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
1994
October
- October: Suicide bombings by the PLO result in the condemnation of the entire Middle East peace process
Middle East peace process
by Israeli opposition leader Binyamin (Benjamin) Netanyahu, a right-wing extremist with strong ties to US conservatives. Israeli Prime Minister Rabin seals off the West Bank and Gaza from Israel. US President Clinton seals a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. (Dan Cohn-Sherbok) - October: A small CIA outpost is set up in northwest Iraq,
Middle East unrest
the first inside Iraq in years, in an area controlled by the US-friendly Kurds and not under Saddam Hussein's control. The headquarters of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress are nearby. Chalabi, with US funding, intends to mount a revolution in Iraq that will overthrow Hussein. The plan, detailed in November 1993 to Clinton officials, calls for simultaneous insurrections in Basra, a southern Iraqi city dominated by disaffected Shi'ites, as well as in the northern, largely Kurdish cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. The plan predicts that massive Iraqi military defections will follow, and Hussein will topple. "We called it Chalabi's rolling coup," says Bob Baer, the CIA station chief in Iraq. The US has virtually no intelligence sources inside Iraq, nor in the neighboring countries -- Iran, Jordan, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, so the US is dependent on Chalabi for its information. It will quickly become apparent that Chalabi is unreliable. (Seymour Hersh) - Mid-October: Lynne Cheney, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities,
"Culture Wars"
writes a scathing op-ed for the Wall Street Journal decrying what she calls the unwarranted influence of the "cultural elite" in the creation of new standards for teaching history. Cheney has given the GOP a perfect scapegoat in their ongoing battle against the "laxity" and "dissolution" of American moral values. The standards Cheney is shouting about are relatively innocuous and voluntary, giving history teachers alternatives to incorporate in their standard teaching content. But Cheney and her confreres rail that the new standards leave out American icons like Thomas Edison, Robert E. Lee, and George Washington, failing to note that the curriculum is designed to supplement, not supplant, current teaching content which, of course, includes the above American historical figures. According to Cheney, the new curriculum wants to strip the Founding Fathers and every other white male from the teaching of history in America's public schools. Cheney finds objectionable such classroom activities as "Analyze the character and roles of the military, political, and diplomatic leaders who helped forge the American victory" in the Revolutionary War, or, regarding the Civil War, "Compare the civilian and military leadership of the Union and the Confederacy." Students answering those questions would by necessity have to include Washington and Lee in their analyses. But these caveats aren't included in Cheney's inflammatory sound bites. - NEH program director Bruce Robinson, who officially oversees the grant for the standards, says in 2004 that Cheney actually administered the project out of her own office. Cheney kept folders about the history standards on her desk, Robinson says, while Charlotte Crabtree, the UCLA professor in charge of developing the standards, lavished praise on Cheney in her grant proposals. "Lynne Cheney and Charlotte Crabtree were, for a few years, great buddies," Robinson recalls. "Then the standards came out."
- In part because her husband Dick Cheney is contemplating a presidential bid, Lynne Cheney decides to use the standards as a platform for attacking them as far-left, anti-American propaganda. In the process, she helps whip up the right-wing base that Dick Cheney needs to mount a bid for the White House into a politically useful frenzy. "She just bludgeoned the standards," Robinson recalls. "She said they emphasized things like the Mafia and slavery. And she turned on Charlotte Crabtree. Lynne Cheney was basically writing checks for that thing. Then she just stuck a knife in it and turned it. It drives me crazy the storm she raised over the history standards. I still hear people repeat what she accused the standards of doing, which were not true. What a waste of money that was. What a step backwards. God, that makes me angry."
- Gary Nash, a colleague of Crabtree's at UCLA who worked with her on the teaching standards, confirms Robinson's account. "She was really crushed by the way Lynne Cheney turned on the standards, because she had been very friendly with her, almost like a sorority sister," Nash says. "Afterwards, she stepped down as national director of the schools center [at UCLA] and withdrew from all the commissions and councils she had sat on in Washington and California. It was really devastating for her." Crabtree will later write a book about her experience, History on Trial.
- The media falls over itself to participate in Cheney's cultural battle, echoing and escalating Cheney's attacks, which, of course, are quickly picked up by other right-wing zealots. Nash, the UCLA scholar who had helped create the supplemental curriculum, recalls "debating" Cheney on four separate news and commentary broadcasts, including Pat Buchanan's talk show, in a single 24-hour period. While Cheney's sound bites prove devastating (if completely inaccurate), Nash's pedantic and long-winded explanations fall flat with the listeners: as Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein write, "Every Cheney zinger required a detailed, audience-losing explanation to rebut."
- In January 1995, Cheney and her political allies help secure a 99-1 vote on a nonbinding Senate resolution condemning the curriculum. "They blitzed the Senate," recalls Cheney's successor at the NEH, Sheldon Hackney. "This was like the war resolution on Iraq. It came down to a notion of whether you were patriotic or not."
- Cheney never tells her listeners that she in fact supervised the creations of the supplemental standards while in charge of the NEH, and oversaw their creation at every step of the process. She wrote to one of Nash's colleagues in October 1992, "What nice work you do! I've been saying lately that the best grant I've ever given is to your standards-setting project." But when Cheney realized the political hay she could make by attacking the standards, she turned on Nash and their creators. "We were dumbfounded" by her attacks, Nash recalls. "She had seen the drafts. She had made it clear she was pleased with the process as well as the product." Cheney answers this by claiming, falsely, that the standards had radically changed after she left the NEH. "I was flimflammed," she claims.
- Cheney proves herself to be a master at gutter politics. "It was as if we all had pop shooters and she had a howitzer," recalls Stanley Katz, chairman emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. "I have to say, Lynne Cheney is a minor genius at public relations, at operationalizing her ideology." The verbose, insular academics Cheney chose to do battle with never stood a chance against her. (Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Salon)
- October 15: Iraq threatens no further cooperation with UNSCOM until the sanctions are lifted and also begins movement toward Kuwait.
Middle East unrest
The US responds by deploying troops to Kuwait. The UN Security Council passes Resolution 949 demanding full cooperation; Iraq withdraws its forces. (UN/Iraqwatch/Electric Venom) - October 19: The first of many, many illegal press leaks from Kenneth Starr's office hits the press;
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
this one alleges, falsely, that Bill Clinton pressured former judge David Hale to arrange for the bad $300,000 loan at the center of the Whitewater investigation. The tale is told by Arkansas state trooper L.D. Brown at the behest of Starr officials. The motive seems to be to inject some steam into Starr's foundering investigation. Leaking information provided to a grand jury, known as a 6E violation, is a federal crime. It also warrants a contempt of court citation, and is a violation of Justice Department guidelines, American Bar Association rules, and DC Bar ethical guidelines. But, as Clinton consultant James Carville puts it, Starr "spew[ed] self-serving information like the Exxon Valdez." Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz will later observe, "Material is just not safe once it gets in the presence of this independent counsel's office." (James Carville [multiple sources]) - October 22: Congressional Quarterly predicts the upcoming Republican sweep of Congress.
Congressional Republicans
Both Republican prospective leaders of Congress, the Senate's Bob Dole and the House's Newt Gingrich, have publicly shared their plans for implementing their agenda as if the election is already in their pocket. "It's hard to believe, they don't seem to have any doubt at all," says Richard Fenno, a political scientist at the University of Rochester in New York. "I wonder if they're not celebrating prematurely, because they certainly are celebrating." Fenno says he still guesses that 90% of the incumbents running this fall will be re-elected, articulating the cooler-heads-prevailing judgment heard from many scholars and political professionals this fall. But even a 90% re-election rate might not be enough for Democrats to retain control of either chamber. In the Senate, a Republican takeover can be accomplished with the defeat of just two or three incumbents, assuming all are Democrats. The key to the Senate is in the nine seats being vacated by retirement. Six are Democratic. If Republicans take five of these away while holding their own (as now looks quite possible), they can capture the Senate by defeating just two incumbents, from a list of vulnerables including Harris Wofford, Edward Kennedy, Dianne Feinstein and Jim Sasser. There are 383 House incumbents who have been renominated by their parties (including independent Bernard Sanders of Vermont). If just 10%, or 38, lose, it would be the largest number defeated in any November in two decades. The same thing applies in the House, where the GOP is expected to dominate in the 52 contests for "open seats" due to primary defeats and retirements. - Democrats are particularly vulnerable because opposing groups of voters are energized to vote, while Democratic supporting groups are not. Higher taxes are a key issue; though only 2% of the taxpayers in the country actually are paying higher tax rates, the GOP is capitalizing on the widespread, erroneous belief that rates were raised far more generally. Democrats are also vulnerable for supporting the unpopular Clinton budget. Other issues include gun control, gay rights, and abortion rights. Clinton and the Democrats have not raised equal, opposing passions among the party's core constituencies. Unions have felt ill-used by Clinton's free-trade views of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade even as they watched their own bills such as economic stimulus and striker replacement fail. Environmentalists have felt shortchanged after having their expectations raised. And many liberal Democrats have been disaffected by White House talk about welfare reform, increased use of the death penalty and "three strikes" sentencing. Clinton also has failed to appeal to that group of deficit hawks associated with independent presidential candidate Ross Perot. Perot himself has urged voters to give control of Congress to the GOP. (Congressional Quarterly)
- October 29: A man fires several shots at the White House from the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Domestic terrorism
He is disarmed and arrested, and no one is injured. The man is later proven to be a disaffected gun advocate who had made threatening phone calls to one senator's office about the Brady gun control bill and the ban on assault rifles. Right-wing media commentators use the incident to ridicule the Clintons and continue their outspoken opposition to any gun control legislation. (H.R. Clinton) - October 31: Jerry Falwell hosts his television show, the Old-Time Gospel Hour, from a Little Rock Baptist church.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
Falwell had hoped to tape his show at the Immanuel Baptist Church, where Bill Clinton had worshiped every Sunday during his tenure as governor, but pastor Roger Horne forbids him access. Horne feels that Falwell has trampled upon the Ninth Commandment's prohibition against bearing false witness: "I happened to tune in on a Sunday morning," he says, and "I saw Falwell promoting the tapes that have proven to be scurrilous and full of innuendo and falsehoods directed against not just Clinton but other Arkansans. I could not, in good conscience, go along with it any longer. Falwell's sermon blasts Michael Jackson and Madonna, among others, but makes no mention of Bill Clinton. When asked about his relationship with the group Citizens for Honest Government, the producers of the two Clinton Chronicles tapes which Falwell helped subsidize, promoted heavily on his show, and appears on conducting a fake interview with a producer masquerading as a reporter who claims his life is in danger, Falwell tells the reporter, "I have not associated with or [had] any relationships with [those] people." (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons) - Late October: Days before the election,
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
Representative Newt Gingrich comments on the drowning of her two children by a 23-year old South Carolina woman named Susan Smith: "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican. That's the message for the last three days." Gingrich's attempt to indirectly link Democrats to the Smith murders backfires when it is revealed that Smith is the daughter of affluent local stockbroker Beverly Russell, the county chairman of the Christian Coalition and a member of the South Carolina Republican Party's executive committee. Court records further reveal that Russell routinely molested his daughter, from age 15 until just weeks before she committed the murder of her children (which Smith attempts to blame on an unidentified black male, setting off a manhunt throughout South Carolina which results in the harassment and arrest of dozens of innocent black men). Russell says after the revelations that his daughter committed the crime herself, and says of his own systematic molestation of her: "Of course, had I known at the time what the result of my sin would be, I would have mustered the strength to behave according to my responsibility." Gingrich never acknowledges his grotesque attempt to link the murders to his own political fortunes; indeed, a year later, he blames "the left" and "the welfare state" for the slashing murder of a mother and her children in Illinois. Gingrich continues to hide the fact that he himself is having an extramarital affair with an intern, Callista Bisek. (Joe Conason)
