1990’s Clinton Redux: President Bill Clinton Smears the Tea Party Movement

by Marinka Peschmann

[Note: This is part of an ongoing series about the Clinton Redux, the Obama Administration and their political wars against Americans. Click here for Part I]

As Big Government reported here, the Clintonistas have reunited to take down the tea party movement. The same tactics they used in the 1990’s to keep the Clintons in power are now being used to keep the Democrats in power. It was only a matter of time when President Bill Clinton would fire a round to vilify the tea party movement. That time has come.

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It happened last week when the former President used the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, where 168 men, women and children were killed, to smear the tea party participants. In a New York Times op-ed President Clinton wrote:

“… we should never forget what drove the bombers, and how they justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them…. Civic virtue can include harsh criticism, protest, even civil disobedience. But not violence or its advocacy. …. the line was crossed in Oklahoma City. In the current climate, with so many threats against the president, members of Congress and other public servants, we owe it to the victims of Oklahoma City, and those who survived and responded so bravely, not to cross it again.”

For months tea party participants have gathered at peaceful rallies across the county but in President Clinton’s narrative these gatherings are reminiscent to Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building.

His smear reminded me of a prophetic warning that Linda Tripp of Lewinsky-Clinton fame told me years ago: “If you believe nothing else, believe this. If the Clintons can do it to me, they can do it to you.”

Looks like she was right.

Welcome tea party participants to the politics of personal destruction; where no American is immune from being targeted, smeared or demonized.

It was the last year of the Clinton Administration when I met extensively with Tripp. The former civil servant had served in the White House for President Bill Clinton, and in First Lady Hillary Clinton’s Counsel’s office. She secretly taped her phone calls with President Clinton’s paramour, Monica Lewinsky, to avoid a potential perjury trap. In January 1998, when the scandal broke, and threatened the Clintons political future, the Clinton White House wrote the narrative they needed the public to believe. Tripp was an evil, bitter, jealous woman who betrayed an innocent friend (Monica Lewinsky), and conspired with Hillary’s concoction, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, to bring the Clintons down so she could write a book.

Anyone involved was obsessed with Bill Clinton’s sex life, especially the special prosecutor, Judge Kenneth Starr, who was actually doing his job, but was scripted in the Clinton narrative, as the sex-crazed out-of-control prosecutor. It was all about sex – that was the script the Clintons needed the public to believe because if the serious charges of witness tampering, suborning perjury, and obstruction of justice took hold and were pursued, or worse, the public finally realized that the dirty tricks they witnessed, and the lies they heard, during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal had also occurred during other less tantalizing Clinton investigations, their political future quite possibly would have ended in the 1990’s. There are reasons why witnesses fled the country or pled the fifth during the Clinton scandal ridden era. There are reasons why evidence was withheld, and witnesses suffered from amnesia, and the reasons do not involve Bill Clinton’s oral sex adventures in the Oval Office. Yes, as I discovered the hard way, Tripp, along with other Americans, had to be destroyed to keep them in power.

Now history is repeating itself. It is the tea party’s turn. The narrative? The tea party movement is a dangerous, angry group of racists and anti-government hoodlums.

The next page in the Clinton script will be that the tea party must become toxic, like Tripp and other “political enemies” became toxic in the 1990’s. The goal is a guilt- by-association-backlash so that no one dares to support or speak up for them.

Except there might be a problem. This time, America is waking up.

For the most part, the tea party participants worry for America’s future; soaring deficits, and higher taxes. They are dissatisfied with recent government take-overs of the auto industry to banks. They are upset that Obamacare was rammed into law. These concerns hardly constitute an advocacy of violence, as President Clinton suggested in his smear last week. Scores of people aren’t necessary buying the Clinton’s latest narrative.

Moreover, as polls show, Tea Party participants aren’t rabid Republicans. They are independents as well as Democrats. Many are frustrated by politicians on both sides of the aisle which is not a threat of violence but a threat to the incumbent lawmakers’ political future.

In the 1990’s, political persuasion didn’t matter either. Being smeared and demonized by the Clintonistas wasn’t exclusive to those on the right. Ask Kathleen Willey, for example.

Beware. I hope I am wrong but using the 1990’s Clinton Redux as a barometer, after the smears and demonization, arrests and indictments are next. In the case of Billy Dale of Travelgate, for instance, he was ultimately acquitted. As for Tripp, her criminal charges were eventually dropped. These indictments, however, served a chilling and intimidating purpose. Guess whose political careers benefited from them.

Cross-posted at marinkapeschmann.com.


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Posted Apr 27th 2010 at 2:01 pm in Politics, Tea Party | 130 Comments