(3 of 4)
Yet another Tripp-related, Goldberg-haunted subplot involves the small but mighty Regnery Publishing. Based in Washington, the house produces roughly 30 books a year, a disproportionate number of which slime the President in prose. Unlimited Access, the firm's huge best seller, comes out in paperback this month (lucky timing or evil genius?), fortified with four top-secret new chapters by former G-man Aldrich. Denunciations of the original edition reportedly spurred a sympathetic Tripp to contemplate her own book on the Clinton White House. Had she written it, she would have joined a Regnery stable that includes R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor of the American Spectator; detective Fuhrman, a Goldberg client; and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, England's premier Clinton hater. Is there an ominous pattern here? No, says Regnery's associate publisher, Richard Vigilante. "Our primary relationship to conservatives," he says, "is that we're gadflies and contrarians."
Perhaps the loopiest strand in the supposed conspiracy winds through the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case. Jones first made her charges at conservative PAC press conference, and they were soon promoted heavily on religious TV shows like Pat Robertson's 700 Club and Jerry Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour. Falwell, of course, is the main promoter of the Clinton Chronicles, a crackpot video documentary that charges the First Couple with drug smuggling and links to a gangland slaying. The Rutherford Institute, which pays Jones' legal bills, once defended the right of football players at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University to pray in the end zone following touchdowns. Finally, and perhaps most damningly, the institute's director, John Whitehead, displays in his office a portrait of Bob Dylan. That's right, Bob Dylan, author of this lyric (from It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding): "But even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked."
If a survey of Clinton's accusers proves nothing else, it's that birdbrains of a feather flock together. On the alleged plot's outer edges stand the mom-and-pop entrepreneurs devoted to peddling anti-Clinton miscellany via at least a dozen Websites. Michael Rivero's Vincent Foster page invites the visitor to view a video of an actual suicide by gunshot, while the unofficial Bill Clinton home page features a doctored photograph of the President with his pants around his ankles. Then there's cybergossip Matt Drudge's controversial Drudge Report, which put the Lewinsky story on the Net days before it ran in print. In a sign that Clinton's White House, like Nixon's, takes its adversaries seriously, presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal is currently suing both Drudge and America Online, which runs his column, over a false tale of domestic violence that Drudge retracted the day after it ran.