Yesteryear watch: Predecessor to Comey the God!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2016

The reign of the Starrs and Barrs: Hillary Clinton is dishonest. She simply can't be trusted!

This has been a relentless theme, aimed at both Clintons and at Candidate Gore. The liberal world has always accepted the gong-show manner in which this theme has been promulgated. In just a few months, our relentless liberal lassitude may give us a President Trump.

You can't trust Hillary Clinton! In his new column at The National Memo, Gene Lyons journeys to yesteryear to show us the birth of this narrative on the national stage.

His column begins in September 1992:

LYONS (7/13/16): Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear: specifically to September 1992, when Attorney General William Barr, top-ranking FBI officials,
and—believe it or not—a Treasury Department functionary who actually sold “Presidential Bitch” T-shirts with Hillary Clinton’s likeness from her government office, pressured the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock to open an investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater investment.

The Arkansas prosecutor was Charles “Chuck” Banks, a Republican appointed by President Reagan, and recently nominated to a Federal judgeship by President George H. W. Bush. It was definitely in Banks’s interest to see Bush re-elected.

As Lyons continues, we learn that a rare thing occurred. Banks, the Republican prosecutor, refused to bow to the pressure from Barr! He refused to pursue the phony Whitewater claims. Bill Clinton went to the White House.

That said, there's a serious downside to Lyons' story. He relates it here:

LYONS: [T]hat was the end of the Bush administration’s “Hail Mary” attempt to win the 1992 election with a fake scandal. Also the end of Chuck Banks’ political career.

The prevailing themes of the Clinton Legends, however, were set: imaginary corruption, and a “Presidential Bitch.” Eight years and $70 million later, Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater prosecutors folded their cards, proving the Little Rock prosecutor had been right all along.

As Lyons tells the story, the phony claims were passed along to Kenneth Starr—and Kenneth Starr didn't refuse to pursue those phony claims. According to Lyons, this theme continues in the current day through the conduct of Comey the God.

We strongly recommend Lyons' column. Let's annotate some key points:

The official with the t-shirts: The Treasury official with the "Presidential Bitch" t-shirts was the appalling L. Jean Lewis. Wikipedia has a fairly decent capsule account of her ridiculous conduct.

For more, see Lyons' important book, Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater. It's one of the books the "liberal" world has always agreed to ignore.

With regard to Lewis, it's important to be clear on a basic point: Some genuine crazies have been involved in the wars against the Clintons and Gore, the endless wars the liberal world has always been willing to tolerate.

Judge Kenneth Starr the God: Today, John B. Comey has been anointed the press corps' latest god. His rectitude is apparent to all. His obvious moral greatness cannot be challenged.

At one time, Kenneth Starr preceded Comey in the role of Washington insider god. "Judge Starr" was known, by one and all, to be a figure of rectitude. He was widely regarded as a future Supreme Court pick when he humbly accepted the task of taking down Clinton and Clinton.

By now, Starr has been humiliated several times, most recently for his role in the Baylor sex assault scandal. He's no longer seen as a press corps god—but so what? He has been replaced in that role by the unassailable Comey.

Helderman does it again: Lyons assails the Washington Post for Sunday's appalling front-page retrospective. The lengthy piece was written by the gruesome Rosalind Helderman, Harvard 2001, a one-person affirmation of Nietzsche's leading theories.

To read Helderman's ridiculous piece, click here. Lyons says this about that:

LYONS: Shamefully, several of Starr’s assistants recently showed up in the Washington Post reminiscing about how they almost indicted Hillary Clinton. Except that they never did, and for the same reason FBI director James Comey wouldn’t dare take his largely adverbial case (“extremely,” “carelessly,” etc.) into a courtroom against her.

Because when the accused can afford competent defense counsel, a bogus case endangers the prosecutor more than the defendant. Indict the former Secretary of State and lose? Goodbye career.

If the Post had a sense of humor, they’d have illustrated the article with a photo of “Judge Starr,” as he liked to be called, dressed in his cheerleader costume leading Baylor University’s felonious football team onto the field.

Lyons doesn't mention Helderman. We'll take over from here.

How horrible is Helderman's work? Even after Starr's latest moral disaster, she managed to write a lengthy front-page report in which she didn't show a hint of skepticism about the gang of Ahabs Starr assembled to pursue the Clintons.

Helderman was Rachel Maddow's favorite in the cable clown's Ahab-like pursuit of Governor Ultrasound. That said, Maddow is almost cosmically clueless about the politics of the entire Clinton/Gore era. We liberals will never understand a basic point—you can't empower crazies like these just because they're pursuing someone you may dislike.

The history of this era is clear. In the end, it's the liberal and progressive world which takes the ultimate biggest hits when this kind of hang-em-high "journalism" is permitted. This is how we got President Bush at the end of the Clinton era. This year, it may give us President Trump.

Tomorrow, we'll return to the recent conduct of Comey the God. The more we've looked at what he has done, the less we're able to feel that he behaved in good faith.

Starting tomorrow, we'll explain.

The more we look at what Comey did, the more we feel that he's pulled a bit of a con. But so what? Dana Milbank made him a god, and one Democrat after another praised him for his obvious rectitude when he testified before the House committee last Thursday.

Meanwhile, Rachel has run away from this topic, as she always does. She's now busily wastingyour tim,e trying to guess Trump's VP pick.

Meanwhile, has "The Puppy," pushed back? Do you even have to ask?

Believe it or not, L. Jean Lewis actually had those "Presidential Bitch" t-shirts. Along the way, we got Ken Starr.

Kenneth Starr is no longer a god, but in his place, we have Comey the God. With regard to his recent conduct, how much pushback have you seen from multimillionaire TV clowns like the ridiculous Maddow?

Rachel Maddow is working a con. Inside our clueless tribal tents, we view her as Rachel the God.

Tomorrow: Comey the God and his apparent con