A Clinton in Every Conspiracy

WorldNetDaily has finally found a conspiracy it doesn't like.

The September issue of its Whistleblower magazine was dedicated to debunking conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A Sept. 17 WND article plugging the magazine posed the question this way:

But is it possible that America's democratically elected government could be guilty of the worst crime in the nation's history – of participating in the wanton murder of thousands of its own citizens and the destruction of the national economy in order to advance some nefarious, secret agenda?

September's Whistleblower will answer this question definitively.

WND doesn't share that answer with us (at least, not without subscribing to the magazine). But it appears that it has decided the answer is no.

A Sept. 11 column by WND managing editor David Kupelian shined some light on the rationale behind that apparent conclusion. Exclaiming, "How can bright and intelligent Americans believe such things?" Kupelian declared that those who believe in a 9/11 conspiracy are angry, adding that "they are automatically more vulnerable to outside suggestion (that is, to believing nonsense) than if they were not angry." He then asks, "[W]ho do America's 9/11 conspiracists hate with an all-consuming passion?"

That's easy: George W. Bush!

They hate him so much, they see him as such an evil and detestable person that they find it easy to make the wild leap of faith whereby they see the president as terrorist-in-chief.

How is it possible that just because you dislike a president, disapprove of his politics and worldview, and even disagree with his decision to involve the nation in a controversial war, you can so easily deny his very humanity and label him a monster – not to mention condemning countless other lesser "monsters"?

That's what is known as projection and irony. While we can't speak to the veracity of the 9/11 conspiracy claims, they certainly can't be any worse than the conspiracies WorldNetDaily has promulgated over the years.

And who is the center of those conspiracies, that person so evil and detestable that WND hates with an all-consuming passion and finds it easy to deny his very humanity and label him a monster?

That's easy: Bill Clinton!

Just because Clinton has been out of office for nearly six years doesn't mean he has stopped conspiring against his purported enemies. In fact, it's apparently going on now: WND columnist Jack Cashill -- he of the bogus defense of a admitted murderer -- used his Sept. 21 and Sept. 28 columns to declare that the "Clinton shadow government" is conspiring to keep Pennsylvania Republican congressman Curt Weldon from winning re-election, purportedly "to prevent Weldon from digging any deeper into the Clinton track record." Cashill claimed that Weldon is dedicated to the "search for the truth behind Sandy Berger's shredding of stolen files, the Rosetta Stone of the Clinton saga." This ignores the fact that, as ConWebWatch has noted, an investigation found not only that Berger didn't withhold any thing from the 9/11 Commission but also that all original documents handled by Berger were accounted for; therefore, anything Berger allegedly shredded were copies of documents. Cashill doesn't explain how shredding copies of documents is a Rosetta Stone to anything.

Related articles on ConWebWatch: Rest in Peace? A Good Story vs. the Truth A Conspirator Rails Against Conspiracies Sore About Soros A Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

With all of these conspriacies floating around, it's worth a look back at perhaps the most famous of the Clinton conspiracies promoted by WND: the Clinton death list.

This, strangely, is one conspiracy that WND editor Joseph Farah denied pushing. As ConWebWatch has noted, Farah was asked in a 2003 online chat about his promotion of the Clinton death list, Farah responded, "Can you cite one place where I have ever accused President Clinton of murdering anyone?"

In a highly technical, literal sense, that may be true. But Farah and WND have certainly not been shy about linking Clinton to numerous deaths. In a Sept. 24, 1998, column, Farah claimed "more than 80 deaths associated directly or indirectly with Clinton" and asked, "Is it time to add one more name to the growing and staggering Clinton body count?" and tried to make the case for adding on to the list Eric L. Henderson, a former financial adviser to Clinton commerce secretary Ron Brown (subject of his own set of Clinton conspiracies surrounding his death in a 1996 plane crash, as Farah also noted). As Farah ominously put it: "Perhaps Henderson was killed in a random drug deal on the seedy streets of Washington. Perhaps he was leading a double life, as police investigators suggest. Or maybe, just maybe, he knew too much."

WorldNetDaily also ran stories that implied Clinton had a hand in the 2000 death of an Arkansas journalist named Tony Moser. WND never told the entire, non-conspiratorial story (reported first by ConWebWatch) that Moser was a longtime alcoholic who was apparently intoxicated and walking down the middle of a dimly lit street when he was hit by a car and killed.

Richard Poe -- an associate of the David Horowitz organization and most recently the co-author with Horowitz of a factually dubious, smear-laden, conspiracy-mongering book targeting billionaire Democratic supporter George Soros -- tried to keep the body count conspiracy alive in his 2004 WND-published, Clinton-bashing book, "Hillary's Secret War." (The introduction to Poe's book includes a defense of conspiracy theories; after all, Poe quotes his wife as saying, "some of them turn out to be true." Poe does not offer his views on 9/11 conspiracy theories.) As he outlined it in a series of 2005 articles for WND based on the book, and as we pointed out, Poe argued that Clinton White House deputy counsel Vince Foster was murdered, despite admitting earlier that "no one can prove" that Foster "met his death through foul play. It is quite possible that he committed suicide." Poe also brought up another alleged "body count" victim, Jerry Parks. His death was never solved, but Poe pointed the finger at the Clintons, citing claims made by Parks' son, Gary. In doing so, he ignored Snopes' debunking of the "body count," which noted that a disgruntled business associate was also a likely suspect and that local police dismissed Gary Parks' conspiracy theories as "unsubstantiated, nothing to grasp." Poe later tried to debunk Snopes' debunking.

But even WND seems to realize the Clinton conspiracy gravy train will eventually run its course. That's why it's ginning up a new enemy to tar -- George Soros. In fact, Farah has already smeared Soros as a "lowly, anti-American and anti-Semitic swine" not to mention "power-hungry, nihilistic, arrogant, self-important" and "a self-hating Jew."

The very latest bit of WND conspiracy-mongering involves dismissing complaints by the legal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington about Rep. Mark Foley's salacious communication with congressional pages because CREW is, in the words of an Oct. 5 article, "a George Soros-sponsored organization," "Soros-backed" and "Soros-funded." An Oct. 6 article by Bob Unruh described CREW as "funded by billionaire George Soros" before he even served up the group's name. In describing CREW's Freedom of Information Act request seeking details on visits by nine leading religious-right figures to the Bush White House, Unruh quoted two of those figures attacking CREW's request as a "publicity stunt" by "left-wing bullies" but did not quote anyone from CREW itself.

But a search of WND's news archive found no instance of WND calling conservative legal group Judicial Watch "a Richard Mellon Scaife-sponsored organization," "Scaife-backed" or "Scaife-funded" -- or even acknowledging the conservative financier's connection to the group (and who, as we've noted, gave $330,000 to a Farah-controlled organization, the Western Journalism Center, in the mid-1990s for anti-Clinton activities). After all, Scaife-controlled foundations donated nearly $5 million to Judicial Watch between 1997 and 2001 -- the time in which Judicial Watch was most active in filing dozens of lawsuits against the Clinton administration (not to mention representing Farah's Western Journalism Center in a lawsuit against the IRS for a purportedly politically motivated audit of the group, a claim that has been continually dismissed by the courts and at least one congressional committee).

By contrast, CREW has received a mere $100,000 from a Soros-controlled organization. In other words, Judicial Watch was controlled much more by Scaife than CREW is by Soros.

(And, as evidence that Clinton-conspiracy ideas recycle and evolve, Poe in his 2005 WND anti-Clinton series approvingly touted Scaife's claim that the death of Vince Foster was "the Rosetta Stone to the Clinton administration" -- conflicting with Cashill's claim that the Sandy Berger case is Clinton's Rosetta Stone.)

But, apparently, if a conservative is involved, it's not a conspiracy as far as WorldNetDaily is concerned. Throw a Clinton or a Soros in the mix, and by golly, WND's conspiratorial synapses start overloading.