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The Vast Right Wing conspiracy. Well, you've got it partly right.<g> Some on the far right were smart enough to see certain combustible elements. Rumors and more of Clinton's philandering had been around for some time. He was pretty active in Little Rock, apparently. He appears to have slowed down (and maybe stopped) in the WH, before Monica. He nonetheless had enormous, and even increased, attractiveness to a whole lot of women. As a whole lot have admitted. And he clearly had a big weakness, which he found difficult to control.
By current accounts (based on leaked info about the Tripp tapes) Monica beat Linda to it. Monica's physical affair was apparently in fact winding down by the time Linda had been recruited (or decided entirely on her own???) to find out whether Monica had stepped over from flirting to acting, and had succeeded in getting to the President. It appears that the tapes make it clear that Tripp started by encouraging Monica to go after the President. To cross over from flirting and "stalking" (that was widely rumored) to action.
The evidence for that is looking strong. The missing link is where did this all come from? Perhaps it was all Lucien Goldberg's idea. Perhaps it came from higher and richer sources. Lucien Goldberg certainly is in a thick web of networked connections to right wingers.
Sure, its true that in the end the President did succumb to the young staffer's long campaign to interest him. (The long campaign preceding success emerges from the Starr report.)
It's also true that Clinton was willing to play awfully close to the perjury line, if not barely step over it, in the Paula Jones deposition, to avoid caving into the calculated plan of those funding and directing the Jones suit to [he thought] embarrass him through politically damaging leaks of his playing around in the White House. Certainly that threat had been made tangible by all the illegal leaks they had previously accomplished.
If fact at the time the Jones lawyers questioned the President they had more in mind that merely leaking any admissions. They had listened to Tripp's tapes. They hoped to entrap him in perjury, or at least something close enough to badly embroil Clinton with Starr. (Who the funders of the Jones suit had long fed with leads of potential misbehavior, in Arkansas and elsewhere.) I think in fact that Jones lawyers didn't ask clear and unambiguous follow up questions in the Lewinsky deposition precisely because they didn't want to push the President into clear admissions, and hence let him off the hook of perjury charges. (How else can you explain their amazing failure to ask follow up questions, again and again?)
Now, how much worse does this set-up look, and how much more excusable the President's decision to walk awfully close to civil perjury while still TRYING to avoid it, if we also learn that the same right wing funders who where directing the Jones lawyers were also behind Tripp's taping of Lewinsky? That is, had created, and not merely discovered, both sides of the trap?
And how much worse still, if these funders were fully prepared to try to encourage Monica to go full tilt for enticing the President into adultery if she hadn't already? So that the President would have something to try to hide in the Jones lawsuit, if he didn't already?
Yeah, that is how I see it. Very possible. Very much worth fully investigating. Which hasn't happened yet.
But no. No one FORCED the adultery. They may have just been willing to try to entice it, given the known weakness. And no, no one FORCED the President to mislead to the edge of perjury in the Jones deposition. Though the Jones funders did come about as close to forcing that as one can imagine, short of a loaded gun.
One thing that certainly did not happen. The mainstream press was not in on the planning. They were merely baited and hooked, according to any intelligent person's knowledge of what will get them to break stories. And voluminously leaked to.
Doug
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