Sunday, March 11, 2007

One more point: Valerie Plame is getting $2.5 million for “her story.” How much did New York publishers and Hollywood producers pay for the stories of Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick?

Paula was my Rosa Parks. Here was this totally powerless nothing -- no money, no status, no family connections, no Ivy League education, no important friends, no fabulous great looks, no worldly accomplishments. Just a nobody who had dignity and self-respect taking on the most powerful man in the universe.

[...]

She says she had to throw her reputation away because she needs the money to pay for her children's college education. (They are now 4 and 8 years old.) Perhaps someday that will compensate them for having a mother who's a Penthouse centerfold.

Not only that, but she is denouncing her lawyers for leaving her "only" $151,000 of an $850,000 settlement. Now I always thought it was idiotic for people to chide Paula for demanding money damages for what Clinton did to her. That's how we settle disputes in this country. No duels, no firstborn, no involuntary servitude -- you commit a civil wrong, you pay money. Still, it was Paula who repeatedly renounced any interest in the money.

So what happened to that charity?

Paula surely was given more than a million dollars in free legal assistance from an array of legal talent she will never again encounter in her life, much less have busily working on her behalf. Some of those lawyers never asked for or received a dime for hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal work performed at great professional, financial and personal cost to themselves. Others got partial payments out of the settlement. But at least they got her reputation back.

And now she's thrown it away.

Throughout the Clinton sex saga, everyone kept saying, "There are no heroes in this story," which was completely wrong -- if Paula had been what she claimed to be. She used to be a hero in a David and Goliath conflict. She used to have dignity and nobility and tremendous courage. Now she's just the trailer-park trash they said she was.

In November 1998, Broaddrick gave an interview (transcript) to "Dateline NBC". The interview, broadcast in February 1999, centered around Broaddrick's accusation that Bill Clinton had raped her on April 25, 1978 during his first campaign for the governorship of the U.S. state of Arkansas. In the interview, she declared that Clinton suddenly "turned me around and started kissing me, and that was a real shock. I first pushed him away. I just told him 'no.'... He tries to kiss me again. He starts biting on my lip... And then he forced me down on the bed. I just was very frightened. I tried to get away from him. I told him 'no.'... He wouldn't listen to me."

The previous year, Broaddrick filed a sworn affadavit with Paula Jones' lawyers saying Clinton had never assaulted her: "During the 1992 Presidential campaign there were unfounded rumors and stories circulated that Mr. Clinton had made unwelcome sexual advances toward me in the late seventies. ... These allegations are untrue ...."[1]

She recanted that affidavit when interviewed by the FBI about the Jones case; the FBI found her account inconclusive, and the affidavit denying the allegations remains her only sworn testimony. Broaddrick later said of the affidavit, "I didn’t want to be forced to testify about one of the most horrific events in my life. I didn't want to go through it again."[2] David P. Schippers, chief investigator for the House Judiciary Committee Republicans during impeachment proceedings, said that his staffers interviewed Broaddrick more than once and "have assured me that she is the most credible witness that either one of them have ever talked to." Schippers believes she filed the affadavit because of intimidation from Clinton: "She was so terrified. And the reason she was terrified was because she saw what had happened to Kathleen Willey, Gennifer Flowers and all the rest of them."[3] Although Broaddrick said no one had pressured her to file a false affidavit, she complained that she was being watched from parked cars, her home had been broken into, her pets released and her answering machine tape stolen while she and her husband were away briefly during the House impeachment probe.[4]

• Glamorous CIA operative specializing in non-conventional weapons has nonofficial cover (NOC) blown by the highest levels of the administration as they attempt to whip up support for an unnecessary war that plunges the Middle East into chaos, wastes $400 billion dollars, thousands of American lives, countless Iraqi lives, and turns America into an international pariah.