[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]
Yesterday was a classic post-holiday broadcast at Fox News. Bill
O'Reilly couldn't be bothered to come in for work, so his producers
cobbled together an entire hour of his moronic "News Quiz" segments. And
on Sean Hannity's show, they simply reran a segment from February --
though, oddly enough, Fox promoted the rerun all week.
Since Hannity chose to just rerun the show, we're going to just rerun our post about it:
___
One of the more disturbing -- and little noted -- aspects of
the Supreme Court's execrable ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is the way it legitimized, if inadvertently, the far-right operatives at Citizens United.
These are, after all, some of the sleaziest and most mendacious
political operatives in business in America today. Citizens United has a
record not only of peddling fabrications, distortions, and baldfaced
lies, they are one of the more significant transmitters of far-right
extremist beliefs into mainstream politics.
Remember that
David Bossie, the longtime head of the organization, was
fired by Republican Rep. Dan Burton in 1998
for distributing doctored audio tapes of prison conversations with
former Clinton aide Webster Hubbell that purported to demonstrate
Hillary Clinton's complicity in corruption, but which in unedited form
clearly demonstrated the opposite.
This is an organization that should have no credibility on any level,
except among the fringes of the right where any concocted smear is
gobbled up like cotton candy.
Yet there was Bossie, along with his cohort from CU, Stephen K.
Bannon, getting an entire hour of Sean Hannity's Fox News show last
night to promote their latest fabrication, a pseudo-documentary titled
Generation Next.
The film's subject is perhaps Citizens United's biggest lie yet: It
claims that the current economic crisis is not the product of
misbegotten conservative governance, but rather is the product of Dirty
F--king Hippies and their degenerate "Me Generation" ethos.
Bossie: Look, the Greatest Generation, the World War II
generation, it would never dawn on them to take the type of risk that
these people did. The people who were the '60s hippies, the people at
Woodstock in the '60s, who became the yuppies of the '80s and really the
barons of the 2000s, and really are the leaders around the country that
helped cause this. It really is a remarkable thing.
In other words, Bossie and Co. have concocted the perfect fantasy for
right-wingers in denial over the complete, fully manifested failure of
their approach to governance -- one that lets them, once again, blame
those dirty hippies for everything wrong with America. No wonder it was
so popular at the National Tea Party Convention and at CPAC.
Bossie has been in the business of peddling lies for a long time (and I've been
writing about him quite awhile too).
In the '90s, he was one of the sleaziest of a remarkably slimy
collection of characters peddling anti-Clinton conspiracy theories,
teamed up with Floyd "Willie Horton's Godfather" Brown. Brown himself
resurfaced in the last election
peddling "Obama is a secret Muslim" smears and
racially incendiary ads in the guise of an
"Expose Obama" outfit run by a far-right nutcase.
Eric Boehlert compiled a rundown of Bossie's sleaze for Salon back in 2004:
Bossie has engaged in such questionable or downright slimy tactics on many occasions. Here are some of his more famous misses:
# During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bossie got into a fistfight
with a Little Rock, Ark., private investigator, Larry Case, who said he
had damaging information on Clinton. Bossie told police that Case had
punched him after Bossie refused to pay Case a $10,000 advance as they
were preparing to board a flight at Little Rock National Airport.
# That same year, Bossie set out to prove that a young pregnant woman
named Susan Coleman had committed suicide in 1977 after having an
affair with Clinton. Coleman's mother told CBS that Bossie hounded her
relentlessly with his false story, even following her to an Army
hospital in Georgia, where she was visiting her husband, in recovery
from a stroke. Bossie and another man "burst into the sick man's room
and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter's suicide,"
CBS reported.
# Also in 1992, President George H.W. Bush, repudiating Bossie's
tactics, filed an FEC complaint against Bossie's group after it produced
a TV ad inviting voters to call a hot line to hear (almost certainly
doctored) tape-recorded conversations between Clinton and Gennifer
Flowers.
# In 1994, Bossie traveled to Fayetteville, Ark., with an NBC
producer, where the two allegedly "stalked" and "ambushed" Beverly
Bassett Schaffer, a former state regulatory officer and a lawyer who had
played a small role in the so-called Whitewater conspiracy. The two
confronted Schaffer outside her office and, after she refused an
on-camera interview, reportedly chased her across town, until she found
refuge in the lobby of an office building.
# In February 1996, Citizens United mailed out a fundraising letter
bragging that it had "dispatched its top investigator, David Bossie, to
Capitol Hill to assist Senator Lauch Faircloth in the official US Senate
hearings on Whitewater." Another mailing reported that Bossie was "on
the inside directing the probe." Democrats subsequently cried foul that a
federal employee was actively raising money for a partisan group, so
D'Amato forced Bossie to submit an affidavit proclaiming his
independence from Citizens United.
# In November 1996, Bossie improperly leaked the confidential phone
logs of former Commerce Department official John Huang to the press. And
he did that by deceiving other GOP congressional aides, according to an
account published in Roll Call, which quoted one Republican aide
comparing Bossie's deceptive presence to "Ollie North running around the
House."
# In July 1997, James Rowley III, the chief counsel to the House
Government Reform Committee, which was investigating allegations of
campaign finance wrongdoing by the Clinton administration, resigned his
position after committee chairman Burton refused to fire Bossie. In his
one-page resignation letter, Rowley, a former federal prosecutor
employed by Republicans, accused Bossie of "unrelenting" self-promotion
in the press, which made it impossible "to implement the standards of
professional conduct I have been accustomed to at the United States
Attorney's Office." (Bossie's habit of self-promotion paid off; during
one four-week stretch in early 1994, Bossie and Brown were profiled by
the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and the Washington Post, each
marveling at the power the activists were wielding.)
The breaking point came in May 1998, when Bossie, then 32, oversaw
the release of the doctored Hubbell tapes. As Roll Call reported at the
time, "At Bossie's request, Burton sat on the tapes for nearly a year
until word started to leak that Hubbell might be indicted by [Kenneth]
Starr for tax evasion. Bossie, who supervised the tapes along with
investigator Barbara Comstock, oversaw the editing of Hubbell's prison
conversation[s] and decided to release them the day before Hubbell was
indicted." According to Roll Call, Bossie enjoyed unusually close
working relations with Starr investigators.
The tapes were edited for "privacy" considerations, according to
Bossie. But they were also edited to completely omit key exculpatory
passages, including one in which Hubbell exonerated Hillary Clinton of
wrongdoing. Gingrich ordered a reluctant Burton to fire Bossie.
Bossie also
heavily promoted the anti-Kerry "Swift Boat" story in 2004, as Joe Conason reported then, and produced
an embarrassing valentine to George W. Bush at the same time.
Then there was the extremism. In the 1990s, Bossie and Citizens
United were inordinately fond of peddling anti-Clinton conspiracy
theories claiming the president was part of a plot to enslave Americans
under a "New World Order". Check out, for instance,
this archived version of the Citizens United front page from 1999.
In addition, naturally, to a bevy of Monica-related impeachment
screeds, you could find screaming exposes of the Clintons' alleged
involvement in the United Nations one-world-government plot. A streaming
banner on the site shouted: "Secret United Nations Agenda Exposed In
Explosive New Video!" (The video in question prominently featured an
appearance by then-Sen. John Ashcroft.) A little further down, the site
explains: "This timely new video reveals how the liberal regime of Bill
Clinton is actively conspiring to aid and abet the United Nations in its
drive for global supremacy." These are tales lifted straight from the
conspiracy theories of the 1990s militia movement.
What makes Bossie's latest fabrication so outrageous is that it
blames "liberal hippies" for the very policies and legal positions long
championed by
conservative ideologues, as embodied by the very Supreme Court ruling that seemingly just legitimized him.
Oliver Willis points this out at Media Matters:
In the segment ... Hannity and the filmmakers lay blame
for the crisis on baby boomers (or "'60's hippies," in the words of
producer David Bossie) moving away from conservative ideas by taking
advantage of corporate personhood in order to avoid personal
responsibility for the risks they took with the funds their banks
controlled ...
This denies reality. It is in fact the conservative movement that has
regularly supported the power of personhood for corporations, and the
resulting dissolution of personal responsibility for corporate
decisions. In fact, one of the producers of this very film is David
Bossie. Bossie is behind Citizens United, the conservative activist
group who recently won a Supreme Court case that affirmed the power of
political speech for coporations like Citizens United (the case was
decided 5-4 with the justices regularly categorized as conservative
voting in the affirmative).
Hannity also claims that
Generation Next "debunks the myth
that deregulation caused the economic crisis"? Oh, really? None of the
clips they showed last night did. I haven't seen the film whole, but if
what they showed last night was their best evidence, they have a long
way to go before they can "debunk" what is a well-established reality.
Of course, someone like Bossie would naturally reject the findings of the
"New World Order" United Nations
report on the causes of the global economic crisis:
The Global Economic Crisis: Systemic Failures and Multilateral Remedies
contends that the systemic failures – driven by financial deregulation,
large-scale financial investments on commodity futures markets, and
widespread currency speculation – have deeper roots that call for
in-depth analysis and need to be approached through recognition of their
multilateral dimensions.
Well before the crisis erupted, we were being warned that it was coming, by people like Paul Krugman, who
particularly points to Reagan-era deregulation as a leading cause of the crisis.
Or you could consult Kevin Phillips, whose book
Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism predicted the crisis well before it erupted, and consider the factors underlying his prediction:
The focus of Phillips’ concern this time out is the
overweening dominance of the financial-services sector in the
21st-century American economy — how their growing power inside the halls
of government has led to rampant abuses, dubious practices that have
hollowed out the real-estate bubble they’ve created this decade, while
simultaneously building a massive economy founded on debt. This has
occurred, as Phillips explains in studious detail, even as shifts in the
global economy — particularly the changes in the oil market, which have
wrought a rapid deceleration in the value of the dollar — threaten to
expose that economy for the hollow thing it has become.
We’re now living in an economy, as Phillips explains, in which
financial services — banks, credit and loan services, real estate, and
the like — now constitute fully 21 percent of our gross domestic
product. Americans’ public and private debt combined now stand valued at
three times our GDP. It now takes about 20 cents of debt to create a
dollar of the GDP.
The financial-services sector is the real locus of this bubble (the
increase in government debt, though substantial, was comparatively
minor), which has been inflated steadily by the expansion of leverage
and what Phillips correctly describes as "reckless innovations" — CDOs,
SIVs, and various other fast-money devices. This house of cards is about
to collapse, Phillips warns, in a "credit implosion" whose consequences
will be felt globally. A run on the dollar, he says, is a fair
possibility, noting that this would wreak havoc within the context of
the current economic downturn.
Bad Money is a thorough and carefully documented — as well as
carefully thought-out — examination of our current economic position.
Phillips explains in detail how the financial-services sector came to be
seen within the Beltway as "the winner" for politicians to back as the
nation’s economic workhorse, fueled in no small part by the ongoing
activities of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, even
as the nation’s manufacturing capacity was slowly being gutted.
He goes on to explore how this was facilitated by Republican
governance this century, particularly from a Bush White House that
favored the familial oligarchical approach to economics, and rapidly
accelerated during the post-9/11 push to expand credit. This was
manifested in the "securitization" mania that took root in the context
of a "Wild West" mania for all kinds of moneymaking devices, especially
low-interest adjustable-rate mortgages. The invasion of Iraq, coupled
with the emerging power of nationally owned oil producers and the
increasing manifestation of "peak oil" prophecies about falling
supplies, left the United States isolated diplomatically and
increasingly vulnerable economically.
The reality check, for conservatives, ultimately comes down to
results. When the "dirty hippy" Bill Clinton left office, we had a
federal surplus and the economy was robust. When George W. Bush, who
followed the conservative prescription to a T, left office we had nearly
collapsed the global economy.
That's a reality they really hate being reminded about.
Her name was Brisenia Flores. She was nine years old and lived near the
border with her parents and sister outside the town of Arivaca,
Arizona.