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Ärende: WND
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People whine about me calling WorldNetDaily, "WingNutDaily."

With right-wing bullshit like this, can you blame me for saying so?  
          
A Clinton in Every Conspiracy

WorldNetDaily works to debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories, despite its own 
love of conspiracy theories -- especially if a Clinton can be thrown in. 
WND's also casting George Soros as the apple of its conspiratorial eye.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 10/11/2006

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

The September issue of its Whistleblower magazine was dedicated to 
debunking the idea that 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.

With all of these conspiracies 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.
   
© Copyright 2000-06 Terry Krepel

From Archae's Roost, Sheboygan, WI

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