YOU THINK CHRISTIANS ARE NICE PEOPLE?
HERE'S HOW X-TIANS SMEARED JOHN MCCAIN IN 2000

from THE FAMILY, Kitty Kelley, pp. 595-596:

[Open quote.]
The Bush team retained the services of Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition, to run grass roots in the state, and they immediately started attacking with push polls, telephone banks, e-mails, anonymous mailings, automatic dialings of untraceable hate messages, phony front groups, and radio talk-show call-ins to pillory McCain with lies that he was a liberal reprobate who abandoned a crippled wife to father black children by black prostitutes. Preposterous charges of extramarital affairs, abortions, wife beatings, mob ties, venereal diseases, and illegitimate children were flung at him, while his wife, Cindy, was tarred as a wayward woman and drug addict who had stolen to support her habit, his children were vilified as bastards, and his friend and supporter from New Hampshire former U.S. Senator Warren Rudman was subjected to vile anti-Semitism. The poison drip saturated South Carolina for eighteen days and nights of slaughterhouse politics.

“I’ve seen dirty politics, but I’ve never seen a rumor campaign like this,” said Terry Haskins, the speaker pro tem of the South Carolina House of Representatives and a McCain supporter. “It’s a vile attempt to destroy a man’s reputation just to win an election, and I know it’s organized because none of these rumors existed until the day after New Hampshire.”

On February 12, a week before the election, Bush was caught by a C-SPAN camera talking to a state senator. Neither man realized he was being watched.

“You haven’t even hit his soft spots,” said the senator.

“I know,” said Bush. “I’m going to.”

“Well, they need to be—somebody does, anyway.

“I agree,” said Bush. “I’m not going to do it on TV.”

By the time he finished mauling McCain in South Carolina with his anonymous smear campaign, George had almost surpassed his father’s vile race-baiting.

“We suspected that Ralph Reed was behind it all,” said Mark Salter, McCain’s administrative assistant, “but we couldn’t prove it, because there was no paper trail . . . They operated under the radar system used political action committees no one ever heard of. . . which gave Bush complete deniability.”

Federal Election Commission campaign records would show that Ralph Reed was paid more than half a million dollars by Enron “for ongoing advice and counsel.” Karl Rove had recommended the conservative political activist to Enron in 1997, feeding suspicions that Rove wanted to keep Reed’s favor for Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.

One aspect of Reed’s fiendish operation in South Carolina targeted 140,000 Republicans throughout the state with flyers from the Christian Coalition titled “10 Disturbing Facts About John McCain.” A southern female, who identified herself as being with a religious group, followed up with a phone call to these same voters. In a honey-sweet accent, she related horrendous stories about McCain and expressed concern about such a man becoming President. Before hanging up, she said, ‘You all be sure to listen to the Reverend Robertson this Sunday.” When Pat Robertson appeared on one of the morning talk shows, he made a veiled reference to “some of those other things that are in John McCain’s background.”
[Close quote.]


FLYNT RETALIATES FOR S.C. WITH NEWS OF BUSH JR'S ABORTION

from THE FAMILY, pp. 599-600:

[Open quote.]
George’s scorched-earth tactics in South Carolina enraged his critics, especially Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, who felt that Bush’s stand on sexual abstinence before marriage was the height of hypocrisy. Bush’s pledge to put federal funds into abstinence programs further outraged Flynt, who argued that such programs did not reduce teen sex. Pronouncing Bush a menace to society, the pornographer hired two investigative reporters to explore every aspect of the governor’s sexual past. In October 2000, he claimed to have hit pay dirt.

Appearing on CNN’s Crossfire, Flynt alleged that George W. Bush had impregnated a woman in the 1970s when he was living at the Chateau Dijon in Houston. According to Flynt, George arranged an abortion through a physician, who purportedly performed the procedure at Houston’s Twelve Oaks Medical Center.

“When I said that we had the proof, I am referring to knowing who the girl was, knowing who the doctor was that performed the abortion, evidence from girlfriends of hers at the time, who knew about the romance and the subsequent abortion. The young lady does not want to go public, and without her willingness, we don’t feel that we’re on solid enough legal ground to go with the story.. . One of the things that interested us was that this abortion took place before Roe v. Wade. . . which made it a crime at the time.”

Without confirmation from the woman, who Flynt said had married an FBI agent, the mainstream press would not touch the story. “Walter Isaacson [former editor of Time] would not go with it because Larry Flynt was involved,” said Brian Doyle, an assistant Time editor. “Even though he had four affidavits from the woman’s friends.” Michael Isikoff of Newsweek said, “Certainly, there was a great deal of circumstantial evidence to support it, but without the woman herself coming forward to admit that Bush arranged her abortion, we could not do anything with it.” Richard Gooding of The National Enquirer said that when he interviewed the woman, she denied having had an abortion. “She admitted they dated exclusively for six months, but said they never had the kind of sex that would get her pregnant.”

The story was pursued because of Bush’s stand against abortion and his threat to support a “human life amendment” to the Constitution, which would overturn Roe v. Wade. As governor, he signed eighteen antiabortion laws, and as a presidential candidate he promised to appoint only pro-life judges.
[Close quote.]


I'LL FINISH "THE FAMILY" TONIGHT

Hey! I'm almost done with Kitty Kelley's book, and if you've been paying close attention, you see how she writes her books. Mostly, she quotes other people and what they have to say about her subjects. That way she does not have to duck slander charges. I think her books are fair in that she quotes people who are friends, people who are enemies and people who are mostly neutral about her subjects. For other details, she refers to documents which have been found to support what her sources come up with, such as journal pages which show that Bush Sr. wrote one thing in his journal while saying the opposite to the public. When she quotes someone about specific allegations, she'll usually quote someone else who recalls an event or act differently. She did that a lot when delving into Bush Jr's National Guard record.

I'd hate to have her do a book on me, but I do think she's fair—as long as her readers realize how her techniques work. Believe it or not, I was able to see George Bush Jr. (as a young man) through sympathetic eyes. I was a lot like him. I was also able to forgive him some of his attitudes about things. But the biggest impression I came away with is that the rich do live lives so different from ours that they just can't understand what it's like to live workaday lives. Thus they get a sense of privilege which shields them from compassion for others. That lack of compassion, translated into governance, the will to win at any cost, could give us an America in which the political surface is so covered with lies that under the surface a sea of lying sharks can do anything and everything they want undetected because we'll have lost the instinct for truth.
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"Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent who get all the publicity. But then—we elected them." —Lily Tomlin [The phoo is on the Bush-league feets now.]