 A longtime media ally of Sen. Hillary Clinton is warning Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman that Mrs. Clinton will "get even" with him for saying she's too angry to win the White House. "As Mehlman will find out, Hillary doesn't get angry, she gets even," predicts Bloomberg News columnist Margaret Carlson, in a screed published Thursday. | "Just ask Vince Foster, oh, wait..." |
| Now, now, Vince really did commit suicide. But the Hildebeast has lots o' ways to bring someone down, just ask the folks in the White House Travel Office. |
Carlson, a longtime booster of Mrs. Clinton going back to her days at Time magazine and CNN, vowed that Hillary won't be steamrolled by hardball GOP tactics, saying: "The senator who has reached a 60 percent approval rating with teeth-gritting determination, hold-your-nose alliances and practiced good cheer won't be Swift-boated or goaded by Mehlman's name-calling."
Carlson's prediction that Mehlman will pay for attacking Mrs. Clinton comports with the former first lady's long history of playing "get even" politics. Throughout the 1990s, for instance, Clinton accusers often found themselves targeted by IRS audits - or had embarrassing details about their private lives leaked to the press. Just this week, Anthony Pellicano - a private eye the Clintons used to dig up dirt on their opponents - was indicted in Los Angeles on wiretapping charges. Whose trial should be a lot of fun: During two terms of the Clinton administration, Pellicano was one of several private investigators used by the White House to conduct "shadow" operations. Others included Terry Lenzner, founder and chairman of the powerful Washington detective firm Investigative Group International, and San Francisco private eye Jack Palladino and his wife Sandra Sutherland. But it was Hillary Clinton who hired the "Shadow Team" – some believe to do work that employees of the federal government could not do.
Former congressional investigator Barbara Olson, who was killed Sept. 11, 2001, wrote that, "In the political life of the Clintons, it was she [Hillary] who pioneered the use of private detectives. It was she who brought in and cultivated the professional dirt-diggers and smear artists." Hillary's detectives engaged in "a systematic campaign to intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit and punish innocent Americans whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth in public," former Clinton adviser Dick Morris charged in the New York Post of Oct. 1, 1998. |
Noting that Mehlman is "a Karl Rove acolyte," Carlson said his "anger" attack comes from the same directly dirty tricks playbook the GOP uses "every four years . . . to convince the public that their opponent suffers from their own character defects." |