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The way those wingnuts workby digby
It’s important to remember that the right wing is essentially a professional scandalmonger, conspiracy theory spinning and cheating operation. Going all the way back to Nixon, the Godfather of wingnuttia, they have organized themselves around it. They even keep it up when they are in power now in order to find cover for their own leaders.
If you think the current craziness with the Uranium One, emails and Pizzagate is nuts, back in the day they went even crazier during the Clinton administration going so far as to claim that the decadent hippies Bill and Hill, seen above worshiping Satan, had covered the White House Christmas trees with drug paraphernalia and sex toys. Seriously.
While most urban legends about the Clintons start somewhat small and then grow in the telling, this one appears to have sprung fully formed from the deranged imagination of Gary Aldrich, a former FBI agent who worked on the security team for the Bush and Clinton White Houses. Aldrich had an unending contempt for the Clintons, who he clearly viewed as a couple of dirty hippies with their Fleetwood Mac records and daughter named after a Joni Mitchell song. After he left, he decided to cash in on that hatred with a 1996 book entitled “Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House.”
Unlike some Clinton haters of the era, Aldrich seems to have realized that accusations don’t need to be plausible in order for them to be eagerly snatched up and believed by huge swaths of the conservative book-buying public. So he went hog-wild in his book, claiming that Hillary Clinton’s Christmas decorating team decided to deck the tree with drug paraphernalia, condoms and cock rings.
Aldrich goes on at length about what is clearly an event that happened only in his head, but I’ve clipped some highlights from the book for your perusal.
Clinton is far from the only target in this. Aldrich also takes a swipe at gay men in an unsubtle passage about a male florist.
I bring this up not to be offensive on Christmas eve but merely to warn everyone that when right wingers are backed into a corner they get even loonier and more dangerous than they already are. And now that they’ve all accepted that Donald Trump is their Dear Leader, they’re likely to go down roads we may have thought even they would fear to tread.
So enjoy the holiday everyone. Eat drink, be merry. But we’ve got a lot of work to do next year and some of it is going to be about keeping the truth and the facts front and center even when it gets nuts. And it’s going to get nuts. Just saying.
If you are doing last minute shopping this week-end and feel like putting a little something in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, it would be most appreciated. As always, I’m immensely grateful for all of my readers. It’s what keeps me going.
Happy Hollandaise everyone! Together we will get through this.
Keep the faith.
cheers — digby
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