Slinging the mud

During the eight years of the Clinton administration, I endured a series of personal attacks, Internal Revenue Service audits, threats, intimidation, lawsuits and harassment – all directed by taxpayer-supported government officials.

I thought maybe those days were over. Apparently not.

Now, in perhaps a more thinly-veiled attack, the smear machine of the Bush administration has fired its first volley at this news organization.

In a letter published in the current edition of the New Republic, Steven J. Law, chief of staff for Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, defends his boss against her own record by throwing the mud at WorldNetDaily.

Keep in mind, the reason the letter is directed to the New Republic is because the magazine admittedly ripped off the original reporting of WorldNetDaily's Washington bureau chief, Paul Sperry, about Chao's possible conflicts of interest and involvement with China.

Law begins his tirade by accusing New Republic's John B. Judis of "picking through the intellectual dumpsters of reactionary websites and peddling their neo-racist conspiracy theories as his own."

Now, let's stop right there. There was only one news agency – let alone website – that did the investigative research into Elaine Chao's background. And that was WorldNetDaily. So, clearly, Law is accusing – in a cowardly, insulting and back-handed way – WorldNetDaily of being "reactionary" and of holding "neo-racist conspiracy theories."

I would like to challenge Law and his boss, Elaine Chao, to spend a little more of their taxpayer-subsidized time to back up that serious, ungrounded and defamatory accusation. WorldNetDaily is the leading independent newssite. We've been publishing daily for more than four years. We have more than 2.5 million unique readers – meaning our circulation is roughly 65 times more than the New Republic's. We uphold the highest standards of journalism – standards developed and practiced in my 25-year career in newspapering during which I directed several major metropolitan dailies. WorldNetDaily has employed staffers, reporters and columnists of all races. Specifically, I challenge Law and Chao to find one example – even one – of racism, "neo" or otherwise, expressed in the tens of thousands of pages of WorldNetDaily.

Ironically, in the same paragraph of his letter, Law accuses the author of the New Republic article of using tactics "that would have made Joe McCarthy proud."

It's the oldest trick in the book: Law is slinging the mud, but obscuring what he is doing by accusing someone else of doing it.

In effect, Law is calling me a racist without the slightest evidence to support his charge. And he accuses others of "McCarthyism" – itself a term developed by communists to deride and undermine the support for anti-communism in the 1950s.

And Law works for the Bush administration. This seems familiar territory. It's like d?j? vu all over again.

Talk about getting ripped off. WorldNetDaily dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's in a remarkable series of investigative reports by Sperry and staff writer Jon Dougherty. No sacred cows. If the Bush administration and Heritage Foundation were guilty of the same kind of offenses as the Clinton administration, we were going to report it. And we did. That's good journalism.

And I don't mind getting criticized by government bureaucrats. In fact, I expect it and welcome it. But even the Clinton administration never stooped so low as to play the race card against me or my news organizations. That is a new low. That is down there in the gutter.

Law's accusations suggest the new standard at our U.S. Department of Labor is that Asian-Americans – the secretary included – should be exempt from criticism, accountability and responsibility to Americans and the free press because of race. That attitude in itself is evidence of racism on the part of Law and, presumably, his boss. They apparently share a kind of paternalistic standard for any non-whites in public life.

I'm going to do Law and his boss a favor – to make their job easier. I'm going to provide hotlinks below to all of the stories WorldNetDaily published about his boss and her Chinese government and business connections. Pore through them, Mr. Law. Examine them for racist innuendo and conspiracy theorizing. See if you can find any errors in the reporting. Give it your best shot. And, if you are able to find anything – which I doubt – please get back to me with some specifics, and leave the name-calling and the trash talk in the gutter where it belongs.

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Chao's pro-China coup at Heritage

Chao has biz ties to Lippo

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Heritage to close old Hong Kong shop

McConnell's belated dirty-money discovery