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Return of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy By DOUG THOMPSON Dec 4, 2002, 08:25

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Even after a month, Democrats still moan, bitch and whine about the outright humiliation they suffered at the polls during the midterm election.

It’s everybody else’s fault, they say, and to keep from blaming the real culprit – themselves – they now have resurrected an old fantasy: the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (otherwise known as the VRWC).

Al Gore says The Washington Times and Rush Limbaugh conspire to hurt Democrats. Tom Daschle blames a broader media base, which he claims is controlled by a right-wing bias.

We’re heard this before. Hillary Clinton claimed her husband couldn’t possibly be getting the lollipop treatment on the First Member by intern Monica Lewinsky. Nah, the whole thing was engineered by the VRWC. When it turned out to be true that Monica found Billy finger-licking good, Hillary didn’t admit she was wrong. She just stopped talking about it.

That’s the beauty of conspiracy theories. They serve your purpose when needed for spin, then can be discarded or forgotten when truth sinks the theory.

But Gore, Daschle and the other “it ain’t my fault” Democrats ran out of others to blame, so they had to resurrect the VRWC as the cause of all their woes. Never mind that any theory that media in this country could ever be controlled by a conservative agenda is about as plausible as Brittney Spears’ virginity. They need a scapegoat, damnit, and it sure as hell ain’t gonna be them.

The VRWC’s roots can be traced back to the Arkansas Project, a research program started by conservative publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, who wanted to sink Clinton’s proposed socialized health care program.

Such projects exists on both sides of the political fence. Scaif wanted to get Clinton. A group of liberals funded by Stewart Mott tried to do the same thing to George W. Bush, launching a rumor and fear program over Dubya’s alleged use of cocaine. Mott’s people spent millions combing through public records, interviewing just about anyone who ever came into contact with Bush and came up with nada. They enlisted help from some of the best investigative reporters in the nation and couldn’t find a thing to support the claim that young Bush had a problem with nose candy.

At least Scaife had a subject with real skeletons in the closet. Clinton is slated to be the most scandal-scarred president in modern history. Dalliances with women, sexual assaults, misuse of public funds, abuse of power – all this and more could and was documented as part of the Clinton legacy. He lost his law license for lying under oath and the respect of the American people for his constant abuses of public trust. His ability to escape more serious punishment came more from Republican incompetence than any innocence on his part.

So we didn’t need a VRWC to expose Clinton for what he was – a tail-chasing, lying, misogynist bastard. His inability to keep it in his pants put his administration into an immoral abyss, not Scaife’s money or any organized conspiracy.

And no VRWC sank Dems on election day last month. It was, instead, their own inability to understand the issues that drove American opinion, a stupid strategy of challenging a popular Republican president when we are at war with terror and a complete failure to motivate the voters who comprise the base of their party.

But a primary rule of politics is “never admit you’re wrong, even when you are.” Hence renewal of the VRWC.

Sorry guys, there ain’t no Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, no more than any real Vast Left Wing Conspiracy as often claimed by the paranoids on the other side of the fence.

Does this mean conspiracies don’t exist?

Not at all.

Something is out there.

I know.

I’m a charter member of the VBWC – otherwise known as the Vast Buffalo Wing Conspiracy.

Contrary to popular rumor, the VBWC did not start at the Anchor bar in Buffalo, New York (although buffalo wings did get their start there).

No, a group of us started the VBWC at Hooters in Fairfax, Virginia, in 1992. We started gathering there for three reasons:

1. The wings, of course.

2. The waitresses, of course.

3. And to ponder the question always asked at Hooters: “Do you think those are real?”
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