As a public service announcement, your friendly staff at MWC would like to remind you to wake up every morning, read your local newspaper (which, no matter where you live, has been renamed The Starr-Dispatch), and say to yourself, "Today is the product of four billion years of progress." Then according to the Surgeon General, as you're reading Section A, "The Starr Report," you should slowly undress yourself while caress--wait, how did a Joycelyn Elder joke sneak in here? What you should actually do is make yourself a nice bowl of soup and go back to bed.
Much has happened since the last issue of MWC, but one thing is the same. The nation is still outraged. An anonymous couple has donated $2.3 million to Texas A&M to investigate the feasibility of cloning their dog, Missy, who has, quote, "the perfect bark." People aren't upset about cloning, because they know from the Hollywood documentary Multiplicity that cloning will result in an ever-more amusing series of Michael Keatons. People are outraged because the couple is remaining anonymous. We the People are thus prevented from forming a more perfect union, which We would do by Going over to the Couple's House and Beating them with Sticks.
Okay, on to this week's conspiracy, in which President Clinton regrets reiterating to the grand jury the following Paula Jones deposition testimony: "Yah, I'll step down when someone hits 70 home runs and the Cubs and Red Sox make the playoffs."
To recap: Independent Prosecutor Kenneth Starr submitted his report to Congress. In it he documented several charges that he considered to be possibly impeachable actions of President Clinton. For example, Starr reported that in the failed Arkansas land deal known as "Whitewater," Governor Clinton... wait, no, that's not it. Starr said that right after Clinton took office, the White House used confidential FBI files to... no, that wasn't it either. It must have been during the firing of the White House travel staff, when Clinton... wait, Starr didn't find anything wrong there, either. Maybe because of the evidence surrounding Vince Foster's and Ron Brown's deaths, Starr alleged... nope, that wasn't it. Huh. Someone remind us why Starr was still independently persecuting the President as of January 1998.
Oh yeah, it was like this: In 1993, reclusive conservative rich guy publisher Richard Mellon Scaife began the first of what would total $1.8 million in donations to the American Spectator. The $1.8 million was earmarked to fund the magazine's anti-Clinton "Arkansas Project" investigation. Note that we use the word "conservative" in the sense of, "like Hitler, but without the mustache." In other words, he's almost as far right as Robert Bork. This guy is scary. He inherited $200 million from his mother (of the banking Mellons) in 1965, and since then he's pretty much been the poster boy for the Increase the Estate Tax movement. We at MWC speak from the heart when we say, please please please don't forward this column to him.
In the January 1994 issue of the aforementioned American Spectator, David Brock wrote that in 1991, a woman named Paula was procured by Arkansas state troopers for Governor Clinton's pleasure. Paula Jones subsequently came forth and said that no, Clinton made a pass at her in a Little Rock hotel room, and she declined. The President denies any recollection of the incident. (Well, duh. Do you remember what you had for breakfast, say, on May 8, 1991? Sure, if you have Cheerios every day, you might reasonably think you had Cheerios that day, too, but we think the evidence suggests that the president is not a Cheerios-every-day type of guy, if you catch our drift. We now leave this parenthetical expression to escape the Metaphor Police, who are quite deservedly right on our heels.)
Conservative influences subsequently convinced Jones to strike back at the defamation she suffered at the hands of Brock by deciding, right before the statute of limitations ran out, that the alleged hotel incident limited her career advancement, as evidenced by the various raises and promotions she received after May 1991. So she sued President Clinton.
In May 1997, the Supreme Court decided that a civil lawsuit against a sitting president for alleged incidents occurring before his or her presidency could go forward during his or her term in office. Despite what you're thinking, there is no evidence that the justices reached this decision after returning from a fact-finding mission at a crack house. Or that Justice Thomas threatened to, if the other justices didn't let the suit go forward, point out pubic hairs on their Coke cans every day for the rest of their lives. For one thing, Thomas knows if he tried this, they'd just fire his staff and give Scalia two votes.
Meanwhile, back on the Arkansas Project, Scaife funds were being given to conservative activists at the rate of $26,000 per month. One of the activists, attorney Steve Boynton, recalled an old friend of his, Parker Dozhier, whom he knew from (this is an actual direct quote) "their shared interest in the animal fur trade." Dozhier, who lived in a trailer behind a bait shop [insert Arkansas joke here] in the Ouachita Mountains, is described as being just a little bit anti-Clinton: "If he had a flat tire, he blamed Clinton," is an actual quote of one Dozhier acquaintance.
Convicted felon David Hale had known Dozhier since he was Dozhier's landlord in the 1960s, and he was a regular visitor to the trailer, according to Dozhier's live-in companion and her son, who witnessed Dozhier's giving Hale several thousand dollars (from the bait shop fortune, we assume) over the course of a couple years. In 1996, Hale testified that in 1986, Governor Clinton pressured him to make a fraudulent $300,000 loan. Hale was released from prison earlier this year after serving a whopping 20 months of the sentence he received for his two felony convictions.
We're running out of room here, and we haven't even started to write about cigars, [bad phrase], and [extremely personal body areas], so let us quickly mention a few other things:
So our point is, where did Hillary Clinton get this crazy idea about a vast, right-wing conspiracy? Stay tuned for Issue 17, "Being a Sleazebag isn't a High Crime or Misdemeanor," or "How Henry Hyde Helped Me Lose the Name 'Mrs. Fred Snodgrass.'"