A Very Special Job

by digby

Joe Conason has a good column today in Salon about GOP bottom feeder Floyd Brown of Willie Horton fame, who has, unsurprisingly, emerged from the slime to work on behalf of John McCain. It’s an excellent rundown on where Brown comes from and shines a light on a very useful but largely hidden corner of the wingnut welfare system.

… the Bush campaign had encouraged the makers of the Horton ad and certainly never made any serious effort to punish or even discourage the group. Two years later, in fact, significant evidence emerged that indicated possible collusion between Brown’s gang and the official Bush cohort, specifically between Bush media consultant Roger Ailes, the future boss of Fox News Channel, and Larry McCarthy, the consultant hired by Brown to make the Horton ad. Ailes indignantly denied working with Brown’s group, which would have been a serious infraction of election law. Responding to a Democratic Party complaint, the FEC opened an investigation that was eventually killed by a party-line vote of the commissioners before any real conclusions could be reached.

Soon Brown found a new cause in the destruction of the Clintons — and a new mentor in the person of Jim Johnson, the Arkansas segregationist whose hatred for the progressive young Southern governor dated back to the ’60s. Known as “Justice Jim” because he had served on the highest court in the state, Johnson earned permanent status as a symbol of unreconciled racism for his role in the 1957 desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School, where “patriots” like him brought worldwide shame to the United States. For years he sought to intimidate blacks and liberal whites in Arkansas as the leader of the White Citizens Council, a country club version of the Ku Klux Klan, whose official newsletter unashamedly referred to “ni**ers” and threatened violence against integration. He tacitly accepted the endorsement of the KKK’s “grand dragon” when he ran for governor in 1966.

“You make me ashamed to be from Arkansas,” said Bill Clinton when they met for the first time in 1968. Years later, Johnson made it clear that the feeling was mutual.

To seek out someone like Johnson to plot against Bill and Hillary Clinton revealed a profound flaw in Brown’s character. When Brown’s Presidential Victory Committee published “Slick Willie,” a vicious “biography” of Clinton that accused him, among other sins, of coddling Arkansas blacks, promoting witchcraft and fostering blasphemy, the acknowledgments included a “special thanks” to the aging segregationist. With still more help from Johnson, Brown and David Bossie went on to concoct and promote the Whitewater scandal, reaping immense publicity (and lots of money) from gullible network reporters eager to score a scoop on the supposed corruption of the new president. Few of those correspondents revealed that the inside dope on the Clintons was coming from the dubious authors of the Willie Horton ad and their racist mentor.

Conason urges McCain to repudiate Brown. I expect that he will, in no uncertain terms. He is, after all, a straight shooter who disapproves of incivility in politics. And Brown will keep on doing what he’s doing.

Perlstein caught both Human Events and Newsmax fundraising for him. Will McCain repudiate them too?

Update: in case you wonder what John McCain’s base (the media) have done so far in this race on his behalf, Jamison Foser has a nice compendium. And to think it’s only April!

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