Back in the presidential election year of 2000, WorldNetDaily set out to give the nation a small taste of the widespread, institutionalized political corruption that spawned the career of Al Gore.
The result was a monumental 18-part series that some Tennessee observers credited with costing the vice president his home state and the electoral votes he needed to win the presidency regardless of the controversy in the state of Florida.
But it was also a costly series for this news organization.
For the last five years, WorldNetDaily has been defending itself, at great cost, against a $165 million defamation lawsuit filed by Gore's top fund-raiser in the state, auto dealer Clark Jones.
Just last week, however, an FBI sting operation in the state, dubbed "Tennessee Waltz," resulted in the indictment of five officials and ex-officials, at least one of whom played a significant role in the series.
Sen. John Ford, a Democrat and part of a Memphis family political dynasty who backed Gore, had skirted the law before, but, according to the series, received help from powerful people – including law enforcement authorities in the state.
According to former members of the Tennessee Highway Patrol, Ford allegedly fired a pistol at a trucker on Interstate 40 near Lexington, Tenn., in 1990. A Dallas trucker reported the shooting to the Highway Patrol station in Jackson, Tenn. The Jackson troopers called Nashville headquarters for guidance, and according to a former THP official, TBI director Larry Wallace said, "Don't stop that car [Ford's]. Let it go."
At this point, there was adequate time to apprehend Ford on the interstate and search his car for the weapon. But because of Wallace's order, Ford escaped and wasn't questioned until the next day. By that time, there was no pistol found in his Mercedes-Benz.
Although a bullet was recovered from the truck, Ford accused the trucker of making everything up. A jury in Jackson acquitted Ford of all charges.
Ford recounted how he sometimes stays with one family and other times he stays with the second. Since he pays nearly all the bills for both families in homes he owns, he wanted to make it clear to the referee in the case that he can't afford to pay any more court ordered support for a third woman, the mother of another 10-year-old girl he fathered.
The demands on him were even more outrageous, Ford said, because one of his two gal pals was pregnant yet again with another of his future offspring.
Ford ironically headed, until his forced resignation last week, the Senate committee that guides Tennessee's child welfare policies, and, for the past year, he has tried to make use of a law he authored that keeps court-ordered support lower when a father is financially responsible for other children.
Some days he shacks up with ex-wife Tamara Mitchell-Ford and the three children they had together. On others, he stays with his longtime girlfriend, Connie Mathews, and their two children.
Ford and Mitchell-Ford divorced in 2002, but not before the ex plowed her car through Mathews' home. It was Mitchell-Ford, his ex, who was six months pregnant with the 62-year-old's latest sperm donation when he testified in the hearing last January.
By the way, neither of the two homes in which Ford lives is in the senatorial district he represents.
Ford was battling a child-support suit by Dana Smith, mother of his 10-year-old daughter, who is a former employee when he served as general sessions clerk. She won a 1996 sexual harassment verdict against him. He contends that any increase in support for Smith and her daughter should be weighed against his obligations to his other five minor children.
Ford had been in the Tennessee Senate for 15 terms before his resignation.
In concluding my commentary on Ford last January, I posed some hypothetical questions:
- Why do Americans elect and re-elect men of such objectively poor character, such clowns, such disgraces, such pathetic miscreants?
- Are there no standards any more?
- Is there no behavior that would bar a politician from claiming office in these United States?
- Why do the people of the 29th Senate district of Tennessee continue to support a conniving, carpet-bagging, three-timing reprobate?
Perhaps I answered my own questions. There's a great cost to exposing these rascals – a price we at WorldNetDaily are still paying, despite the intervention of the FBI and its sting operation.