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  "Who Is Jack Abramoff?" Don't ask the Wall Street Journal's editorial board
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ContributorArmyDem 
Last EditedArmyDem  Jan 05, 2006 05:12pm
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CategoryCommentary
News DateWednesday, January 4, 2006 11:10:00 PM UTC0:0
DescriptionBy Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2006, at 7:03 PM ET

The red-meat eaters who wrote for Robert Bartley at the Wall Street Journal editorial page during the Clinton era loved nothing more than to peel back the White House carpet and stomp on the squiggling vermin they spotted fleeing the disinfecting sunshine. Exactly how many of the silverfish, roaches, and water bugs they squished were corrupt pests deserving of the stomping and how many were mirages created by the page's overheated sense of mission remains a subject of much debate.

The page began its Clinton-vilification program, appropriately enough, with a March 12, 1992, editorial titled "Who Is Bill Clinton?," the first of three such titled columns about the bubba, and quickly set up a production line to assail the chief executive's associates and other Democrats with facts, speculation, and innuendo all under the "Who Is …?" rubric. Assistant Attorney General Webster Hubbell, a Clinton crony and genuine criminal, got the "Who Is Webb Hubbell?" treatment at least six times as the Journal rode him all the way to a 21-month stay in a federal penitentiary.

[snip]

Although Bartley gave up command of the page in 2002 and departed this earth in 2003, his ideology still informs it under current boss Paul Gigot. You'd think, as the Jack Abramoff scandal burned its way through the Republican establishment faster than the space monster's blood dissolved the Nostromo's bulkheads in Alien, that the Journal editorialists would be exercising their own fangs.

[snip]

Alas, no scathing "Who Is Jack Abramoff?" editorial has appeared on the Journal page.
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