Free Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! by Andrew Breitbart Page B

him over the course of the next few months, that was when Drudge dropped the cigar story as a “fuck you” to the Democrat-Media Complex. On August 22, 1998, Drudge bombshelled, SHE HAD SEX WITH CIGAR: MEDIA STRUGGLES WITH SHOCKING NEW DETAILS OF WHITE HOUSE AFFAIR. Again, he headlined that the story contained graphic descriptions. “In a bizarre daytime sex session, that occurred just off the Oval Office in the White House, President Clinton watched as intern Monica Lewinsky allegedly masturbated with his cigar. It has been learned that several major news organizations have confirmed the shocking episode and are now struggling to find ways to report the full Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton grossout.” 10
    Clinton’s carefully crafted media defense was going down, and Drudge was dismantling it as brilliantly as anyone in media history.
    But the Democrat-Media Complex isn’t enormously powerful because they give up easily. Over the course of the next eight months, they took an open-and-shut case of sexual harassment, of perjury, of intimidation of witnesses—they took that epic slam-dunkand used a coordinated media propaganda campaign of monumental proportions to split the country apart. They went after all their political enemies to try to draw blood regardless of what the infraction was; they used the media, a critical part of the Complex, to legitimate it. Over the next eight months, I learned all I needed to know about the ethics of journalism. The rules were created by the left to be applied exclusively as a weapon against the right.
    For the next eight months, the Clinton administration and their media parrots devised a strategy that assessed, through polling, every possible aspect of the story.
    They asked the American people: “What do you feel about the intimidation of Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp not to testify truthfully in the Paula Jones civil trial?”
    “We don’t like that.”
    “What do you think about the president lying under oath?”
    “We don’t like that.”
    “What do you think about the president lying to Donna Shalala and the rest of his cabinet?”
    “We don’t like that.”
    “What do you think about the exploration of the president’s sex life?”
    “We don’t like that.”
    “Aaaaah,” said the Democrat-Media Complex. “Good! There’s our wedge.”
    They crafted a wedge from Clinton’s sex life and they went to their messengers in the intellectual circles to shove that wedge between Americans’ shoulder blades. They knew that most Americans still thought that Clinton was a liar and a sexual predator, but they knew that if they could only convince Americans that “everybody lies about sex,” everything would turn out fine for their man, no matter how hypocritical and manipulative they were being to save him.
    They started with the classic leftist tactic: the politics of personal destruction applied to Lewinsky. This effort was spearheaded by Sidney Blumenthal, a former mainstream media journalist. According to Christopher Hitchens, who testified before Congress in 1999, Blumenthal attended a Washington luncheon soon after the revelations broke, at which “Mr. Blumenthal stated that… the President was ‘the victim’ of a predatory and unstable sexually demanding young woman.” In other words, Blumenthal used his Rolodex to distribute the dirt that the reason Bill Clinton was in the proximity of Monica, with whom he “did not have sexual relations,” was because she was a stalker. 11 In fact, Blumenthal used the word
stalker
several times during a March 19, 1998, luncheon at the Occidental restaurant in Washington, DC, explaining that “this version of the facts was not generally understood.” 12
    Blumenthal later blamed Lewinsky herself for this version of the story; in his book
The Clinton Wars
, he stated, “Beginning with Isikoff’s publication of the Talking Points on January 21, in which Lewinsky called herself a ‘stalker,’ newspapers around the country