Reply #33: "Who the hell cares about the Arkansas Project anymore?" asked Orrin Hatch

[L. Coyote]

Why the Senate should reject Ted Olson
His role in the sleazy Arkansas Project is bad enough. The fact that he hasn't told the truth about it is worse.
By Gary Kamiya
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/05/18/arkansas_project/index.html


May 18, 2001 | "Who the hell cares about the Arkansas Project anymore?" asked Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, after the committee deadlocked 9-9 on party lines on whether to confirm Theodore Olson to be solicitor general.

The answer is simple: Every American who thought that the impeachment of former President Clinton mattered cares, or should care, about the Arkansas Project.

... the Arkansas Project -- the five-year, $2.4 million dollar effort ... channeled through the tax-exempt, nonprofit American Spectator magazine -- played a key role in the events that led to that impeachment.

It makes perfect sense that Sen. Hatch wants us to think that the Arkansas Project is some 19th century dispute over municipal water rights, rather than a sleazy, secretive operation that had a major impact on the biggest political crisis of the last 50 years. The Republican Party and the right wing would like nothing better than for America to forget that they spent eight years and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars trying to bring down a sitting president, often -- as with the Arkansas Project -- using the most dubious methods. Now that their own candidate has been installed in the White House, it would be much better if all that sleazy dirt-digging simply never happened.

For what the Arkansas Project really reveals is the connection between the creepy-crawliest elements of the American far right and the powerful, respectable, establishment face of conservatism, in the person of Ted Olson. It's important for the GOP that that connection be forgotten, immediately and permanently. ...............