Dan Calabrese published the account provided by Hillary Clinton’s former boss.

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.

Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.

Read the whole thing.

Can Hillary Clinton possibly survive this news story? Tune in for the next episode in Campaign 2008: the Bloodbath.

Via Ed Morrissey.

British comedian Pat Condell expresses his personal indignation about capitulations to Islamic outrage over Geert Wilders’ recent film Fitna (which criticizes endorsements of violence and intolerance found in the Koran) in this 6:49 video.

Hat tip to Global-Air.

Michelle Malkin wants to raise your consciousness.

Wikipedia publishes a list of pranks and hoaxes.

I assume the Independent‘s story on a US Depression of 2008 is one of these. Sorry, Matt Drudge.

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

APRIL FOOLS

The 1st of April, of all days in the year, enjoys a character of its own, in as far as it, and it alone, is consecrated to practical joking. On this day it becomes the business of a vast number of people, especially the younger sort, to practise innocent impostures upon their unsuspicious neighbours, by way of making them what in France are called poissons d’Avril, and with us April fools. Thus a knowing boy will despatch a younger brother to see a public statue descend from its pedestal at a particular appointed hour. A crew of giggling servant-maids will get hold of some simple swain, and send him to a bookseller’s shop for the History of Eve’s Grandmother, or to a chemist’s for a pennyworth of pigeon’s milk, or to a cobbler’s for a little strap oil, in which last case the messenger secures a hearty application of the strap to his shoulders, and is sent home in a state of bewilderment as to what the affair means.

The urchins in the kennel make a sport of calling to some passing beau to look to his coat-skirts; when he either finds them with a piece of paper pinned to them or not; in either of which cases he is saluted as an April fool. A waggish young lady, aware that her dearest friend Eliza Louisa has a rather empty-headed youth dangling after her with little encouragement, will send him a billet, appointing him to call upon Eliza Louisa at a particular hour. when instead of a welcome, he finds himself treated as an intruder, and by and by discovers that he has not advanced his reputation for sagacity or the general prospects of his suit.

The great object is to catch some person off his guard, to pass off upon him, as a simple fact, something barely possible, and which has no truth in it; to impose upon him, so as to induce him to go into positions of absurdity, in the eye of a laughing circle of bystanders. Of course, for successful April fooling, it is necessary to have some considerable degree of coolness and face; as also some tact whereby to know in what direction the victim is most ready to be imposed upon by his own tendencies of belief. It may be remarked, that a large proportion of the business is effected before and about the time of breakfast, while as yet few have had occasion to remember what day of the year it is, and before a single victimisation has warned people of their danger.

What compound is to simple addition, so is Scotch to English April fooling. In the northern part of the island, they are not content to make a neighbour believe some single piece of absurdity. There, the object being, we shall say, to befool simple Andrew Thomson:

Wag No. 1 sends him away with a letter to a friend two miles off, professedly asking for some useful information, or requesting a loan of some article, but in reality containing only the words:

This is the first day of April,
Hunt the gowk another mile.’

Wag No. 2, catching up the idea of his correspondent, tells Andrew with a grave face that it is not in his power, &e.; but if he will go with another note to such a person, he will get what is wanted. Off Andrew trudges with this second note to Wag No. 3, who treats him in the same manner; and so on he goes, till some one of the series, taking pity on him, hints the trick that has been practised upon him.

A successful affair of this kind will keep rustic society in merriment for a week, during which honest Andrew Thomson hardly can shew his face.

The Scotch employ the term gowk (which is properly a cuckoo) to express a fool in general, but more especially an April fool, and among them the practice above described is called hunting the gowk.

Sometimes the opportunity is taken by ultra-jocular persons to carry out some extensive hoax upon society. For example, in March 1860, a vast multitude of people received through the post a card having the following inscription, with a seal marked by an inverted sixpence at one of the angles, thus having to superficial observation an official appearance:

‘Tower of London.—Admit the Bearer and Friend to view the Annual Ceremony of Washing the White Lions, on Sunday, April 1st, 1860. Admitted only at the White Gate. It is particularly requested that no gratuities be given to the Wardens or their Assistants.’

The trick is said to have been highly successful. Cabs were rattling about Tower Hill all that Sunday morning, vainly endeavouring to discover the White Gate.

It is the more remarkable that any such trick should have succeeded, when we reflect how identified the 1st of April has become with the idea of imposture and unreality. So much is this the case, that if one were about to be married, or to launch some new and speculative proposition or enterprise, one would hesitate to select April 1st for the purpose. On the other hand, if one had to issue a mock document of any kind with the desire of its being accepted in its proper character, he could not better insure the joke being seen than by dating it the 1st of April.

The literature of the last century, from the Spectator downwards, has many allusions to April fooling; no references to it in our earlier literature have as yet been pointed out. English antiquaries appear unable to trace the origin of the custom, or to say how long it has existed among us. In the Catholic Church, there was the Feast of the Ass on Twelfth Day, and various mummings about Christmas; but April fooling stands apart from these dates.

There is but one plausible-looking suggestion from Mr. Pegge, to the effect that, the 25th of March being, in one respect, New Year’s Day, the 1st of April was its octave, and the termination of its celebrations; but this idea is not very satisfactory. There is much more importance in the fact, that the Hindoos have, in their Huli, which terminates with the 31st of March, a precisely similar festival, during which the great aim is to send persons away with messages to ideal individuals, or individuals sure to be from home, and enjoy a laugh at their disappointment. To find the practice so widely prevalent over the earth, and with so near a coincidence of day, seems to indicate that it has had a very early origin amongst mankind.

Swift, in his Journal to Stella, enters under March 31, 1713, that he, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Lady Masham had been amusing themselves that evening by contriving ‘a lie for tomorrow.’ A person named Noble had been hanged a few days before. The lie which these three laid their heads together to concoct, was, that Noble had come to life again in the hands of his friends, but was once more laid hold of by the sheriff, and now lay at the Black Swan in Holborn, in the custody of a messenger. ‘We are all,’ says Swift, ‘to send to our friends, to know whether they have heard anything of it, and so we hope it will spread.’ Next day, the learned Dean duly sent his servant to several houses to inquire among the footmen, not letting his own man into the secret. But nothing could be heard of the resuscitation of Mr. Noble; whence he concluded that ‘his colleagues did not contribute’ as they ought to have done.

April fooling is a very noted practice in France, and we get traces of its prevalence there at an earlier period than is the case in England. For instance, it is related that Francis, Duke of Lorraine, and his wife, being in captivity at Nantes, effected their escape in consequence of the attempt being made on the 1st of April. ‘Disguised as peasants, the one bearing a hod on his shoulder, the other carrying a basket of rubbish at her back, they both at an early hour of the day passed through the gates of the city. A woman, having a knowledge of their persons, ran to the guard to give notice to the sentry. “April fool!” cried the soldier; and all the guard, to a man, shouted out, “April fool!” beginning with the sergeant in charge of the post. The governor, to whom the story was told as a jest, conceived some suspicion, and ordered the fact to be proved; but it was too late, for in the meantime the duke and his wife were well on their way. The 1st of April saved them.’

It is told that a French lady having stolen a watch from a friend’s house on the 1st of April, endeavoured, after detection, to pass off the affair as un poisson d’Avril, an April joke. On denying that the watch was in her possession, a messenger was sent to her apartments, where it was found upon a chimney-piece. ‘Yes,’ said the adroit thief, ‘I think I have made the messenger a fine poisson d’Avril!’ Then the magistrate said she must be imprisoned till the 1st of April in the ensuing year, comme un, poisson d’Avril.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine this week had a feature by Benjamin Wallace-Wells profiling Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and discussing Cole’s uphill task this year.

Going into the 2008 elections, Cole faces a daunting list of challenges. To date, 29 of his party’s representatives in Congress have retired, an unusually large number, leaving open politically marginal seats that incumbents might have held but which will be more difficult for challengers to defend — Deborah Pryce’s seat in Columbus, Ohio; Mike Ferguson’s in central New Jersey; Heather Wilson’s around Albuquerque; Thomas M. Reynolds’s in Buffalo. Reynolds, Cole’s predecessor at the N.R.C.C., just narrowly held his seat in 2006. Rick Renzi, a Republican congressman from Arizona, was indicted last month on federal corruption charges, putting what was another safe Republican seat in play. These vacancies mean that in a year when, by historical standards, his party would be expected to win back seats, Cole will have to defend many more seats than he will be able to attack (only six Democratic incumbents have announced they are leaving office). His committee has approximately $5 million on hand, roughly one-eighth the amount of cash on hand as its Democratic counterpart, which at latest count had $38 million. …

Many within the Democratic Party believe that the gains of the 2006 election weren’t merely the result of good strategy. They believe that the map was undergoing a fundamental shift. Perhaps the most-studied Democratic detailer of the map’s evolution is a consultant named Mark Gersh, whose analysis of the 2006 election results has become the Democratic Party’s official version. “Most people think of politics as changing from the grass roots up,” Gersh says. “It doesn’t. It changes from the top, from presidential races on down.”

For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich’s insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. “The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992,” he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emanuel earlier this month, he told me: “I believe there’s a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts.” …

Many Republican operatives now worry that crucial segments of the electorate are slipping away from them. Republicans had traditionally won the votes of independents; in 2006, they lost them by 18 percent. Hispanic voters, who gave the Democrats less than 60 percent of their votes in 2004, cast more than 70 percent of their votes for Democrats in 2006. Suburban voters, long a Republican constituency, favored Democrats in 2006 for the first time since 1992. And Democrats won their largest share of voters under 30 in the modern era, a number particularly troubling for some Republicans, since it seems to indicate the preferences of an entire generation.

“What is concerning is that we lost ground in every one of the highest-growth demographics,” said Mehlman, the former R.N.C. chairman and Bush political adviser, who is now a lawyer at the lobbying firm Akin Gump.

Tom Cole, however, thinks the situation is not hopeless.

Cole’s basic challenge is to try to flip the popular perception of the capital so that more voters identify Washington with the Democrats than with the Republicans. He says he wants to use his party’s resources to define Nancy Pelosi as a national character, the face of a Democratic Congress that is once again too liberal for the country. (“Those three little words — ‘San Francisco liberal’ — are just magic for fund-raising,” one of Cole’s staff members told me.) He has tried, when possible, to choose candidates whose biographies can reinforce the anti-Washington theme, even if they have no real political experience. And he is counting on McCain’s emergence to permit the party to distance its image from that of Bush. Cole might have come up with a grand and unifying policy vision for his insurgents to run on. But Cole is not an ideologue. And with Rove and the party’s other grand strategists having abandoned the field — five of the six members of the Republican Congressional leadership in 2006 have now retired — Cole is now turning to practical answers, to process, and deferring to the politically moderate geography of the battleground areas. “I still think most Americans want their government to be smaller, not bigger, and their taxes to be lower, not higher,” Cole says. “And I still think most Democrats in office think that America is not a force for good in the world, and I think most voters have a different perspective.”

But Wallace-Wells believes the GOP coalition and platform are in serious trouble.

Part of the problem, for a Republican Party that wants to get back to basics, is that George Bush and Karl Rove’s party was not theirs alone but a pretty precise articulation of decades of post-’60s Republican strategy. “You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend,” Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole’s committee, told me. “The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we’ve tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it’s not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there’s more of a libertarian view on social issues.” Cole says that the party’s rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. “My problem on social issues is the tone — sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us.

In other words, he is repeating the conventional viewpoint that the Reagan coalition of anti-communist neocons, religious and social conservatives, and economic conservatives has fallen apart.

I think it’s more the case that the Republican coalition, under George W. Bush, has fallen into disarray for lack of articulate and firmly principled leadership.

Bush is so inarticulate that it isn’t easy at all to identify a coherent Bush philosophy, but it seems clear that he has always been a moderate on Government, and is in many ways a liberal (resembling Woodrow Wilson) in foreign policy. Bush’s so-called conservatism has generally consisted of a manifest rejection of the consensus of the elect as articulated in the elite media outlets, which is widely recognized as an expression of a visceral animosity on Bush’s part to his own native elite culture.

Therein really consists his unforgivable sin from the point of view of the Establishment left. And Bush’s folly has proven to be his willingness to provoke their ultimate degree of wrath in the absence of an effective ability to fight them in public debate or within government.

Amusingly, Bush got away with his fundamentally happy-go-lucky approach right up until 2005 Hurricane Katrina. He seemed to be made of teflon. Media attacks simply bounced off him, and the American public in general indifferently shrugged off his malapropisms with a smile until along came New Orleans. The MSM was able to flood televisions screens with images of disaster while blaming them on Bush Administration incompetence and callousness. Blame for Katrina finally stuck.

Simultaneously, the disinformation operation conducted by disaffected elements of the Intelligence Community proceeded without White House interference or effective opposition. The passage of a couple of years proved adequate for the media echo chamber to persuade large portions of the public that “Bush lied.” There were no Iraqi WMD, and Bush knew it all along. He started the war “for the oil,” or to avenge Saddam Hussein’s attempt to assassinate his father.

The collapse of Bush Administration political activity coincided with a series of Republican Congressional scandals, and together produced the public perception of a failed and discredited GOP and the subsequent loss of both houses of Congress.

Bush’s failures seem to be amplified by the failures of the Conservative Movement. The Conservative Movement chose the time of Republican disarray to try mobilizing the base with a red meat issue. And what did they chose? Anti-illegal immigration. Anti-illegal immigration politics worked beautifully in transforming California into a firmly democrat stronghold. Why not take the same strategy, certain to alienate Hispanic voters, nationally?

Both George W. Bush and the current organized Conservative Movement demonstrably arrived at the 2008 primary campaign season without a defined candidate, a coherent strategy, or a clue.

The consequence was John McCain’s victory, produced by a combination of media bias and cross-over democrat voting in open primaries. Essentially, we are running the moderate democrat candidate this year as the Republican nominee.

If the Conservative Movement and the GOP does not return to the kind of politics practiced by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, to a politics based on a coherent and principled philosophy, to clearly articulated ideas, to a policy of winning elections by winning the long-term national debate, they are going to find the GOP stool has no leg to stand on at all.