media inquiries into Whitewater.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
First, they write that the Resolution Trust Company (RTC), the organization set up to deal with the rash of failed savings & loan companies under Reaganomics, is investigating Madison Guaranty Trust, a defunct Arkansas bank owned by James and Susan McDougal, friends and business partners of the Clintons. The RTC had asked federal prosecutors to determine whether the bank had used depositors' funds "to benefit local politicians, including a reelection campaign of then-governor Bill Clinton." They then report that former Little Rock judge David Hale is under indictment for defrauding the Small Business Administration, and is charging that in the 1980s Clinton pressured him to make an illegal SBA loan to Susan McDougal which was used to purchase land in the Whitewater real estate deal. Finally, they report that Webster Hubbell, associate attorney general and a former law partner of Hillary Clinton, might have had a conflict of interest involving Madison Guaranty when he switched from defending the S&L to working for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the government agency that was suing the failed bank; Hubbell failed to report his previous connection to Madison to the FDIC. - While none of the stories directly accuse the Clintons of criminal activity, they raise questions that have already dogged the couple during the campaign: questions about Hillary Clinton's involvement with Madison during her days at the Rose Law Firm; questions about the McDougals' casual handling of Madison monies; questions about the possibly illegal connections between business and government officials in Little Rock. The White House's early refusal to turn over "relevant" documents the Post requests only fuels reporters' desire to dig deeper into the allegations. Between November 1992 and February 1993, the Post will publish 63 stories on Whitewater, what Clinton advisor David Gergen calls a "full-court press." The Post will set up a full-time Whitewater team; however, as the stories pile on and nothing really develops, many reporters, including Isikoff, begin to wonder if the Post isn't "overdoing it a bit." He shares his concerns with senior editor Karen de Young, who agrees, but says that senior editor and Whitewater team leader Len Downie was determined to keep pursuing the story, even if there isn't a story to pursue: "Len thinks this is his Watergate," de Young says. Downie denies the characterization, and says that he feels it is the news media's obligation to reveal when government officials are lying or withholding information. Downie felt that Clinton lied during the campaign about avoiding the Vietnam draft and about smoking marijuana, and found Clinton personally offensive. On the other side, the Clintons felt personally and baselessly attacked by Downie's team, and felt that the press was refusing to understand or even grant the existence of the right-wing zealots who were trying to overturn the Clinton presidency. The White House establishes its own Whitewater response team, and the antagonism and mutual mistrust escalates rapidly.
- Many of the core members of the Post's Whitewater team covered the Clinton campaign in Little Rock during 1992, and that group, spending so much time together hanging around together in Little Rock, grew to have a uniquely negative outlook on the Clintons. The Little Rock group included the Post's Schmidt and Isikoff, the New York Times's Jeff Gerth (author of the first official mainstream media Whitewater story); ABC's Jackie Judd, Jim Wooten, and Chris Vlasto; the Wall Street Journal's Glenn Simpson; Sara Fritz and Bill Rempel of the Los Angeles Times, Fox News's David Shuster, CNN's Bob Franken, and a few others. Many of these reporters would contribute a great deal, including their own negative bents, to the Whitewater coverage of the next few years. Marvin Kalb writes, "Most of these reporters [had] developed a portrait of Clinton as a wild, reckless womanizer accustomed to lying about what Isikoff called his 'serial indiscretions' to protect his political career and his family. They saw him as unscrupulous and unprincipled, a cunning cad who kept slipping through their investigative net, evading responsibility for his immoral and possibly illegal activities and, whenever possible, laying the blame on others. Of course, this remained an essentially private portrait of the president, discussed among themselves and their editors but not yet reported. The reporters needed a hook on which they could hang this portrait, and at that time they didn't have one strong enough." They would soon help build one, with the help of a cadre of right-wing extremists in Arkansas and Washington who hated Clinton and would do whatever it took to denigrate and ultimately destroy the Clinton presidency. This coterie of Clinton haters spread wild stories accusing Clinton of all manner of crimes, including being involved in the so-called murder of Vince Foster. "The mainstream media rejected these poisonous stories," writes Kalb, "but they found a sympathetic audience among such writers as David Brock, who wrote the original Troopergate story. ...Once in print or on the air, some of these stories were picked up by the mainstream press but were then quickly dropped -- often because the White House issued denials, but also because the sources seemed so biased and disreputable. Still, the stories lingered in the minds of many reporters, who believed that they might one day prove to be true." (Marvin Kalb)
