Posted 10:06 AM by Scoobie Davis

We Distort, You Abide
Joe Conason has a good column on the Ken-Lay-Slept-In-The-Lincoln-Bedroom-During-The-Clinton-Administration smear. What I found particularly revealing is that Conason reports that right-wing conspiracy theorist David Bossie appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News program to spread the falsehood. For those of you not familiar with Bossie, in 1992, Bossie and his colleague Floyd Brown attempted to manufacture a rumor that Bill Clinton had impregnated a law student who later committed suicide. Brown and Bossie mercilessly hounded the family of the deceased woman; Bossie was so obsessed that he barged into a hospital room where the deceased woman's mother was visiting her sick husband. CBS’s Eric Engberg did a report on this noxious episode; this caused Brown and Bossie to be such a liability to the Bush campaign that it finally repudiated the duo—calling them “the lowest forms of life.” After Clinton became president, Bossie jumped aboard the Vince-Foster-was-murdered conspiracy train. Bossie was hired by Representative Dan Burton; on the government payroll, Bossie doctored Web Hubbell’s prison phone tapes to make exculpatory statements sound as if Hubbell implicated Hillary Clinton in wrongdoing. Ms. Van Susteren and Fox News have every right to have whomever they want on their programs. But it speaks volumes about Fox News's right-wing bias that they would have as a commentator a man who has a history of doctoring tapes, character assassination, and outright dishonesty.