Update: No Wonder Chelsea Wanted To Keep the Secret Service Around

A columnist wants the Clinton clan dead -- oops, just kidding! Plus: Politically motivated IRS audits are a good thing again; and who's stupider, people who didn't vote for Bush or right-wingers who believe that?

By Terry Krepel
Posted 2/23/2001

Aside from its obsession about Hillary Clinton, NewsMax has a problem with Chelsea Clinton. She's gotten the same treatement from NewsMax as her mom, though to a lesser degree, even as they whine about younger members of the Bush family being targeted by a so-called "media-backed vendetta."

Most recently, on Jan. 27, they threw a snit-fit over Chelsea wanting an extension of her Secret Service protection, calling it "unprecedented" and "yet another tawdry aspect to the Clintons' not-so-final exit."

Now, we perhaps know why she wanted the protection. It seems that a National Review writer would like to see her dead.

"I hate Chelsea Clintion," John Derbyshire declares in his Feb. 15 column. He admits at first that he doesn't have a clear reason for doing so, but one certainly emerges: She's a Clinton -- more specifically, "the vile genetic inheritance of Bill and Hillary Clinton."

And the only genuine solution for dealing with this situation, Derbyshire writes, is death:

"Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past — I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble — recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an "enemy of the people". The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, "clan liability". In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished "to the ninth degree": that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed, and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed."

Needless to say, declaring that you wouldn't mind seeing a former public official and his family dead gets people's attention. So, on Feb. 22, Derbyshire posted another piece less about explaining himself than blaming his critics for not getting it.

"Well, it wasn't meant to be a thigh-slapper. ... However, my tone was partly tongue in cheek," he asserts. Then he deflects the blame: "... We all face the sad fact that there is an irreducible minimum of people out there who are cloth-eared to anything more subtle than simple declarative sentences. You can't get through to everyone."

Does he intend to apologize? "In your dreams. I make it a point of principle never to apologize to hysterical idiots."

And as for Chelsea: "Chelsea is old enough to vote and old enough to die for her country (if that was a thing Clintons did). She's old enough to take a little mild ribbing from an obscure web journalist."

She's also certainly old enough to know the difference between "mild ribbing" and a heavily implied death threat, even if the source of said threat later insists it was "tongue in cheek."

Politically motivated IRS audits were called a bad thing by conservatives when they thought the Clinton administration was behind them. Just ask WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah; the Western Journalism Center he co-founded lost a lawsuit over that very issue.

But now that Republicans are in power, it appears to be payback time.

On the heels of WorldNetDaily's wishing an audit on a group that opposed John Ashcroft's appointment as attorney general, the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation announced on Feb. 2 that it was turning narc by forwarding to the Internal Revenue Service "the names of numerous 501-C tax-exempt organizations that were involved in lobbying against the confirmation of John Ashcroft for attorney general."

In addition, Landmark is starting a monitoring project "to ensure that liberal nonprofit organizations who lobby against presidential appointments comply with U.S. tax and lobbying laws."

Reaction from the Western Journalism Center could not be found.

WorldNetDaily writer J.R. Nyquist joins his ConWeb comrades in declaring that the public is stupid for not electing George W. Bush in an landslide.

Why? "the public voted Bill Clinton into the presidency twice, and Al Gore actually won a plurality of the popular vote last November," he writes in a Feb. 5 column. "In other words, we barely escaped catastrophe in the 2000 national election."

Of course. Nyquist is merely following the right-wing logic that no rational human being could have possibly voted for Clinton or Gore, so they must be under the Hitleresque spell of Clinton's propaganda. Nyquist even invokes Hitler's propaganda theories at length.

Nyquist goes as far as to theorize that the public is in a final, destructive phase of "individualistic hedonism." He writes: "The people, hypnotized by advertising and entertainment, are no longer vulnerable to a Hitler. In fact, they no longer feel like citizens of a country at all. The country is no longer very interesting to them. The question of politics becomes a question of selfish gain. Either people want something from the state or they want to be exempted from making a contribution. Such people are no longer citizens at all. They are merely consumers who watch the same TV programs and play the same video games."

"The public is stupid, and its last stupidity -- visible all around us -- damns it without appeal," Nyquist concludes.

All this because they didn't vote for Bush? There's a leap of logic that makes one wonder just who the stupid one is.