“And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress … by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.”
- Revelation 14:19-20

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

When John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in the 1930s, the United States was on the verge of coming apart due to the Great Depression, caused largely by run-amok corporate capitalism and an attitude on the part of Big Business, including Big Oil, that workers had no rights except as serfs in their kingdom.

Since we now face another Great Depression thanks to king Bush and his corporate cronies, perhaps it is time to revisit the Biblical theme of the grapes of wrath. Especially since the right-wing Republican attack machine keeps eluding to it and, as usual, in a way that shows they don’t know what the fuck they are talking about.

Glynn Wilson

Jill Simpson seems to have the ability to bring Republicans and Democrats together. She is shown here with two people you will never see in the same picture again, a couple of the biggest political opponents in Dekalb County. That’s the local dentist in the cap, Marvin Barron, the brother of the powerful Democrat in the Alabama Legislature Lowell Barron. On the other side, that’s a Republican rabble rouser who is trying to get the Bush Justice Department to investigate Barron, Jimmy Dan Kilgore. He drives around town in a pickup truck with a sign in the back that says, among other things, “Anybody But Barron.”

It’s also coming up on the one-year anniversary of the filing of the now famous affidavit of Alabama lawyer Jill Simpson that is now part of an ongoing probe into how the Bush administration turned the U.S. Justice Department into a full-blown election wing of the Republican National Committee.

And then there’s the news that Bush’s evil brain Karl Rove, who left the White House under a cloud of disgrace last August, was finally subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee this past week, followed by a new appeals court filing by former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman asking that his political conviction be thrown out.

Former Bush Aide Karl Rove Subpoenaed in Probe

Siegelman Asks Appeals Court to Throw Out Conviction

If you have been keeping up with the headlines, you knew that.

But if you have been depending on the corporate media in this country for news, you may not have heard about how the right-wing attack machine is still doing everything it can to try and discredit Ms. Simpson as a bona fide Republican whistleblower.

The darling blogger of the right-wing nuts leading this attack is a so-called conservative lawyer named John H. Hinderaker, who is best known for attempting to debunk the human causes of global warming and Darwin’s theory of evolution - in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence. He constantly takes up Rush Limbaugh’s tired and false theme that the American press has a “liberal bias.”

On Monday, May 19, Hinderaker promoted himself, a hit piece he wrote for the Powerline blog and a story on the Website of the conservative Weekly Standard on one GOP blog by calling Jill Simpson a “lunatic conspiracy theorist (and darling of the nutroots).”

Just so you will know, “nutroots” is a term coined by the Election 08 blog on March 10, 2006. It is a play on the name commonly used for liberal grassroots groups known as the Netroots.” Once used strictly by conservative blogs in reference to their liberal counterparts, the term entered the formal political lexicon when Sen. Orin Hatch used the term on the Senate floor on September 12, 2007, to describe MoveOn.org’s “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” advertisement in the New York Times.

But there is a real question about who the real nuts are in this story. The headline to Hinderaker’s hatchet job on Ms. Simpson was: “A Conspiracy So Lunatic…”

The evidence suggests, however, that Hinderaker is among the lunatic fringe, not Jill Simpson.

In the lead smear, Hinderaker calls Ms. Simpson “an unusual woman” and describes her, based supposedly on unnamed sources, as “a very strange person” who “lives in her own world.”

It is obvious what he is trying to accomplish with this nonsense. But we suspect anyone who knows Hinderaker might say the same thing about him. Does he claim that he is a normal, mainstream model of good behavior who lives in the world of reality? Of course not.

He doesn’t believe in science at all, apparently, which may make him normal in various religious cults operating on the fringes of American society, but not in the educated world where facts matter.

He says Ms. Simpson “has scratched out an uncertain living in DeKalb County, Alabama.”

Any cursory check of her career shows she has done quite well as a lawyer over the past 20 years, not only representing the good people of her part of the world in divorces, bankruptcies and Social Security cases, but also representing clients with multi-million dollar contracts who work directly with federal emergency officials to clean up after major storms such as Hurricane Katrina.

Ms. Simpson is also described as “the daughter of rabid Democrats,” which is such a patently stupid lie that any cub reporter could check and find out not to be true. As I reported in the five part series I did telling Ms. Simpson’s story almost one year ago, her father was a Democrat who knew George Wallace well, but her mother’s entire family were lifelong Republicans.

I have sat at the dinner table with Ms. Simpson’s mother and listened to family stories and talked politics, so I happen to know she is a huge fan of Republicans such as Tom Delay to this day, who awarded her the National Leadership award for the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2003. She was somewhat shocked to read that she was considered such a “rabid Democrat,” Ms. Simpson said, considering that she also sat on the RNCC Business Advisory Counsel as a special adviser and honorary chair.

This lawyer blogger, who has no training or credentials as a journalist, claims Ms. Simpson was “rarely if ever been known to participate in politics as even a low-level volunteer” and this whopper: “Those who know her in DeKalb County scoff at the idea that she is a Republican at all.”

Well, it just so happens I was present at Jill Simpson’s property auction two weeks ago and interviewed about 20 people who have known her all her life who said she was a die-hard Republican who volunteered to work for GOP candidates in races all the way back to the 1980s, including the races of Governor Bob Riley. As I have reported before, she never claimed to be a paid staff member of those campaigns, so there is no credence to the attack on her on that front. Like many lawyers who are politically active, there is ample evidence her volunteer work as an investigator and her army of volunteers who post political signs has made a difference over the years.

But that does not deter Hinderaker’s libelous attack on her.

He goes on to say Ms. Simpson’s “house and law office were on the auction block. Rumor has it that she is leaving DeKalb County for good and heading for the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Jill Simpson, who barely got by in Alabama, is now toasted by the national Democratic party and featured on network and cable news. All this because she has testified - without a shred of supporting evidence - to a conspiracy so vast as to be not just implausible, but ridiculous.”

Ms. Simpson has openly admitted that turning against the Bush and Riley political machines hurt her law business for the past year, which is not surprising when you study the cases of whistleblowers in other cases - especially those who take on the Bushes and Karl Rove.

Siegelman still clings to the idea that his support of Al Gore in 2000 and his opposition to Bush was behind the initial investigation of him. Considering the evidence of a Justice Department turned rogue now coming up in cases in state after state, this should not come as a shock to anyone. So why does it still elude the understanding of right-wing bloggers and the corporate press in Alabama?

The grapes of wrath indeed.

As a matter of fact, Ms. Simpson held an auction of some of her extensive property holdings in order to buy a house and open a law office in Washington. She sold her burned down house for $57,000, not bad in a depressed market. And she sold her law office and an out building next door, along with the land next to the Rainsville City Hall and a city park, for $300,000. Not exactly a pauper’s return on her investment of about $65,000 a number of years ago. The city wanted the land anyway to fill out it’s growing municipal complex. Her office building may very well be used for the new Dekalb County satellite courthouse.

She rejected the bid on a 38-acre farm she still owns with a $150,000 lake on it. And she is keeping the house in Rainsville where she still lives with her mother and three children. When she is away working in DC, her secretary will still be working full time on her practice in Rainsville.

Yet without ever having met Jill Simpson, Hinderaker goes on to attack her mental health and the work of CBS’s “60 Minutes” on the story, all while defending the disgraced Karl Rove. He repeats the myth perpetrated by the Birmingham News that she has somehow changed her story several times over the past year.

Since I told the whole story based on an on the record interview almost a year ago, I can attest to the fact that the story has never changed. It’s just a complicated story with a host of characters, and different news outlets pick up on different aspects of the story in the retelling.

My favorite line in Hinderaker’s uninformed rant comes near the end, when he says, “Simpson’s story is unbelievable and contradictory on so many levels that it cannot bear a moment’s inspection.”

So that’s why he is spending so much time and space trying to debunk it?

Then, in his defense of “the architect” of Bush’s elections and the man who turned the Alabama Supreme Court into part of the right-wing conspiracy, he says with a straight face, “Karl Rove has become the man who cannot be libeled.”

As a lawyer, Hinderaker should know better. He knows that Karl Rove is a public figure and a former high-level public official and therefore would face a high bar in claiming libel in any court of law in this land.

Ms. Simpson, on the other hand, was unknown to the general public one year ago and has never held a government post, so it would be much easier for her to claim that he is libeling her - and win.

Of course that’s not the real issue here. No one is suing anyone for libel, at least not yet.

There is an all out fight going on for the political soul of the country, however. And from this vantage point, where facts matter, it looks like Hinderaker and his ilk better look out for true believers like Jill Simpson, as well as the power of the pen from real journalists, bloggers or otherwise.

And they might want to look out over their shoulders for the wrath of God. Somehow we don’t think if Jesus were to come back today he would be hanging out with the liars and thieves who have been running this country into the ground for the past seven and a half years. Let the river of blood flow - with their blood.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
- Battle Hymn of the Republic

Now for a suggestion from Jill Simpson on how to compel Karl Rove to testify about his knowledge of White House involvement in the political prosecution of Don Siegelman.

Perhaps House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers should send out the Sergeants at Arms of the House to arrest Rove and drag him before the committee. It would constitute a new use for the office to be sure. But in these uneasy times, why not turn to the Constitution itself to save it?

Those of us in the “reality-based community” are tired of seeing the letter and the spirit of the Constitution shredded in the name of corporate monarchy. Holding Rove and Bush accountable are essential steps to restoring the world’s trust in pluralistic democracy.

“The truth is still marching on,” Ms. Simpson said, as she said it would last summer when she was humming the Battle Hymn of the Republic when the first attacks on her hit the press.

“I’ve marched myself to Washington, now we’re going to march Karl Rove up there to testify,” she said in an interview Sunday. “We’re not going to give up until the truth marches on.”

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 9:20 am and is filed under Don Siegelman On Trial, HealthSouth's Richard Scrushy On Trial, Under the Microscope III. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.