-Caveat Lector-
Goodbye to the black helicopters
By Sarah J. McCarthy
� 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
Late in the year 2000, while chads were still being counted in Florida,
and
before Bill Clinton's black helicopter lifted off its pad for what may or
may not be the last time, Larry Nichols, a former Clinton employee in
Little Rock dialed up the "Quinn in the Morning" talk show at WRRK-FM
in
Pittsburgh and whispered in his Arkansas twang, "Quinn ... Quinn ...
they're not leaving." Referring to the Clintons, of course, Nichols, a
frequent long-distance caller to Jim Quinn's Morning Militia, has been
long
convinced that the Clintons would never go away.
Like many Clinton-crazies, Larry Nichols has spent the last eight years
afraid for his life. Sounding a bit panicky, he usually calls from
somewhere in hiding. I picture him with his telephone, hunched under a
blanket in a Bates psycho motel near an Arkansas highway, looking over his
shoulder with furtive glances toward the door. Not only was Nichols
convinced that Bill Clinton wasn't leaving and that Hillary would have to
be pried away like a Halloween cat clinging to the Oval Office drapes, but
he was a big-time believer in the "Arkancides," those 56 suspicious and
untimely deaths around Clinton that many believed to be murders.
This is what the Clinton presidency was like: White House counsel Vince
Foster found dead in Fort Marcy Park; Ron Brown, who had said he was not
going down alone, died with plenty of others in a plane crash; the
next-door neighbor of Gennifer Flowers beaten to within an inch of his
life; former Clinton security chief Jerry Parks gunned down in broad
daylight at a Little Rock intersection. And there were more. Bizarre
stories gushed forth like a muddy geyser out of Hot Springs.
We tried to find out what was happening, but never really could. Every once
in awhile there was a glint here, or a glimmer there, like a silver fish
under murky waters, but you couldn't get your hands around it. The Clinton
team always had a colorful cast of tough disarming characters ready to beat
back the fuddy-duddies who thought something sinister was going down.
Clinton aide Anne Lewis, who looked like a talking teapot from a children's
fairy tale, declared with a wave of her short chubby arms that the Filegate
scandal, resulting from two White House security agents haplessly receiving
an overflow of Republican FBI files that gushed forth like unstoppable suds
from an "I Love Lucy" washing machine, was just a "Sesame Street Snafu."
Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca, the Ernie and Bert of Filegate, were
dismissed by George Stephanopoulos as morons. "Filegate was a bureaucratic
f----up by two morons," he told Vanity Fair.
"Hell, you work for Bill Clinton, you go up and down more times than a
whore's nightgown," quipped James Carville. "Nuttin' to be excited about
yet."
Referring to the sexual harassment lawsuit in which, among other things,
Paula Jones charged that she was asked to kiss then-Governor Clinton's
crooked member, which took a strange veer to the left, the New York
Observer editorialized at the beginning of Clinton's second term, "This is
the first swearing in of a president where 40% of the electorate was
thinking about the president's penis. Right now there is a trailer parked
on Pennsylvania Avenue, and we are a trailer park nation. Enjoy the next
four years."
And a trailer park nation we were. Like friends around a campfire listening
to ghost stories, I used to wake up on winter mornings while it was still
dark and tune my bedside radio to "Quinn in the Morning" for the latest
tales of black helicopter sightings and calls from Arkansas witnesses who
had seen shady capers, train deaths and drug deals going down near Mena.
Like kids who love to hear "Where the Wild Things Are" read over and over
while hiding under the blankets, conspiracies can be fun.
Larry Nichols was my favorite caller to the Morning Militia, the former
Clinton-appointed employee of the Arkansas Development Finance Authority,
who the Clintons called a "pathological liar" but who had lots of scoops.
The latest "Arkancide," Larry confided to the captivated radio audience one
dark morning in a breathless stage whisper, was one of his "witnesses." He
would call back tomorrow morning to tell us who it was. Stay tuned.
Larry and others made it their business to report anything unusual at the
Mena airport, tidbits they might have picked up on the Internet, like when
a runway was being lengthened. You'd be amazed how many people on the
Internet live within sight of Mena. These folks may be swamp dwellers, but
they're not dumb. They knew that during the Clinton presidency, which New
York Times columnist Maureen Dowd described in a prophetic pre-Monica
column as an "exploding cigar, where the only absolute certainty is no
certainty," paranoia could employ ya.
Each conspiracy on Quinn's show had a theme song. "Smuggler's Blues" by
Glen Frye was played for Mena updates, and "Burnin' Down the House" was the
Janet Reno theme song. When Clinton aide Dickie Morris was caught by the
national media sucking someone's toes in a Washington hotel room, Quinn put
out a call for the song "Popsicle Toes." I had "Popsicle Toes" and drove it
to Quinn's house for the Dickie Morris updates, which he played along with
a lot of sucking and slurping sounds. My husband gave Quinn a copy of
Streisand's long drawn-out live version of "He Touched Me" for the sexual
harassment update (conservatives were against sexual harassment laws until
Ms. Jones erupted with stories about the president. Like a sign from on
high, like 666 emblazoned as the sign of a beast, even his penis was
crooked!).
Not a person to believe in conspiracy theories, I never bought a tabloid in
my life, except for the time The Star ran the irresistible headline "Family
Flees Talking Doll" (which co-incidentally, as a result of my involvement
in the vast right-wing conspiracy, actually happened to me later in real
life). But many of the bizarre stories were intriguing. Not wanting to be
perceived as someone who belonged to what Al Gore referred to as the
"extra-chromosome crowd," I gleaned my info-nuggets from a wide array of
"legitimate" sources -- like The Wall Street Journal which editorialized
that "Bill Clinton's Arkansas was a very strange place" and Joe Klein, the
New Yorker's respected political writer who wrote "Primary Colors,"
portraying Clinton aide Betsey Wright, the woman in charge of "bimbo
eruptions," as someone who pointed a loaded gun at Clinton enemies telling
them to "get their mind right." Even Bob Dole's ad man, Michael Murphy,
announced that he was teaching his pet parrot, Ernie, to repeat,
"Whitewater -- guilty as sin!"
"I accuse President Clinton of murder," proclaimed Dr. Jack Wheeler in his
column in Strategic Investors, a financial newsletter published by James
Davidson, author of "Blood in the Streets." Wheeler specifically accused
Bill Clinton of ordering his personal goon squad of Arkansas state troopers
and ex-troopers to kill Luther "Jerry" Parks, the former Clinton security
chief who had been gunned down in Little Rock in 1993. "Parks," said
Wheeler, "was a Little Rock private investigator hired by Vince Foster to
collect an extensive surveillance file on then-Governor Clinton, which
included Clinton's participation in cocaine and sex parties at his brother
Roger's apartment."
James Davidson, founder of the National Taxpayer's Union, was once a heavy
financial backer of Bill Clinton but had since become an ardent foe and
sponsor of research into the death of Vince Foster. Warned by his lawyers
that he was risking not only his credibility but a libel suit as well if
his newsletter was wrong about the charges against Clinton, Davidson hired
investigators to check out the allegations coming out of Little Rock. The
investigators, said to be shocked at what they found, advised Davidson that
he had no need to fear any libel or slander suits.
On the morning after the disappearance of former CIA Director William
Colby, I was reading my copy of Strategic Investors, which was announcing
that the publisher had financed a trio of top handwriting experts who had
just declared that Vince Foster's suicide note was a forgery. The
newsletter also announced that former CIA Director Colby had just joined
the board of Strategic Investors. It was a mighty strange thing to be
reading right at the very time the news wires were reporting that Colby had
just been declared missing from his vacation cabin.
Colby had left for a canoe ride, leaving his radio on and his computer
screen glowing in the dark, and a half-eaten clam dinner on his plate. He
was a cautious man, said his wife, a man who would never go out canoeing in
two-foot-high whitecaps with 25 mph sea winds. Shortly thereafter, his body
was found without shoes or lifejacket, which his wife said he always wore.
Chills ran up my spine. I could feel the sea winds billow under my life
jacket ... I mean sweater!
The scuttlebutt about Bill Clinton's connections to drugs and political
murders by the Dixie Mafia was once taken about as seriously by the
national media as Elvis sightings at the K-Mart, but little by little it
was nonetheless being checked out. The New York Times sent writer Philip
Weiss to Little Rock get the lowdown. Weiss, a witty, urbane, New York
liberal was an unlikely convert to right-wing nuthood, but between the
lines of his article, "The Clinton Crazies," you could tell he didn't think
they were so crazy after all.
Weiss, who had voted for Clinton, later wrote an article for the New York
Observer portraying Clinton as a "backwoods governor who allowed 'rough
justice' in Arkansas," a state with a "tradition of vigilante violence," a
place "so poor that primitive men with third grade educations were elected
sheriff in the 1980s." Weiss wrote about Forrest City Sheriff Conlee, a man
who proudly displayed the pickled testicles of a castrated rape suspect on
his office shelf. The accused rapist, Wayne Drummond, insists to this day
that he is innocent of the rape of a distant Clinton cousin.
Shortly after Bill Clinton's re-election, the White House issued a 331-page
report to counter the unending flow of bizarre stories. Entitled the
"Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce," the White House report
designated Pittsburgh publisher and billionaire Richard Scaife as the
mastermind who engineered the vast right-wing conspiracy from his media
mother ship at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. (In case you missed it, by
the way, WND editor Joseph Farah is the only journalist fingered by name in
the report.)
Clinton spokesman James Carville, looking like a space alien who'd just
shuffled his way down a gangplank of a mother ship himself, dismissed the
anti-Clinton stories as just blatherings of the trailer trash. "You drag
$100 bills through trailer parks, there's no telling what you'll find. I
know these people. I went to school with them. I necked with them. I spent
nights with them."
During the Clinton years, it was impossible for writers not to make fools
of ourselves. If you ignored the conspiracy stories, you were boring and
irrelevant, and if you researched them, there was such a blizzard of
contradictory dots, you never really knew if you were a wing-nut or if you
were onto something.
And a fate momentarily worse than death was the day my editor at an obscure
little newspaper in Pittsburgh, The Observer, got an angry call from Jackie
Judd. It was the Jackie Judd, calling the editor about me, a nobody from
Pittsburgh, and a grandmother to boot, long distance from ABC News in
Washington, D.C., demanding to know where I had received my information.
She wanted to know where I had gotten my quote about her, and she wanted it
now. "When she calls you, if you can't remember where you got it," my
editor told me, "just cry."
When Ms. Judd called back she said a relative in Pittsburgh had sent her my
article, "Skeleton Stampede," about the skeletons in Clinton's closet. "I
can't open up my closet," Clinton had once confessed to his friend David
Ifshin during the 1992 campaign. "I'll get crushed by my skeletons."
Judd was being called on the official ABC carpet to defend some of her
statements about the Clinton White House. I had quoted her as saying, "The
White House views this as a war, and they're going to use whatever they can
to win it." So far so good. Judd admitted to saying that. I had received
the quote from Micah Morrison at the Wall Street Journal. But the
second
part of my sentence was wrong. I had misquoted Judd by inadvertently
blurring the sentence with two words, saying that she had said ABC
News had
"unbelievable battles" with the Clinton White House, when it was
actually a
source at ABC news other than Judd who had given the Wall Street
Journal
that information. I apologized for the misquote and Judd said she would
call back if she needed me to back up her story. Whew!
The White House was reaching deep to intimidate the press -- as Bill
Clinton had threatened he would do immediately upon his reelection!
At a victory celebration in a Little Rock hotel on his re-election night,
Bill Clinton had promised to "spend a lot of time going after detractors
who pursued him on Whitewater and other ethical questions." His
enemies, he
declared, had "hurt a lot of people in our state with their systematic
abuse." Calling his political attackers "a cancer," he vowed to "cut them
out of American politics." Strong language from a winner!
We might expect this kind of venting from a loser with fresh wounds, but
who would expect to run into such a nasty winner? Ungracious winners
with
the full power of the federal government at their disposal can be a
frightening prospect.
Relaxing on Air Force One later that night, Mr. Clinton told reporters it
was the Oklahoma bombing that proved to be the turning point in his
political fortunes. "The bombing broke a spell in the country as the people
began searching for our common ground again," he explained. "Our one duty
to the victims of Oklahoma is to purge ourselves of the dark forces which
gave rise to this evil."
Adept at the exploitation of tragedies and the politics of division,
Clinton had been demagoging the Oklahoma catastrophe before the ashes had
cooled. He was apparently oblivious to the fact that those on the other
side of the political divide saw the dark force that had given rise to the
evil of Oklahoma as him. Though the administration tried to smear
right-wing critics, radio talk show listeners, militia members and
Republicans as fellow travelers of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, McVeigh
turned out to be a virtual loner who was enraged by the incineration of 80
Americans at Waco, a needless incineration that was directly produced by
the reckless and irresponsible decision-making processes of the Clinton
administration.
"Who are these people," Clinton asked shortly after the Oklahoma bombing,
"who say they love their country but hate their government?" More politics
of division and inflammatory rhetoric from a man who knew full well from
his participation in the anti-war movement that you can vehemently protest
government policies without hating your country. These people who "hate
their government" were people just like he was when he proclaimed that he
"loathed the military." Understanding political radicals, because he was
once one of them himself, would have given a wiser man an edge in unifying
and leading the country, but Bill Clinton chose to inflame and divide,
fueling the opposition's rage just as surely as his heavy-handed policies
at Waco had fueled the rebellion there. In the end, he was no better a
leader than his '60s nemesis, Richard Nixon. He had learned nothing.
Perhaps because the Clinton administration had viewed Pittsburgh as the
home of the mastermind of the "vast right-wing conspiracy," the place from
where the "cancer" had sprung, the city seemed to get a little more White
House attention than others. When the head of HUD visited town, he pointed
across the Monongahela river at a forsaken little town called Braddock and
asked if that was where the Morning Militia met. On June 4, 1996,
Pittsburghers had a bizarre experience -- an unannounced nighttime invasion
of black helicopters playing war games over city streets, zooming over
McKeesport and Braddock. "Not Armageddon, Just Noisy Helicopter Training,"
said the next morning's headline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
"World War III did not break out along the Three Rivers last night,"
reported Post-Gazette staff writer Michael Newman. "It just sounded like
it. As part of a U.S. Department of Defense training exercise, helicopters
flew low along the Monogahela, Ohio and Allegheny rivers, from McKeesport
to McKees Rocks to the Strip District. They were accompanied by a
frighteningly realistic soundtrack of exploding bombs and crackling
gunfire. Residents from throughout the area called their local police. One
man said the commotion was so loud, his wife went into labor. An official
at Pittsburgh's emergency-management center said the exercises were part of
the Defense Department's normal training. He said last night's exercises
were designed to help helicopter pilots learn to fly at night in urban
areas. The exercises, sponsored by local police departments, including the
city's, started shortly after dark and lasted until after midnight."
"It Would Have Been Nice to Warn Us," said a headline the next day,
followed the day after by "Military Retreats in Face Of Anger: Public's
Reaction Was Too Negative, Army Announces."
Said Lt. Col. Ken McGraw of the Army Special Operations Command at Fort
Bragg, "In light of the public reaction, we re-evaluated our training
schedule and determined we really couldn't do much of our training without
disruptions to Pittsburgh residents and thought it would be better to
cancel it."
Asked about the safety of flying the Black Hawk helicopters at night over
heavily populated areas, McGraw said, "I'm never going to tell you nothing
[sic] is foolproof." He said that in other cities, such as Atlanta, Dallas
and Chicago, where similar exercises had been held over the last few years,
public reaction had never been anything like in Pittsburgh.
U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., stated that he had been "left with the
impression from a meeting with officers at the Special Operations Command"
that the training was in part to prepare troops should their expertise be
necessary at the Atlanta Olympics. Others said the Army was concerned that
conditions in certain cities are ripe for racial conflict. The morning
after Pittsburgh's helicopter invasion, Tom Marr, a Philadelphia talk show
host said that invariably in these situations the "black helicopter crowd"
comes out of the woodwork, spreading rumors that the Pentagon is ready to
aim its guns at American citizens.
Whatever the reason, the black helicopter crowd did get angry -- and pour
out of the woodwork they did! Some even poured into the streets in their
underwear during the treetop anti-terrorist maneuvers by nine Army
helicopters that swooped through with mock gunfire and explosions that
shook the ground.
"In my granma's neighborhood," said waitress Kelly Toth, "people laid down
in the streets. The noises came in through the open windows. The
helicopters were flying so low you could've hit them with a broom handle.
They thought the communists were coming to take over, or that it was
aliens!"
The owner of La Dolce Vita Sweet Shop in Bloomfield, Pittsburgh's Little
Italy, said he wasn't surprised to see masked soldiers sliding down ropes
onto rooftops from helicopters. "They've been doing extractions around here
for a long time," he said, referring to Pittsburgh's missing persons.
Another woman peering out her apartment window in the wee hours at the
black helicopters said, "Oh my God, the militia was right!" On the other
hand, Granpa Bup, a World War II vet, said, "These people are crybabies.
They should've felt the ground shake when a 3,000 pound bomb was dropped on
London!"
And so it went, on and on like a novel. Sure, there were nuts in the
movement, and I met a few of them, and for awhile was one of them. I was
getting so paranoid that when I got a call from the Make-A-Wish Foundation
for a donation, I thought it was a death threat! How could it be otherwise,
after all, the whole conspiracy food chain thing was said to have started
down the street from where I live at the newspaper we call "The Trib."
Sometimes I wrote op-eds for the Trib. But what if Woodward and Bernstein
had been dismissed because they met some kook-show named Deep Throat who
hung out in underground parking garages?
I admit I went on the conspiracy tour, roamed around in the tall grass in
Fort Marcy Park to check out the cannons, looked for the missing bullet
and
all the rest. In the end, though, I concluded that Chris Ruddy, author of
"The Strange Death of Vincent Foster," was wrong, and that Ken Starr
had
gotten it right in declaring Foster's death a suicide.
Others still aren't so sure, like the lady I met at a Quinn think-tank, at
a bar called Kangaroo's. Introducing herself as a member of the West
Virginia militia, she said she had been run off the road by the CIA on the
way to the meeting. She explained that lead paint had been outlawed by
the
government because they wanted to see through our walls with infrared
equipment from satellites. To outfox them, she had added lead to her
no-lead paint and was there to give us her formula for adding lead.
I figured she might have been an FBI agent, fishing for wing-nuts.
With the Clinton presidency over and G.W. now in office, the only thing
we
can say for sure is that the biggest nut-ball of them all has just left the
building. The lunatics had indeed taken over the asylum, to the tune of
"Hail to the Chief." With Bill Clinton and his wife gone from Pennsylvania
Ave., it's a good bet that we'll be hearing nothing from the militias, the
wing-nuts and the Arkansas fever swamp folks. Even the Internet will
simmer
down -- if it hasn't already. And no matter how much the liberals
complain
about George W., they will never have to deal with what we did.
I'm no Dionne Warwick with a crystal ball, but I have some solid
predictions about the Bush administration: I know Laura Bush won't go
on TV
to announce that any of us are free-loaders. Condoleezza Rice won't be
visiting Al Sharpton with a gun telling him to get his mind right. Mary
Matalin won't be found dead in Fort Marcy Park. Christie Whitman won't
threaten to break anyone's knee-caps. Even the pro-life ideologue
Ashcroft
won't incinerate 80 feminists at the NOW headquarters. And no one in
the
Secret Service will have any tales about George W. leaving the White
House
rolled up in a blanket in the floor of a car having phone sex with an
intern.
Clinton's legacy? Easy. It'll be two things: his resilience in the face of
a self-induced pummeling and, as Hillary put it at the end of the
Lewinsky-impeachment saga, that you could say a lot of things about
Bill
Clinton, but he was never boring.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
Sarah J. McCarthy is a contributing editor and writer at Liberty Magazine
and co-author with Ralph R. Reiland of "Mom & Pop vs. the
Dreambusters: The
Small Business Revolt Against Big Government," now available at
Amazon.com.
--
Best Wishes
Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx
without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly
admitted in the Newspeak word *duckspeak*, meaning "to quack like a
duck." Like various other words in the B vocabulary, *duckspeak* was
ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked
out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise...
~~George Orwell, _1984_
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